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The New Zealand Northern Drivers’ Union: Trade Union Anti-Racism Work, 1937–80 by Cybèle Locke

    We are very lucky that the Labour History journal and Liverpool University Press has allowed us to reproduce this article, which was short-listed for the Bert Roth Award. The original article was published in Cybèle Locke, ‘The New Zealand Northern Drivers’ Union: Trade Union Anti-Racism Work’, 1937–80’, Labour History, 120, 2021, pp. 21-47. We acknowledge the copyright of Liverpool University Press.

    In 1960, the Northern Drivers’ Union of New Zealand instituted its anti-racism policy. How this came about, and what it meant for union struggles in the following two decades, are the central concerns of this article. Effectively, the implementation of democratic organising principles within the Northern Drivers’ Union assisted the formation of anti-racism policy and practice. Union officials linked domestic racism with the experiences of black workers under apartheid in South Africa from 1960, which generated calls for a boycott of South Africa and local support for the Citizens’ Association for Racial Equality. Anti-apartheid sentiment in relation to South African rugby tours, which had galvanised unionists in the 1960s, became a source of division by the 1970s as attention turned to more “local” experiences of racism. In particular, this article considers how Māori rank and file, working together with Pākehā union officials such as communist Bill Andersen, extended trade union anti-racism work across the northern regions of the country, especially Auckland.

    Black and white poster saying All Black - Maori Issue

Sign the protest petition against racial discrimination.
    Courtesy of the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, Eph-C-RACIAL-1959-01

    Māori have always been at the forefront of campaigns to challenge racism. Māori activism, Aroha Harris argues, emerged out of long-term experiences of racism in New Zealand: assimilationist state policies and the attendant impact of everyday racist behaviours from “Pākehā fellow-citizens” (white New Zealanders). That Māori were denied access to certain spaces, jobs, and rugby teams – commonly called the colour bar – went largely unreported in the mainstream press. Pākehā were mostly oblivious to the reality of racial discrimination or in some circumstances actively supported it.[1] Māori migration from rural tribal heartlands to towns and cities (especially Auckland) in huge numbers in the 1950s and 1960s brought institutional racism into sharp focus.[2] For Ngāti Whātua, who had Auckland grow up around them, such racism was not new.

    Assimilation policies stemmed from nineteenth-century British colonialism. In 1840, two treaties were drawn up by representatives of the British Crown: an English language treaty that ceded Māori sovereignty to the British Crown; and a Māori-language version, Te Tiriti o Waitangi, understood and signed by Māori rangatira (chiefs), which guaranteed “rangatira retained their authority over their hapū and territories.” Te Tiriti allowed for a British governor to have authority over Pākehā who had settled in Aotearoa and be in relationship with rangatira as equals.[3] However, Te Tiriti was never honoured. Instead, with the justification of the English-language treaty, Britain colonised Aotearoa, alienating Māori land and destroying tribal political structures to facilitate and finance large-scale British settlement. As Harris writes, Te Tiriti “has been the cornerstone of Māori struggles to secure the rights that it guarantees, regain control of Māori affairs, and have their tangata whenua status recognised.”[4]

    The rise of modern Māori activism, spearheaded by the Māori Organisation on Human Rights (MOOHR) and Ngā Tamatoa, with confrontational methods and greater attention to racism, has been well canvassed historically.[5] What has received less attention are the collaborative efforts of both Pākehā and Māori trade unionists and the Communist Party of New Zealand to support Māori tribal leaders and young Māori activists in their anti-racism and land rights work.[6] This case study of the Northern Drivers’ Union examines such intersections, paying attention to the influence of communists, the outlawed Auckland Waterside Workers’ Union, and the broader Māori rank and file of the Northern Drivers’ Union in producing such solidarities. Enduring relationships and shared geography mattered.

    As Kerry Taylor argues, historically the Communist Party of New Zealand (CPNZ) attracted very few Māori members. Although Māori were cast as “potential allies of the working class,” they were positioned outside the working class and class relations were the principle CPNZ frame of reference.[7] Nevertheless, sporadic efforts by CPNZ members on local trades councils (especially those in the northern regions of New Zealand – Auckland, Waikato and the Bay of Plenty – and Wellington) to act in solidarity with Māori protesting the colour bar in sport and land alienation in the 1930s and 1940s, are important to understanding what occurred later in the Northern Drivers’ Union. The forging of the Māori Watersiders’ Union Association inside the Auckland Waterside Workers’ Union in the 1940s demonstrated “workplace whānau” ways of organising for young Pākehā union leaders such as Bill Andersen to follow in later decades.

    When the New Zealand Waterside Workers’ Union was dismantled by the government in 1951, 2,000 Auckland wharfies were blacklisted from the wharves. Approximately 200 wharfies became truck drivers, Bill Andersen among them, and they joined the Northern Drivers’ Union. The Northern Motor and Horse Drivers’ Union had grown out of the Auckland Carters’ Union and by the post-World War II era had branches representing truck, bus, construction vehicle, taxi and ambulance drivers in the Northland, Auckland, Waikato and Bay of Plenty regions. The Northern Drivers’ Union (Northern Drivers), along with regional drivers’ unions across New Zealand (such as the Wellington Drivers’ Union), belonged to the New Zealand Drivers’ Federation.[8] Ex-wharfies and communists elected Andersen into a Union leadership role in the mid-1950s. He would become a key player in the anti-racism history of the Northern Drivers’ Union. His successful efforts to democratise the Northern Drivers’ Union led to membership conversations, policy and action on the colour bar at home and abroad during the 1960s and 1970s.

    This analysis of the Northern Drivers’ Union connects with recent histories of trade union activism in civil rights, black nationalist and anti-apartheid movements. In his ground-breaking work, Peter Cole explored how unionised dockworkers in the San Francisco Bay area and in Durban participated in movements for racial equality and freedom.[9] With Peter Limb, Cole brought the history of Australian dockworkers’ anti-apartheid activism, under the auspices of the Waterside Workers’ Federation, into conversation with that of San Francisco dockworkers.[10] Cole and Limb argue that transnational solidarity, class-consciousness and political unionism (the influence of communism, syndicalism and other left-wing beliefs), as well as alliances beyond the waterfront, were crucial factors that led to anti-apartheid activism. African American dockworkers brought black nationalist and anti-colonial ideas to their trade unionism, but Indigenous workers are largely missing from this history.

    The Northern Drivers saw a growing Māori membership in the post-war years. Oral history interviewees, who worked as drivers from the late 1960s, estimate that by the 1970s 50 per cent of the Union’s 6,000 members were Māori.[11] These members brought their personal experiences of racism to their Pākehā union officials, to job meetings, to conversations at annual delegate conferences and to stop-work meetings. Their voices are difficult to discern, especially for the earlier years, because I am heavily reliant on Pākehā union officials’ reports, often written by Andersen himself, as published in Wheels and the Road Transport Worker. However, oral historiesprovide valuable insights into how regular Union forums encouraged conversations about racism and other social issues of concern to members. Drivers gathered at stop-work meetings to “grapple with … the question of racism, women’s rights, worker’s rights … world peace … It was not just about pay and conditions but the betterment of mankind, global issues.”[12] “The Northern Drivers’ Union was one of the most democratic unions I’ve ever worked with … We were against racism, supported the Māori movement.”[13] Interviewees described the Union “fight against racist situations” and indicated why local racism issues and the land rights movement gained far more attention and action from Union members than the more removed international anti-apartheid campaign.[14] They also reveal that Māori and Pākehā drivers considered racism a capitalist tool to divide the working class in the 1960s and 1970s. As Evan Te Ahu Poata-Smith suggests: “New Zealand’s working class is extremely diverse and a range of factors such as ethnicity, culture, nationality, gender and sexual orientation shapes working-class struggle and individual and collective experiences of class conflict.”[15] Ethnicity became a key consideration in working-class struggles conducted by the Northern Drivers and led to solidarity efforts with the Citizens’ Association for Racial Equality (CARE), Ngā Tamatoa and the Ōrākei Māori Committee Action Group.

    This article begins by examining communist and trade union solidarity prior to 1945, with Māori protesting the colour bar in rugby union team selection in 1937 and Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei land alienation in 1943. It then explores how such solidarity was disrupted by the Cold War and the defeat of militant New Zealand trade unionism in 1951. It follows Auckland ex-wharfies and Māori drivers into the Northern Drivers’ Union and unpacks efforts to rebuild democratic, class-solidarity-based unionism in the 1950s, led by communist Bill Andersen. Anti-racism work in support of CARE and the international anti-apartheid movement in the 1960s is examined, and then how such work shifted in response to the 1970s activities of Ngā Tamatoa and the Ōrākei Māori Committee Action Group. This case study of the Northern Drivers’ Union, in conversation with the Wellington Drivers’ Union, reveals the interplay between ethnicity and class in trade union struggles of the 1960s and 1970s.

