A letter-writer rails against “poisonous vaccines and drugs” and the vast medical establishment pushing them on the population, leaving the country “littered and plastered from end to end and side to side with mad, maimed, diseased and prematurely dead”.
The sentiment might read like a Big Pharma day on the Facebook page of a difficult relative but it is, in fact, a letter to the editor of the New Zealand Listener – in 1956. The author is Ulric Williams, the Whanganui doctor-turned-naturopath who was a national figure at the time. Williams further held in his missive that pre-contact Māori had enjoyed healthy lives with “practically no disease”, until they were ruined by the doctors. (The more conventional view is that the Māori population was laid waste by the arrival of the colonists’ diseases – influenza, smallpox and typhoid – and halved between 1840 and 1890.)
I discovered Dr Williams’ letter by accident in searching the archives of the first 20 years of the Listener, 1939-1959, which have just been published on the National Library’s Papers Past website – with more to come presently. Papers Past is a boon for social researchers and historians, and, as the associate producer of a documentary about psychedelic therapy (Mind Menders, still available for viewing on Sky Go and Neon) I was searching for “drugs”. So to speak.
I can tell you that the Listener’s first mention of LSD came in 1958, in an interview with Aldous Huxley by the literary critic Cyril Connolly. Huxley, Connolly wrote, “had a great deal to say about lysergic acid, the drug similar to ergot which in minute quantities is so powerful”, and believed that “these drugs may be a way of influencing the future by teaching people to accept other ways of looking at the universe and by breaking down the barrier between conscious and unconscious”.
Huxley adeptly sidesteps Connolly’s invitation to endorse the notorious eugenicist beliefs of his brother, Sir Julian Huxley. The interviewer tells the tale of acquaintances whose nephew had grown into “a dangerous teddy-boy”. “What kind of genes are those?” he demands of his subject. “Blue genes,” deadpans Huxley.
Elsewhere in the old Listener files in 1954, the rebel poet ARD Fairburn invokes Huxley, in a short history of New Zealand in the 20th century, purportedly “published in 2054AD [by] the Department of Internal Affairs”. It holds that attempts to upgrade hotels had made them “so expensive and unpleasant” for honest drinkers that “it was only the reforms of 1984, which made liquor available in restaurants, cafes and grocers’ shops, that prevented the nationwide adoption of mescalin”.
In 1955, the deputy director-general of health, Mr Turbott, frets about New Zealanders’ “excessive” consumption of prescription barbiturates, barely half of which is “legitimate”. In another text (like the first, the script of an address carried by all radio stations), he frets about our mental health and issues what seems like an inordinately long list of instructions to parents. The topic of mental health was a hot one in the Listener in the 40s and 50s – a search on the phrase summons 135 pages of results.
And really, that’s the joy of it. Go to the Listener on Papers Past (paperspast.natlib.govt.nz, click through to Magazines and Journals), enter a topic you’re interested in, or which is in today’s headlines, and see what the conversation was a long lifetime ago. You can refine your search with the menus at the left of the screen. It can be remarkably grounding; the kind of context it’s easy to miss when we argue in the here and now. It turns out that computers – or “electronic brains”, as they were commonly referred to in these pages – were good for something after all.