    Anti-Racism Solidarity in 1937 and 1943

    Two key moments of anti-racism solidarity stand out in the 1930s and 1940s. The first, in 1937, centred on sport – specifically on rugby union. Rugby union had emerged as New Zealand’s national game, a symbol of “colonial nationhood,” in the early twentieth century. As Mark Falcous argues: “Amateur rugby was simultaneously promoted within the local conditions and imaginings of a fledgling settler colony seeking a national character distinct from the imperial centre.”[16] The All Blacks and New Zealand Maori teams were key in promoting mythologies of “egalitarianism” and “harmonious ‘race relations,’” and “early Māori adoption of rugby and considerable playing prominence could be read as proof of successful assimilation, cooperation and unproblematic unity with Pākehā.”[17] Rugby union games attracted the largest numbers of spectators of any New Zealand sport, as well as extensive media coverage, and so became the ideal target for anti-racism activism.

    South African Springbok team racism towards Māori players, and the New Zealand Rugby Union’s (NZRFU) capitulation to South African demands that only white players tour South Africa, led Te Arawa to advocate a “social and sporting boycott of the 1937 Springbok Tour.”[18] The CPNZ offered solidarity, calling for: “No further exchange of teams with South Africa unless guarantees are given that no colour lines will be drawn”; members were encouraged to attend protests.[19] There was “extensive protest and public debate, dominated by many senior Māori leaders,” including Kīngitanga leader Te Puea Herangi, but the NZRFU stood firm in its decision.[20] Enough Māori players left rugby union and joined Pākehā working-class men to play rugby league that a “Māori League Board of Control was formed in Auckland”; the Kīngitanga was the Board’s first patron.[21] Solidarities with working-class Pākehā were strengthened in Auckland over Māori land rights in 1943.[22]

    Due to communist wartime efforts – allying with social democrats in the class struggle against fascism – the CPNZ was at the height of its popularity, particularly in Auckland, in the early 1940s.[23] Trade union work was prioritised and with communist officials in the transport, labourers’ and carpenters’ unions, eight of the 11 Auckland Trades Council (ATC) elected executive were communists.[24] National CPNZ Chair, Scottish migrant Alexander (Alec) Drennan, was the ATC president.[25] Communist influence led the ATC to engage in solidarity work with local Māori on land rights, prompted by Kīngitanga leader Te Puea Hērangi in 1943.[26]

    Te Puea, with the assistance of Māori and Pākehā officials of the Auckland Labourers’ Union, brought a petition to the ATC which sought to prevent the Auckland City Council from evicting Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei from the last few acres of their land at Okahu Bay on the waterfront. Ngāti Whātua grievances were long-standing. Ngāti Whātua chief Apihai Te Kawau had facilitated Pākehā settlement of Auckland, gifting 3,000 acres to Governor Hobson in 1840. He also made it clear that the Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei tribal base, the 700-acre Ōrākei block on the waterfront, was inalienable. However, the Crown and consecutive governments disregarded this decree and the block was acquired piecemeal by dubious practices, until only the village was left for tangata whenua to live.[27] These last acres were now in danger. The ATC executive unanimously agreed “‘the Orakei Maoris be secured in their ancestral home’ and their village be ‘brought up to present day conditions.’”[28] In June, 200 unionised workers turned up to help Ngāti Whātua build a palisade around their marae and successfully prevented eviction.[29] Auckland Labourers’ Union secretary and party member Pat Potter was “the official Auckland Trades Council liaison person with Maori.”[30] These two moments – 1937 and 1943 – are illustrative of the connections made between communist trade unionists and Māori protesting racism. The Cold War would undermine such solidarity.

    Solidarity Disrupted: The Cold War and the Decline of Militant Trade Unionism, 1947–51

    In March 1946, 22-year-old Pākehā merchant seaman Gordon (Bill) Harold Andersen returned home to Auckland from war; he harboured a twin hatred of capitalism and racism. Andersen was radicalised by class exploitation on British ships and witnessing even worse exploitation of Arab dockworkers in British ports like Aden.[31] He joined the New Zealand seafaring community, the Seamen’s Union (SU) and the Maritime Branch of the CPNZ. In his trade union work, Andersen was mentored by older maritime trade union communist leaders such as Drennan, who set an example of united front communism – demonstrating how to build democratic, industrially militant cultures inside trade unions, and urging solidarity with local Māori to bring about a united working class.[32] Encouraged by CPNZ policy, Andersen engaged direct action tactics with employers to win better wages and conditions at sea and in port.

    As the Cold War intensified internationally, however, New Zealand communist fortunes began to wane. From 1947, there was a concerted and successful effort to remove communists from trade union office. Cold War anti-communist rhetoric was unleashed by Federation of Labour (FoL) leader Fintan Patrick Walsh and Labour government ministers, and was continued by the National government, elected in 1950.[33] Andersen was blacklisted from seafaring and Drennan voted out of ATC office in 1948. Drennan got Andersen a job on the Auckland wharves and he worked alongside Māori waterside workers who had their own Māori Watersiders’ Union Association, chaired by rugby league star Steve Watene, inside the Auckland Waterside Workers’ Union.[34]

    With communists removed from union office, support for Māori protesting the colour bar in sporting contacts with South Africa was weakened. Māori players were excluded from the All Black team touring South Africa in 1949 and maritime trade unionists and the CPNZ joined Māori protest efforts. The issue was discussed at the FoL conference and a rather weak remit agreed to: unions were to “make clear to the South African Rugby Board that the team to visit South Africa was not representative of New Zealand.”[35] The 1949 All Blacks tour of South Africa went ahead without Māori players.[36] As Diane Kirkby and Dmytro Ostapenko found in their work on Australian seafarers’ activism against apartheid, the emerging Cold War in the late 1940s caused division and “hampered” such trade union efforts.[37] The Auckland Carpenters’ Union was deregistered in 1949 and conflict came to a head when the militant New Zealand Waterside Workers’ Union (NZWWU) and a small number of other leftist delegates walked out of the 1950 FoL conference and formed a rival national organisation, the Trade Union Congress (TUC).[38]

    The final showdown was the 1951 waterfront lockout, triggered by a disagreement over a wage rise. Waterside workers (wharfies) refused overtime until the dispute was resolved, but employers called the action an illegal strike and locked out all wharfies from work until they gave up their claims.[39] Seafarers (despite opposition from their union president), miners, freezing workers, drivers, hydro workers, gas workers, harbour board employees and sugar workers declared solidarity strikes in support.[40] The National government backed employers and brought Waterfront Strike Emergency Regulations into force: the NZWWU registration was cancelled, funds and records seized, police powers were increased to arrest anyone aiding the wharfies, their side of the story was banned from the media, and troops were enlisted to unload cargo on the wharves. The FoL condemned the NZWWU leadership as “communist-dominated misleaders,” which undermined support strikes.[41] Despite his youth and short tenure as a wharfie, Andersen was a member of the Auckland Waterside Workers’ Lockout Committee.[42]

    After five months, the lockout ended in defeat and the NZWWU was replaced by 26 port unions. Andersen was amongst 2,000 blacklisted Auckland wharfies who took their beliefs in international solidarity, democratic unionism and now tempered militancy into other unions. As Andersen put it: “We learnt the hard lessons of when to fight, to select the issue on which to fight, when to advance and when to retreat in order to preserve organisation.”[43] The experience of defeat taught Andersen never to become a militant minority in the trade union movement or let a strike go beyond its peak; unity and organisation must be protected at all costs.[44] This approach would influence Andersen’s anti-racism solidarity efforts as well. Ex-wharfies supported Andersen to regain a leadership role, this time in the Northern Drivers’ Union.

    Northern Drivers’ Union Anti-Racism Policy

    Andersen became a truck driver and joined the Northern Drivers’ Union (Northern Drivers). In late February 1951, the Northern Drivers went on strike in support of the wharfies and offered their office as a base for the deregistered Auckland Waterside Workers’ Union. However, drivers voted to return to work after they were directed to do so by the FoL conference in March. Once the Wellington Drivers’ Union was deregistered for maintaining their support strike, further attempts to take Auckland drivers back out on strike were unsuccessful. Anti-communist union secretary Geoffrey Moore sought to align the Northern Drivers with the moderate Federation of Labour; he was unsuccessful.[45]

    Backed by the newly established CPNZ Drivers’ Industrial Branch and about 200 ex-wharfie drivers, Andersen was elected a union organiser in 1954.[46] He gained admiration for tying his wage to the Drivers’ Award and being an able negotiator with employers. Andersen was elected Northern Drivers’ secretary alongside new Pākehā organisers, communist Len Smith and militant ex-wharfie Jim Knox, in 1956. Andersen worked closely with communist Pat Kelly, a delegate in the Waikato region.[47] Mentored by communist Wellington Drivers’ Union organiser Chip Bailey, Andersen began instituting a delegate system to activate union members. Delegates were elected for 19 branches of the Union and worksites with over 20 members.[48] All union policy was discussed and voted on at annual delegate conventions, beginning in 1958; Northern Drivers’ policy was published in the NZ Drivers’ Federation newspaper Wheels. Andersen wrote a manual on how to be a “good Union delegate”: “fully take into account the ideas and mood of the workers on the job,” look out for that key point of agreement – the issue that most people care about and can unify around – and that is the issue to go ahead on; the manual was workshopped at annual delegate conventions and published in 1962.[49] Conventions and job meetings provided spaces for discussion of issues such as racism.

    Kelly attended a World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) conference in Leipzig, East Germany in October 1957 where apartheid was discussed, and he brought these ideas home. The FoL had belonged to the WFTU – formed in 1945 to unite all labour organisations into one international organisation – but, along with most peak union organisations in western democracies, left the WFTU and joined the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) in 1949. These two international bodies represented the Cold War divide. The WFTU had been speaking out “against apartheid as imperialist, capitalist and racist” since 1949. At their 1957 conference, a South African Congress of Trades Unions delegation attended and shared evidence about life under the apartheid system. In response, the conference “made an appeal to trade unions around the world to take solidarity actions ‘to put an end to racial discrimination and the persecution of their fellow workers in South Africa.’”[50] Kelly’s visit to the conference posed such a threat to the FoL leadership they sought to ban him from all Trades Council and FoL meetings in 1958.[51] The first Drivers’ Delegate Convention was held in 1958, where no doubt apartheid South Africa was discussed.

    Increasing numbers of Māori drivers joined these discussions, but they gave greater priority to local experiences of racism. As Māori moved from rural tribal homelands to the city in post-war New Zealand, they not only remade urban workplaces, they remade trade unions – those representing drivers, labourers, freezing workers, and pulp and paper workers.[52] They clustered together on particular worksites where collective ways of “being Māori … informed the practices and values” of the workplace.[53] For example, Māori men became truck-drivers for Winstones, J. J. Craigs, Vuksich & Borich and Auckland breweries, joining relatives and friends who already worked there. Older Māori men would become the foreman or Union delegate and act as a tribal elder for younger Māori men, “helping them to organise their social lives as well as their working lives.”[54] As the Northern Drivers’ delegate system expanded, Māori became increasingly involved in union affairs, such as Auckland ambulance driver John Willis and General Foods driver Rameka (Mac) Harris.[55]

    Māori drivers made their Pākehā union officials aware of incidents of racial discrimination in the workforce and organisers gained the reinstatement of Māori workers. Employers were not always the problem: Knox described a dispute at the Tauranga Bus Company where a South African driver was dismissed for his racist attitude to Māori passengers. After investigating, Knox supported his dismissal and explained to the man “that we in the trade union movement do not have racial discrimination and believe in all of our people in New Zealand working together, no matter what colour they may be.”[56]

    Drivers were also influenced by the “No Maoris, No Tour” campaign, led by the Citizens All Black Tour Association (CABTA) in 1959.[57] CABTA did not regard itself as part of the anti-apartheid movement; rather, it was protesting racial discrimination practiced by the NZRFU.[58] CABTA was led by Dr Rolland O’Regan (Wellington surgeon and Catholic layman) and Joan Stone (welfare officer with the Department of Māori Affairs and secretary of the Māori Women’s Welfare league). It involved Māori and churches leaders, “trade unions, student organisations, academics, teachers, journalists, public servants and rugby footballers.” Drivers numbered among the 150,000 people who signed the petition opposing racial discrimination in the selection of an All Blacks team to tour South Africa in 1960.[59] Job meetings held at trucking worksites for North Shore Transport, Opotiki County Council, Opotiki Borough Council and W. S. Henderson all passed a resolution: “Against Racial Discrimination in All Black Team.”[60] The all-Māori Howard Morrison Quartet popularised the cause with a song “My Old Man’s an All Black,” which mocked the NZRFU’s support for South African racist policies:

    Oh, my old man’s an All Black,

    He wears the silver fern,

    But his mates just couldn’t take him,

    So he’s out now for a turn.

    (Fi Fi Fo Fum, there’s no Horis in this scrum.)[61]

    South African apartheid was protested as a local racism issue.

    In May 1960, peaceful demonstrators in Sharpeville were shot down by police and the press brought the reality of South African apartheid home to the outside world. Northern Drivers’ anti-apartheid support can be traced from this moment. In Wheels, Andersen reported: “shootings, beatings and mass punishments of coloured South African workers have motivated a strong protest from this union.” He went on to say:

    The Northern Drivers’ Union is firmly opposed to the colour bar. We recognise that New Zealand is not completely free of guilt in this regard. We support the NZ Federation of Labour’s protest in the matter and urge the Government to use every opportunity to speak out boldly against the actions of the South African Government regarding the apartheid policy.”[62]

    The FoL called on the government to cancel the 1960 tour.[63] The Seafarers’ Union went further, stopping work for 24 hours to protest the massacre.[64] Prime Minister Walter Nash refused to intervene, leaving the decision to the NZRFU. Despite demonstrations of between 1,000 and 3,000 people (an unusually large number for the time), the tour went ahead.[65]

    Just under 60 delegates attended the July 1960 Drivers’ Delegate Convention in Auckland, where racial discrimination was discussed. Delegates unanimously agreed to the Union executive’s proposed “stand against racial discrimination wherever it may raise its ugly head.” Andersen reported: “racial discrimination has the effect of dividing the working people and … we should be united, irrespective of colour, religion or political beliefs.” In 1960, Northern Drivers’ Union members recognised that a colour bar existed “to some extent in New Zealand and it must be vigorously stamped out, root and branch.”[66] This policy made the Northern Drivers an explicitly anti-racist union and is significant given the mainstream Pākehā belief that New Zealand was a place of racial harmony.[67]

    1960s Anti-Racism Solidarity

    Encouraged by international trade union activity, the 1960s saw a broadening focus from “all-white All Blacks” to protesting apartheid and its consequences in South Africa. The South African Congress of Trade Unions called on trade unions to boycott South African goods in 1959 and the Australian Waterside Workers’ Federation responded by boycotting fish, carbide, and asbestos. The Australian Council of Trade Unions supported a partial boycott in 1960.[68]In 1962, the FoL conference agreed to support the boycott policy of the ICFTU and develop an industrial and economic boycott of South Africa.[69] Andersen banned South African goods from the Andersen household and at Northern Drivers’ Union meetings he drew attention to the colour bar as it operated both internationally and nationally. At a Franklin County Council job meeting, drivers discussed the Northern Drivers’ Union opposition to the colour bar in New Zealand sports teams, and related local experiences of the colour bar (particularly in nearby Pukekohe), and how to deal with it. Andersen responded: “This disease, so ugly and real in the USA … and in South Africa, is also in New Zealand and we must destroy it root and branch.”[70]

    The year 1963 saw union leadership changes, which would increase anti-racism activism. Drivers’ Union organiser Kelly left Auckland to take up a position in the Wellington Drivers’ Union with other communists Bailey, Ken Douglas and Tama Poata. When Bailey died suddenly in 1963, Douglas was elected secretary in his place.[71] FoL leader Walsh also died in 1963, and Auckland Trades Council president Tom Skinner became FoL president. New trade union affiliates increased the militancy of the FoL on issues like apartheid; Knox joined the FoL executive in 1964 and would be elected secretary in 1969.

                From the mid-1960s, the Northern Drivers’ Union was actively supportive of the Citizens’ Association for Racial Equality (CARE), which protested racism at home and abroad. CARE, a predominantly Pākehā group, formed in 1964 to focus both on race relations in South Africa and on racism experienced by Māori and Pacific Island migrants to Auckland city. Unlike CABTA, CARE was explicitly anti-apartheid, rather than just opposed to racism in All Black selection. CARE led protests during the 1965 Springbok tour of New Zealand, which were supported by the FoL.[72] Māori MPs Eruera Tirikātene and Matiu Rata were vocal in their opposition to apartheid, and Rata spoke against racial discrimination at the 1966 Drivers’ Delegate Convention. This time there was success: the planned 1967 All Blacks tour of South Africa was cancelled.[73]

                There were close interpersonal and professional connections between anti-racism activists and the union. Frank Haigh and Tom Newnham were elected president and secretary of CARE in 1966.[74] Andersen had a close working relationship with Haigh, who did legal work for the Northern Drivers’ Union, and CARE’s work was advertised in the new Northern Drivers’ Union newspaper, Road Transport Worker.CARE advocated the government pass a New Zealand Race Relations Act (to make race discrimination illegal) and contribute to the United Nations Trust Fund for Southern Africa. They established the first Citizens Advice Bureau in 1967 to advise new migrants to Auckland City. CARE was one of the very few Pākehā organisations that opposed the Māori Affairs Amendment Bill in 1967.[75]

                Although involved with CARE, the Northern Drivers lagged behind their Wellington-based comrades in actively opposing the Amendment Bill. The legislation empowered the government to define Māori land as “uneconomic” and to acquire it through compulsory purchase; Māori elders recognised this as yet another land grab and galvanised the Wellington Drivers’ Union (WDU) into action. WDU organiser Poata called a meeting of Māori drivers to discuss the issue and they formed the Māori Organisation on Human Rights (MOOHR). A stop-work meeting of 1,000 drivers supported a union submission opposing the Bill to the Parliamentary Select Committee.[76] The WDU executive agreed that MOOHR’s organisational work become part of Poata’s job description as a union official.[77] MOOHR opposed “apartheid, racism in all spheres of social and political life, and Māori involvement in unjust wars overseas.”[78] While MOOHR was influenced by “philosophies of Marxism and white liberalism … and the analyses of civil rights and anti-apartheid movements,” it was the forerunner of a “new wave of Māori activism” in the 1970s.[79] With no Māori officials, nothing like MOOHR was established in the Northern Drivers’ Union.

    The Northern and Wellington drivers’ unions were also affected by the Sino-Soviet split as communist union comrades went their separate ways. The CPNZ conducted “an intensive inner-party study of the differences in the world communist movement,” and the majority decided to support the Chinese position in 1964.[80] Unhappy with the move to a more ultra-left position, Andersen and other Auckland trade unionists left to form the Soviet-aligned Socialist Unity Party (SUP) in 1966.[81] Northern Drivers’ delegate and executive member Peter Cross went with Andersen, while organiser Len Smith stayed in the CPNZ. In Wellington, Kelly remained in the CPNZ, Douglas joined the SUP and Poata left communism and his WDU position in 1970.[82] The SUP engaged popular front policies and tempered industrial militancy to preserve organisation and gained some influence in the trade union movement; Andersen would be elected ATC Chair in 1976. CPNZ members understood the SUP as reformist sell-outs and union officials as “agents of the capitalist class,” and in turn, the SUP dismissed the CPNZ as “Peking Parrots” or “mouth militants.”[83] Such sectarianism undermined solidarity work at times.[84]

    “Honorary Whites” and Rugby Union Sporting Contacts with South Africa, 1970–76

    Rugby sporting contacts with South Africa continued to galvanise anti-racism activism into the 1970s, but an “honorary whites” policy would cause divisions. The South African Prime Minister John Vorster adapted the touring rules so Māori and Pacific Island players could be included in the All Blacks team as “honorary whites” in 1970.[85] In response, CARE hosted Dennis Brutus – President of the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee – to strengthen their campaign against sporting contacts with South Africa. Brutus was greeted on arrival by CARE and the New Zealand Federation of Māori Students leader Syd Jackson; Māori students had just resolved to oppose the 1970 All Blacks tour of South Africa whether or not Māori went as “honorary whites.”[86] Brutus spoke at the Auckland Town Hall and argued the tour would demonstrate New Zealand’s approval of apartheid laws.

    Trade unionists got involved in the controversy. Northern Drivers’ executive member Wally Foster, a Māori South Auckland Council driver, was involved in Māori land rights struggles and educated those around him. Young Pākehā driver Neil Chapman remembered: “He was a great reader of New Zealand history and he’d share those stories about land confiscation.” Foster was active with Andersen in challenging racist hiring practices in Pukekohe.[87] In 1969, Foster found Brutus a persuasive speaker, and in the Road Transport Worker,explained why drivers should oppose the 1970 Tour:

    Each year, at the Annual Convention of the Northern Drivers’ Union, when race relations are being discussed, the delegates have always adopted a policy which has condemned racial discrimination, racial prejudice, or racial disharmony. This is a very important part of our discussion of our annual conventions for the reason that Pākehās, Māoris, Islanders and others work side by side, engage at times in conflict with employers side by side, and go home at night to live in their communities side by side. Racial harmony is a question of bread and butter for all working people here in New Zealand … Every worker be he Pākehā, Māori or Islander has problems of a similar nature, for example, housing, making the wage packet spin out, feeding the family and sending children to school. These problems cannot be solved by allowing arguments over race or religion to divide us.[88]

    Foster presented opposing sporting contacts with apartheid South Africa as solidarity work to promote racial harmony of the working class, both domestically and internationally. Class identity was also central for Willis, the first Māori member elected an organiser and vice-president of the Northern Drivers in 1970.[89]

    Amongst the membership, however, there was vocal support for the 1970 tour. Some members argued: we shouldn’t “drag politics into sport”; the All Blacks could set South Africans a good example with a mixed-race team; and Māori play separately from Pākehā internationally sometimes, isn’t this racial discrimination? Other members responded: “why should we care?”[90] This last comment, I would argue, was not a sign of apathy or of implicit support for racial discrimination in sport; it signals instead that rugby union was not that important to them. The majority of drivers were rugby league supporters and no league teams had sporting contacts with South Africa. While the Northern Drivers’ executive were united in their opposition to the 1970 Tour, they did not gain the majority support of the membership for this policy.[91] The inclusion of Māori players in the All Blacks would have appeased some, and for league supporters rugby union games did little to galvanise their anti-racism activism. The WDU faced a similar situation: a motion opposing apartheid and recommending a boycott of all relations with South African was vigorously debated and then defeated at stop work meetings in 1970.[92] National Māori organisations were also divided: the New Zealand Māori Council supported the 1970 tour and the Māori Women’s Welfare League did not.[93]

    It was students who would take the lead in the New Zealand anti-apartheid movement in the 1970s. Students’ associations brought people together in July 1969 to form Halt All Racist Tours (HART) to end sporting contacts with South Africa. Auckland student Trevor Richards was Chair and Syd Jackson, Vice-Chair; Poata attended the first meeting and gave the organisation its name. CARE secretary Newnham became an active HART supporter, though the two organisations regularly disagreed over tactics.[94] HART was far more combative in its protest methods to oppose the 1970 tour: graffiti adorned rugby grounds, goal posts “were sawed down,” rugby trials were invaded, and Molotov cocktails and paint bombs thrown. However, much smaller numbers of people flocked to support this anti-apartheid protest.[95] The 1970 Tour went ahead with one Samoan and two Māori players selected for the All Blacks team as “honorary whites.” A Springbok tour of New Zealand was planned for 1973 and the anti-apartheid movement became more organised. The National Anti-Apartheid Committee (NAAC) was formed in March 1972 to coordinate and extend the activities of anti-apartheid groups, sharing space with the New Zealand University Students’ Association in Wellington.

    The Northern Drivers’ executive decided more union education was required and sponsored (with the SU) the visit of John Gaetsewe, Representative of the South African Congress of Trade Unions in May 1972.[96] He spoke at Northern Drivers’ stop-work meetings about how the apartheid system impacted South Africans designated “black” or “coloured,” with a particular focus on workers.[97] The Northern Drivers’ executive issued a statement: “we support the decisions of the United Nations Organisation, the FOL and the South African Congress of Trade unions to isolate South Africa whilst Apartheid remains.” But again, feelings ran high, especially amongst “ardent supporters of rugby as a game” at Northern Drivers’ policy meetings.[98] Northern Drivers’ president Ken Fabris responded: “This Union does not oppose sport in any form”; it opposes this tour because “of the effect it will have on many African trade unionists” and the denial of Black or Coloured South African workers’ rights. Fabris continued, “It is not CARE or HART who is trying to dictate to the people of New Zealand whom they can watch playing rugby, it is the Government of South Africa who says who is allowed to play overseas or at home.”[99] Some members claimed the Union should not be involved in political issues or oppose apartheid in South Africa before cleaning up “our own back yard.”[100] This argument echoes complaints by Māori members of CARE that too much attention was given to apartheid South Africa and not enough to race relations at home.[101] Members remained divided over the issue, but this time the Norman Kirk-led Labour government cancelled the 1973 Tour.[102]

    Annual stop-work meetings to set Union policy gave the Northern Drivers’ executive a platform to bring in public speakers to educate members and encourage discussion. Attending to members’ complaints, young Māori activist group Ngā Tamatoa was invited to come and speak about “back yard” racism in 1973.[103] Inner-city Auckland-based Ngā Tamatoa had emerged in 1970 and “combined Brown Power, Māori liberation and self-governance rhetoric, protest tactics and self-help programs to oppose racism and champion Māori culture and identity.”[104] Hana Jackson addressed the Northern Drivers and explained why Ngā Tamatoa was protesting annually at Waitangi, promoting the teaching of Māori language in schools and challenging institutional racism, particularly in the justice system.[105] After a lively discussion, the meeting resolved to give Ngā Tamatoa $100 to assist with their work; articles about Ngā Tamatoa campaigns were published in the Road Transport Worker.[106] Drivers’ monetary support is significant because at this time Ngā Tamatoa “were scorned by many Māori, who felt they were somehow bringing Māoridom into disrepute” due to their confrontational protest methods.[107]

    The Northern Drivers worked even more closely with CARE, most likely due to their less combative approach; they shared office space and staff in the mid-1970s. The executive reported proudly:

    The campaign against racial discrimination has increased in volume [and] [o]ur previously unpopular messages … have become more popular now. In many aspects of life, more and more people are appreciative that racism is a poison and is used by very powerful business interests to exploit black labour more ruthlessly than white, and also to pit black against white to the disadvantage of both … even that citadel of “white supremacy,” South Africa, is being forced to manoeuvre to offset world opinion.[108]

    Campaigns against racism in the workplace were gaining increasing support.

    This was also the time when Matiu Rata became Minister of Māori Affairs and pushed the third Labour government to take Māori Treaty rights seriously. The Waitangi Tribunal Act to investigate Māori claims relating to breaches of the Treaty of Waitangi after 1975 was legislated.[109] The 1975 Act prompted a coalescence of forces into the Māori land rights movement – Te Roopu o te Matakite (Te Matakite) – and a march was organised from Te Hapua to Wellington that same year. Māori, including many trade unionists, marched in their thousands, demanding that “Not one more acre of Māori land” be surrendered.[110] The march sparked debate on marae across the motu (island), and fired up support for land occupations to regain Māori land that had been wrongfully alienated. MOOHR and Ngā Tamatoa helped out by organising march logistics; CARE and trade unions donated money and food. Truck driver Syd Keepa recalled attending a Northern Drivers’ stop-work meeting where members discussed the Maori land march. All the delegates were white, he remembered, and didn’t understand the issues, but support for the march was carried by the members.[111] Democratic union processes enabled Māori members to gain Northern Drivers’ support for the land rights movement.

    Bastion Point and the Auckland Trades Council Green Ban

    As economic conditions deteriorated from 1973,the National Party, led by Robert Muldoon, wagedaverysuccessful election campaign presenting trade unionists as communist or anarchist thugs: it “scratched every itch of prejudice against the poor, particularly the brown poor.”[112] National won the election in November 1975, instituted a wage freeze, reduced immigration and supported the 1976 All Blacks tour of South Africa. Muldoon also announced that 24 hectares at Bastion Point, on the Auckland waterfront, would be subdivided, sold off, and “redeveloped as a pricey retirement village.”[113] Bastion Point, or Takaparawha, was Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei ancestral land from which, “on the pretext of protecting their health,” they had been evicted in the early 1950s; homes and the meeting house had been burned to the ground.[114] Eruini (Eddie) Hawke was a Ngāti Whātua wharfie who had stood loyal to the Waterside Workers’ Union in 1951; that year he lost his job, his union, and his marae. It was his son Joe Hawke who became the spokesperson for the Ōrākei Māori Committee Action Group and led an occupation of Bastion Point in early January 1977 that would last for 17 months. Eddie and his wife Piupiu provided the internal leadership and inspiration for those who joined the occupation.[115]

    The long-standing union connection between Eddie Hawke and Bill Andersen was thus extended to the next generation. Joe Hawke respected Bill for his assistance in forming a Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei league team at City Newton Rugby League Club in 1975.[116] Before the Bastion Point occupation began, a delegation from the Ōrākei Māori Action Committee came to the Auckland Trades Council, chaired by Andersen, and won a motion of support for a Green Ban on Bastion Point. The Council committed to policy that no subdivision or redevelopment work would be carried out at the Point. Keepa remembered the Green Ban was initially sold to trade union members as a class issue, which drew him in:

    Muldoon wanted to build rich people’s houses on there … So that was a big draw card, not only for me but some who were a bit iffy on Māori rights anyway … [I] was going up to support the people at Takaparawha to keep the rich white people out … I don’t think there was anything in it about supporting Māori rights. I think that’s how … [the Auckland Trades Council] sold it to the membership. It was about poor people against rich people … which I thought was a brilliant way of doing things. Rather than to say it was Māori land … so the whole Auckland Trades Council agreed to put the Green Ban on.[117]

    As the occupation went on however, conversations inside the Northern Drivers became focused on Māori land rights and the history of colonisation. Andersen explained:

    All the jokes about the “Pākehās stealing Māori land” are almost correct. The Pākehās who have stolen (legally on some occasions) Māori land were not drivers, storemen, labourers or carpenters. It was the stock and station companies and other carpet baggers – that is the rich Pākehās or their agents. Many of our Union members and other Union members are amongst those who have been or are being robbed. The great Māori Land March and the Bastion Point struggle represent the first real roll back in this long and infamous period of injustice against the Māori peoples.[118]

    On 25 May 1978, “seven hundred police and army personnel invaded Bastion Point,” arrested 222 people and charged them with trespass.[119] But the Green Ban remained in place and a successful Treaty claim would see Bastion Point restored to Ngāti Whātua in 1991.[120]

    Shifting attitudes to Māori land rights amongst drivers is evident in changes to Northern Drivers’ Union race relations policy. In 1977, members agreed to “opposition to all forms of racial discrimination at home and abroad.” But by 1978, policy was expanded to:

    (a) equality of all races and harmonious relations between all workers for mutual progress (b) Greater involvement of Polynesian members in various positions in the Union (c) Full support for justice for the Māori people for land rights (d) Opposition to all forms of apartheid in any area.[121]

    After 1970, the Northern Drivers’ executive never gained full membership support for opposition to sporting contacts with South Africa, but had greater success with Union activism that addressed racism at home.

    Green Ban activism had flow on effects. From 1978, Māori members were elected onto the Northern Drivers’ executive in greater numbers.[122] Mac Harris became an organiser in 1979 and John Willis was elected Union president in 1980. By the mid-1980s, five of the nine paid Northern Drivers’ officials and ten executive members were Māori.[123] Māori workers were prominent in strike action at Mangere Bridge, New Zealand’s first national General Strike in September 1979 and the Kinleith Paper Mill in 1980.[124] Working-class solidarity held strong for these ethnically diverse, male-dominated workforces and their unions at this moment in time. “An injury to one is an injury to all” was extended to injuries caused by colonisation. Working-class unity was given physical expression when the Northern Drivers and a range of other union allies moved into the newly built Auckland Trade Union Centre (TUC) in 1980. The Polynesian Resource Centre was formed there by Ngā Tamatoa activist and Northern Clerical Workers’ Union secretary Syd Jackson to educate trade unionists on institutional racism and Māori land alienation issues. HART also moved in and the TUC would become the Auckland headquarters for the anti-Springbok Tour coalition in 1981.[125]

    Conclusion

    A number of factors gave rise to the Northern Drivers’ Union anti-racism policy in 1960: the memory of communist trade union solidarity with Māori in protesting the colour bar and land alienation in the 1930s and 1940s; the influence of communist leadership; the implementation of democratic trade unionism; and the influx of Māori members to the Northern Drivers’ Union in the post-war decades. Māori drivers brought their experiences of racism both within and outside the workforce to the union, which communist trade unionists such as Andersen compared to the experiences of black and coloured workers in apartheid South Africa. Solidarity was promoted with the Citizens Association for Racial Equality to protest racism at home and abroad.

    Despite the international outlook and experiences of some key unionists such as Andersen, rank-and-file drivers considered local issues more important in the implementation of their anti-racism policy. This became clear in 1970 when Māori and Pacific Island rugby players were able to tour apartheid South Africa as “honorary whites” and the union executive were unable to mobilise members in opposition. Rugby union sporting contact with South Africa, the key focus of the broader New Zealand anti-apartheid movement during the 1970s, was not of great interest to drivers – most of whom were rugby league players and supporters. Drivers demanded that their union officials pay more attention to “our own backyard” and stop-work meetings were utilised to do just that. Ngā Tamatoa advocated for Treaty, Māori language and land rights, as well protesting institutional racism, and drivers became active in implementing the Auckland Trades Council Green Ban to support the Ōrākei Māori Committee Action Group’s occupation of Bastion Point. Empowered by such experiences, increasing numbers of Māori drivers became executive members and union organisers from this point.

    In charting the history of anti-racism in the New Zealand labour movement through the Northern Drivers’ Union, this article has emphasised the significance of personal relationships and connections. Solidarities formed during the 1951 waterfront lockout, between Bill Andersen, Jim Knox and Eddie Hawke, held strong. Into the 1960s and 70s, solidarities were forged with Frank Haigh in CARE, Syd Jackson in Ngā Tamatoa and Eddie’s sons Joe and Grant Hawke at Bastion Point. Not all solidarities would last. In the early 1980s, Ngā Tamatoa activists changed their focus to Māori sovereignty and demanded revolutionary change in Aotearoa. This was not greeted well by trade unionists such as Andersen, who understood Māori nationalism as a rejection of the class struggle; the Polynesian Resource Centre and HART were evicted from the Auckland Trade Union Centre in 1982.[126]

    Cybèle Locke is a New Zealand labour and oral historian in the History Programme at Victoria University of Wellington. She is Chair of the Labour History Project and a Labour History Associate Editor. She wrote Workers in the Margins: Union Radicals in Post-War New Zealand and a book-length biography of Auckland communist and trade union leader Bill Andersen is forthcoming with Bridget Williams Books in 2021.

    <cybele.locke@vuw.ac.nz>


    *          My sincere thanks for the helpful suggestions from Labour History’s two anonymous reviewers.

    [1].         Aroha Harris, Hīkoi: Forty Years of Māori Protest (Wellington: Huia Press, 2004), 17–20. How Māori experienced the “colour bar” in New Zealand has been given less historical attention: Angela Ballara, Proud to Be White? A Survey of Pākehā Prejudice in New Zealand (Auckland: Heineman, 1986); Atholl Anderson, Judith Binney and Aroha Harris, Tangata Whenua: A History (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2015), 307, 317–318, 344–45, 349; Cybèle Locke, “Solidarity Across the ‘Colour’ Line? Māori Representation in the Māoriland Worker 1910–1914,” New Zealand Journal of History 48, no. 2 (2014): 50–70.

    [2].         By 1961, the Māori population of Auckland was just shy of 20,000 (12 per cent of the total Māori population), employed in the semi-skilled and unskilled sectors of the workforce. Melissa Matutina Williams, Panguru and the City Kāinga Tahi, Kāinga Rua: An Urban Migration History (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2015), 182. The Auckland urban population was 450,000 in 1961.

    [3].         “He Whakaputanga me te Tiriti: The Declaration and the Treaty: The Report on Stage 1 of the Te Paparahi o Te Raki Inquiry,” Waitangi Tribunal Report 2014, Wai 1040, accessed January 2021, https://waitangitribunal.govt.nz/publications-and-resources/waitangi-tribunal-reports/.

    [4].         Harris, Hīkoi, 27.

    [5].         Harris, Hīkoi; Ranginui Walker, Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou: Struggle Without End (Auckland: Penguin, 2004); Angelique Stastny and Raymond Orr, “The Influence of the US Black Panthers on Indigenous Activism in Australia and New Zealand from 1969 Onwards,” Australian Aboriginal Studies 2 (2014): 60–74; Linda Johnson, “Māori Activism Across Borders, 1950–1980s” (PhD diss., Massey University, 2015). Due to lack of space, this article does not include the Polynesian Panthers who worked closely with Ngā Tamatoa. See Melani Anae, Lautofa Iuli, Leilani Burgoyne, eds, Polynesian Panthers: The Crucible Years 1971–74 (Auckland: Reed Publishers, 2006).

    [6].         For an analysis of Māori involvement in the freezing workers’ unions, clerical unions and organised unemployed, see Cybèle Locke, Workers in the Margins: Union Radicals in Post-War New Zealand (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2012). Deborah Wilson, Different White People: Radical Activism for Aboriginal Rights 1946–1972 (Crawley, WA: UWA Publishing, 2015).

    [7].         Kerry Taylor, “‘Potential Allies of the Working Class’: The Communist Party of New Zealand and Maori, 1921–52,” in On The Left: Essays on Socialism in New Zealand, ed. Pat Moloney and Kerry Taylor (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2002), 104.

    [8].         The 1894 Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act did not allow for national unions, just national “associations.” The New Zealand Drivers’ Federation was formed in 1909. The Federation negotiated the New Zealand Motor and Horse Drivers’ Award (collective agreement) covering 70 per cent of drivers nationally. Drivers’ union memberships increased from 8,983 in 1946 to 19,523 in 1971. Bert Roth, Trade Unions in New Zealand (Wellington: Reed Education, 1973), 162.

    [9].         Peter Cole, Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area (Urbana, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2018).

    [10].      Peter Cole and Peter Limb, “Hooks Down! Anti-Apartheid Activism and Solidarity among Maritimes Unions in Australia and the United States,” Labor History 58, no. 3 (2017): 303–26.

    [11].      Trade unions did not keep records of ethnicity. Neil Chapman told me it was as high as 75 per cent. Bert Roth reported that Māori chiefly joined the Auckland labourers’ and drivers’ unions, but only gave figures for the Northern and Taranaki Labourers’ Union: 1,000 Māori members (one sixth of the union’s members). Roth, Trade Unions, 133.

    [12].      Neil Chapman, oral interview with author, 4 September 2013. Equal pay was an issue of focus for drivers in the early 1970s despite the very small number of women drivers. Drivers had been part of the peace movement, anti-conscription and ban the bomb movements, since 1949.

    [13].      Rameka Harris, interview with author, 1 December 2014, First Union, Onehunga.

    [14].      Chapman, interview.

    [15].      Evan Te Ahu Poata-Smith, “Ka Tika A Muri, Ka Tika A Mua? Māori Protest Politics and the Treaty of Waitangi Settlement Process,” in Tangata Tangata: The Changing Ethnic Contours of New Zealand,ed.Paul Spoonley, Cluny Macpherson, David Pearson (Southbank, Vic.: Thomson Dunmore Press, 2004), 72.

    [16].      Mark Falcous, “Rugby League in the National Imaginary of New Zealand Aotearoa,” Sport in History 27, no. 3 (2007): 427–28.

    [17].      Falcous, “Rugby League in the National Imaginery,” 438. Middle-class Pākehā dominated amateur rugby because they had resources to attend practices and tours, unlike working-class players.

    [18].      Trevor Richards, Dancing on Our Bones: New Zealand, South Africa, Rugby and Racism (Wellington: BWB, 1999), 13.

    [19].      Taylor, “Potential Allies,” 110.

    [20].      Greg Ryan, “Anthropological Football: Māori and the 1937 Springbok Rugby Tour of New Zealand,” New Zealand Journal of History 34, no. 1 (2000): 60–79; Ron Palenski, “Rugby union – International rugby – Southern Hemisphere,” Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, accessed January 2021, http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/rugby-union/page-8.

    [21].      Ryan, “Anthropological Football,” 77–78; Falcous, “Rugby League in the National Imaginary,” 441.

    [22].      Richards, Dancing, 13–14.

    [23].      CPNZ membership was anywhere between 1,000 and 2,000.

    [24].      The ATC represented the largest number of private sector trade unionists in the New Zealand Federation of Labour.

    [25].      Kerry Taylor, “The Communist Party of New Zealand from its Origins until 1946” (PhD diss., Victoria University of Wellington, 1996), 181. Scottish shipyard builder Alec Drennan had immigrated to Auckland about 1925, been active in the Labourers’ Union and Labour Party, but was radicalised by the Depression and joined the CPNZ in 1931. Drennan joined the CPNZ National Committee in 1935 and was Auckland CPNZ Chair from the late 1930s. David Verran, “Drennan, Alexander,” Dictionary of New Zealand Biography (first published in 2000) in Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, accessed January 2021, https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/5d25/drennan-alexander.

    [26].      The Kingitanga originated as a pan-tribal independence movement in the 1850s and was instrumental in rallying armed resistance to Pākehā invasion of Māori territories during the wars in the North Island between 1860 and 1863. Michael King, Te Puea: A Biography (Auckland: Hodder and Stoughton, 1977), 217.

    [27].      Harris, Hikoi, 78–83.

    [28].      Communists regularly reported on Māori health, housing and education issues, Māori land grievances and the work of local tribal committees during the war. Taylor, “Potential Allies,”106.

    [29].      For a full discussion of this event, see Locke, Workers in the Margins, 20–29.

    [30].      Taylor, “Potential Allies,” 109.

    [31].      Cybèle Locke, “Communist Made at Sea and in Port: Maritime Class Relations during the Second World War,” International Journal of Maritime History 28 (2016): 532–549.

    [32].      Andersen also admired Jim Healy, “a gritty communist grassroots fighter” who led the Australian Waterside Workers’ Federation, and communist Eliot V. Elliott, Seamen’s Union of Australia national secretary. Cole and Limb, “Hooks Down,” 307; Bill Andersen to Tom Curphey, 12 June 1996, Bill Andersen personal papers, Rotorua.

    [33].      Walsh, FoL secretary Ken Baxter and Minister of Labour Angus McLagan were all ex-communists. Conrad Bollinger, Against the Wind: The Story of the New Zealand Seamen’s Union (Wellington: New Zealand Seaman’s Union, 1968), 131; Pat Walsh, “Walsh, Fintan Patrick,” Dictionary of New Zealand Biography (first published in 1998) in Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, accessed January 2021, https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/4w4/walsh-fintan-patrick.

    [34].      Manuka Henare, “Watene, Puti Tipene,” Dictionary of New Zealand Biography (first published in 2000) in Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, accessed January 2021, https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/5w12/watene-puti-tipene.

    [35].      Richards, Dancing,15.

    [36].      Ibid., 18.

    [37].      Diane Kirkby and Dmytro Ostapenko, “‘Second to None in the International Fight’: Australian Seafarers Internationalism and Maritime Unions,” Journal of Contemporary History 54, no. 2 (2019): 446.

    [38].      Bill Andersen, “60 Years of Struggle,” unpublished memoir, Bill Andersen personal papers, Rotorua, 12; Roth, Trade Unions, 68–70; David Grant, Jagged Seas: The New Zealand Seaman’s Union 1879–2003 (Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 2012),140.

    [39].      There is significant historical work on the 1951 waterfront dispute: Dick Scott, 151 Days (Auckland: New Zealand Waterside Workers’ Union, 1952); David Grant, ed., The Big Blue: Snapshots of the 1951 Waterfront Lockout (Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 2004); Anna Green, “Spelling, Go-Slows, Gliding Away and Theft: Informal Control Over Work on the New Zealand Waterfront 1915–1951,” Labour History, no. 63, (November 1992): 100–14; Anna Green, British Capital, Antipodean Labour: Working the New Zealand Waterfront 1915–1951 (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2001); Grace Millar, “Families and the 1951 New Zealand Waterfront Lockout” (PhD diss., Victoria University of Wellington, 2013); Grace Millar, “‘This is Not Charity’: the Masculine Work of Strike Relief,” History Workshop Journal 83 (2016): 176–93; Grace Millar, “‘We Never Recovered’: The Social Cost of the 1951 New Zealand Waterfront Dispute,” Labour History, no. 108 (May 2015): 89–101; Grace Millar, “‘As a Scab’: Rank and File Workers, Strike-breakers, and the End of the 1951 Waterfront Lockout,” New Zealand Journal of History 48, no. 2 (2014): 71–90. For accounts of Auckland watersiders, see H. Roth, Wharfie, “From Hand Barrows to Straddles”: Unionism on the Auckland Waterfront (Auckland: New Zealand Waterfront Workers’ Union, 1993); Jock Barnes, Never a White Flag: The Memoirs of Jock Barnes, Waterfront Leader (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1998).

    [40].      Grant, Jagged Seas, 148.

    [41].      Roth, Trade Unions, 76.

    [42].      Andersen never forgot the financial support from Australian wharfies and seamen, and the World Federation of Trade Unions for locked out New Zealand wharfies. Andersen, “60 Years of Struggle,” 16.

    [43].      Ibid., 19.

    [44].      More militant drivers called Andersen “3-Day Wonder” because he very rarely condoned strikes that went longer than three days. Marx Jones, oral interview with author, Auckland, 15 April 2015.

    [45].      Auckland Star, 20 November 1952.

    [46].      Andersen was part of a CPNZ Drivers’ industrial branch in early 1953, which aimed to remove the moderate union leader Geoffrey Moore and replace him with a militant. There were neighbourhood CPNZ branches in Eden-Roskill, Grey Lynn, Westmere, Avondale, Otahuhu, Penrose, Orakei, City, Newmarket, Papatoetoe, Mt Albert, Pt Chevalier and Onehunga at this time, and Railways and Maritime industrial branches. NZ Police, History Sheet of Person Associated with Subversive Activities, Gordon Harold Andersen Personal File, s.53/108; s.53/122; s.53/128, p. 5; S.54/349; Detective J. P. Marsh, Auckland Drivers’ Branch of the Communist Party Report, 14 March 1954, New Zealand Security Intelligence Service, declassified 11 November 2015, in possession of the author.

    [47].      Wheels, November 1956. Other ex-wharfies gained leadership roles in Auckland trade unions by the late 1950s as well, quietly seeding more militant and democratic cultures, which began to effect the FoL: Frank Barnard in the Auckland Freezing Workers’ Union; Johnny Mitchell in the Engine Drivers’ Union; Ronnie Black in the Seamen’s Union; Ron Jones in the Labourers’ Union; and Jim Knox was elected to the FoL executive in 1964. Kelly would become a powerful figure in the Wellington Trades Council.

    [48].      By 1956, there were 19 elected branch secretaries (in Paeroa, Helensville, Dargaville, Thames, Tauranga, Whakatane, Morrinsville, Te Kuiti, Otorohanga, Te Puke, Kaikohe, Te Aroha, Rotorua, Opotiki, Awanui, Tuakau, Hamilton, Whangarei and Taumaranui) and 55 job delegates. Wheels, November 1956.

    [49].      Northern Drivers’ Executive, A Case for Strong Trade Unionism (New Zealand: Northern Drivers’ Union, 1962), 17–18. This manual became a central tool for union education.

    [50].      And forwarded a resolution to the United Nations “condemning racial discrimination against non-white workers, including those in South Africa.” Kirkby and Ostapenko, “Second to None in the International Fight,” 447.

    [51].      Andersen defended Kelly to Northern Drivers’ members and argued the FoL was violating Kelly’s individual rights – Kelly did not represent any organisation at the WCTU conference. W. F. Dempsey and G. H. Andersen, “An Executive Statement Regarding NZ Federation of Labour’s Attitude to Mr P. J. Kelly,” 25 April 1958, from Gordon Harold Andersen Personal File, New Zealand Security Intelligence Service.

    [52].      Williams, Panguru and the City, 181–210.

    [53].      Ibid., 185, 205.

    [54].      James Ritchie, “Workers” in The Māori People in the Nineteen-Sixties, ed. Erik Schwimmer (Auckland: Longman Paul, 1968), 299.

    [55].      Māori names appeared on the list of Northern Drivers’ delegates printed in Wheels in the 1950s, but many drivers didn’t have or weren’t known by their Māori names in the Union, so this does not tell us much.

    [56].      Wheels, August 1960, 18.

    [57].      Wheels, February 1966, 12; Wheels, August 1960, 13. Northern Drivers’ executive member Bill Katterns was an active member of CABTA.

    [58].      Richards, Dancing, 27

    [59].      Richards, Dancing, 22.

    [60].      Wheels, August 1959.

    [61].      Ngāi Tūhoe Gerry Merito wrote the song and it was recorded at the Pukekohe Town Hall in 1960. Stephanie Gibson, Matariki Williams, and Puawai Cairns, eds, Protest Tautohetohe: Objects of Resistance, Persistence and Defiance (Wellington: Te Papa Press, 2019), 168.

    [62].      Wheels, May 1960, 5.

    [63].      Walsh had grown disaffected with the Labour government between 1957 and 1960 and became more accommodating of left-wing trade unionists as a result. Andersen, “60 Years of Struggle,” 9.

    [64].      This became an annual event. Noel Hilliard, in Grant, Jagged Seas,288; Kirkby and Ostapenko, “Second to None in the International Fight,” 448.

    [65].      Richards, Dancing,25–26.

    [66].      Wheels, August 1960, 13.

    [67].      Harris, Hikoi, 20.

    [68].      Cole and Limb, “Hooks Down,” 307. By this stage, the ICFTU also called on trade unions internationally to boycott South African goods. Kirkby and Ostapenko, “Second to None in the International Fight,” 447.

    [69].      This remit was moved by the North Island Waterside Workers’ Federation, but was also claimed by Andersen as a Northern Drivers’ remit. NZ Federation of Labour Minutes and Report of Proceedings of the 25th Annual Conference, 1–4 May 1962, 112, National Library, Wellington. Northern Drivers, Fifth Annual Convention, 1962, University of Auckland Library.

    [70].      Wheels, February 1966.

    [71].      David Grant, Man for All Seasons: The Life and Times of Ken Douglas (Auckland: Random House, 2010), 129–30.

    [72].      Richards, Dancing,31; Richard Thompson, Retreat from Apartheid: New Zealand’s Sporting Contacts with South Africa (Wellington: Oxford University Press, 1975), 41.

    [73].      Northern Drivers’ Union, Union News: Official Union News Bulletin, September 1966.

    [74].      First CARE Committee: Harold Innes (President), Gladys Salter (Secretary), Mrs J. Abrahams (Treasurer), W. Glass, Sarah Campion, Syd Pilkington (Carpenters’ Union), N. Karaka, Frank Haigh, W. McNaughton, Mabel Wilson. Early discussions were held on apartheid in South Africa and the position of Māori in New Zealand society, led by MP Matiu Rata, Koro Dewes and Dr Muriel Lloyd Pritchard. Both meetings were chaired by Dr John Reid, professor of English at Auckland University.

    [75].      Tom Newnham, ed., 25 Years of C.A.R.E. (Auckland: Citizens Association for Racial Equality, 1989), 3–5.

    [76].      Tama Te Kapua Poata, Poata: Seeing Beyond the Horizon: A Memoir (Wellington: Steele Roberts, 2012), 100.

    [77].      Ken Douglas, oral interview with author, 11 June 2015; Ken Douglas, email correspondence with author, 10 December 2015.

    [78].      Harris, Hīkoi, 38.

    [79].      Harris, Hīkoi, 40.

    [80].      The CPNZ was “the only Western communist party to take China’s side in the Sino-Soviet split.” Lisa Sacksen, “Switching Sides: The Communist Party of New Zealand and the Move Away from China,” in Trans-Tasman Labour History: Comparative or Transnational? Proceedings of the Trans Tasman Labour History Conference, ed. Raymond Markey (Auckland: AUT University, 2007), 76–77.

    [81].      Herbert Roth, “Moscow, Peking and NZ Communists,” Politics 4, no. 2 (November 1969): 168–85; Monique Ooman, “The Socialist Unity Party of New Zealand: A Study of the Incentives, Ideology and Organisation of a Small Communist Party” (MA thesis, University of Canterbury, 1981).

    [82].      Poata got frustrated with the CPNZ’s reliance on “foreign ideology” and lack of communalism. Poata, Poata: Seeing Beyond the Horizon, 99. Recruitment of Māori to the CPNZ was poor because Māori were understood as potential recruits to the class struggle. Māori struggles for self-determination were never seriously engaged until after the 1981 Springbok Tour. Taylor, “Potential Allies,” 114–15.

    [83].      David Grant, Jagged Seas, 185; Roger Fowler, oral interview with author, 14 April 2015; Glenn Andersen, oral interview with author, 2 March 2015.

    [84].      There is not space here to develop the impact of communist sectarianism more fully, but Socialist Unity Party trade unionists such as Andersen kept their distance from and disparaged ultra-leftist CPNZ members in Auckland trade unions and other organisations, such as the People’s Union. Expelled Wellington communists such as Kelly formed the Maoist Marxist Leninist Organisation in the 1970s and were very active in HART; the SUP was dismissive of HART tactics during the 1981 Springbok Tour.

    [85].      Harris, Hīkoi, 104; Malcolm Templeton, Human Rights and Sporting Contacts: New Zealand Attitudes to Race Relations in South Africa 1921–94 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1998), 50.

    [86].      Richards, Dancing,36.

    [87].      Chapman, interview.

    [88].      Wally Foster, “The Apartheid Question,” Road Transport Worker, June 1969.

    [89].      Willis was a member of the Socialist Unity Party. Harris, interview.

    [90].      Road Transport Worker, June 1969.

    [91].      Rank-and-file division affected the FoL as well: the 1969 annual conference voted overwhelmingly against the 1970 tour but could not promise strikes and boycotts from trade union members. Thompson, Retreat from Apartheid, 55.

    [92].      Rob Campbell, The Only Weapon: The History of the Wellington Drivers Union (Wellington: Wellington Drivers’ Union, 1976), 105.

    [93].      Harris, Hīkoi, 35.

    [94].      Richards, Dancing,43–45, 86.

    [95].      Only 30,000 signatures were collected to oppose the tour. Richards, Dancing, 50–51.

    [96].      General Foods delegate and excutive member Mac Harris remembered Andersen always asked him to host visitors from South Africa. Harris, interview.

    [97].      Road Transport Worker, issue 2, 1972. Gaetsawe then travelled to meet with Australian maritime unions. Cole and Limb, “Hooks Down,” 309.

    [98].      Road Transport Worker, early 1973.

    [99].      Ibid.

    [100].    Road Transport Worker, 1972.

    [101].    Newnham, 25 Years of C.A.R.E., 17–18.

    [102].    Michael Bassett, “Kirk, Norman Eric,” Dictionary of New Zealand Biography (first published in 2000) in Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, accessed January 2021, https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/5k12/kirk-norman-eric.

    [103].    Walker, Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou, 210. It was established by John Ohia, Paul Kotara, Ted Nia, Taura Eruera and Auckland university students Hana and Syd Jackson, Peter Rikys and Donna Awatere. Walker argues that Nga Tamatoa was initially divided between radicals John Ohia, Paul Kotara and Ted Nia, who modelled themselves on Black Power leaders, and the more conservative university students who would take control of the group, with more focus on reform.

    [104].    Cybèle Locke, “From Human Rights to Māori Sovereignty: Māori Radicalism and Trade Unions, 1967–1986,” in The Treaty on the Ground: Where We are Headed and Why it Matters, ed. Rachael Bell, Margaret Kawharu, Kerry Taylor, Michael Belgrave, and Peter Meihana (Palmerston North: Massey University Press, 2017), 73–90. Ngā Tamatoa built alliances with indigenous activists in Sydney and Melbourne, and the 1972 Ngā Tamatoa occupation of parliament was modelled on the Aboriginal tent embassy in Canberra. Stastny and Orr, “The Influence of the US Black Panthers on Indigenous Activism,” 66.

    [105].    Every Waitangi Day saw Ngā Tamatoa protests, arguing the 1840 Treaty was a fraud to dispossess Māori. By 1972, they had gathered 30,000 signatures in support of te reo Māori being taught in primary and secondary schools. Walker, Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou, 211; Harris, Hīkoi, 48.

    [106].    Road Transport Worker, December 1973.

    [107].    Harris, Hīkoi, 48.

    [108].    Paul Tolich, oral interview with author, 5 May 2015; Northern Drivers’ Union 1st Biennial Combined Delegates’ Convention, 2–3 December 1974.

    [109].    Walker, Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou,212.

    [110].    Ibid., 214; Sydney Keepa, oral interview with author, 6 September 2013.

    [111].    Keepa, interview.

    [112].    Ryan Bodman, “‘The Public Have Had a Gutsful and So Have We’: The Alienation of Organized Labour in New Zealand, 1968–1975,” New Zealand Journal of History 48, no. 1 (2014): 97; Jim McAloon and Peter Franks, Labour (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2016),184.

    [113].    Miranda Johnson, “‘The Land of the Wrong White Crowd’: Anti-Racist Organizations and Pākehā Identity Politics in the 1970s,” New Zealand Journal of History 39, no. 2 (2005): 140.

    [114].    Harris, Hīkoi, 82–83.

    [115].    Deirdre Nehua, in Takaparawhau: The People’s Story, ed. Sharon Hawke (Orakei: Moko Production, 1998), 68. Ngā Tamatoa members joined the occupation. It was supported by the CPNZ, SUP and the Socialist Action League.

    [116].    Auckland Rugby League News, 1975. Grant Hawke, phone conversation with author, 23 January 2015.

    [117].    It was only later that Keepa found out about his whakapapa links to Takaparawhau through Parehauraki and related to the issue on those terms. Keepa, interview.

    [118].    Road Transport Worker, December 1977.

    [119].    Sharon Hawke, in Takaparawhau, 7.

    [120].    Harris, Hīkoi, 86.

    [121].    Road Transport Worker, 1977; Road Transport Worker, 1978.

    [122].    For example, Winstones delegate Bill Abraham played a critical role in speaking at job meetings to gain support for the Green Ban and Bastion Point occupation. He was elected onto the executive in 1978, was active in land rights and became a founding member of the Mana Motuhake party in 1979. Trucker, June 1979. Chapman, interview.

    [123].    Trucker, May 1986.

    [124].    These were unions where Māori workers, and increasingly Pasifika workers, were more prevalent.

    [125].    Malcolm Maclean, “Football as Social Critique: Protest Movements, Rugby and History in Aotearoa, New Zealand,” The International Journal of the History of Sport 17, nos 2–3 (2000): 263–64.

    [126].    For full coverage of this event, see Cybèle Locke, “Māori Sovereignty and Black Feminism: Māori Women and the New Zealand Trade Union Movement in the Early 1980s,” in Indigenous Women and Work: From Labor to Activism, ed. Carol Williams (Baltimore: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 254–67.

    Cybèle Locke*

    Running head: Locke ● NZ Northern Drivers’ Union

    There is a picture to include after footnote 59. Here is the caption:

    A Poster for the Petition Opposing the Exclusion of Māori from the All Black Team Touring South Africa in 1960

    Courtesy of the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, Eph-C-RACIAL-1959-01

    In 1960, the Northern Drivers’ Union of New Zealand instituted its anti-racism policy. How this came about, and what it meant for union struggles in the following two decades, are the central concerns of this article. Effectively, the implementation of democratic organising principles within the Northern Drivers’ Union assisted the formation of anti-racism policy and practice. Union officials linked domestic racism with the experiences of black workers under apartheid in South Africa from 1960, which generated calls for a boycott of South Africa and local support for the Citizens’ Association for Racial Equality. Anti-apartheid sentiment in relation to South African rugby tours, which had galvanised unionists in the 1960s, became a source of division by the 1970s as attention turned to more “local” experiences of racism. In particular, this article considers how Māori rank and file, working together with Pākehā union officials such as communist Bill Andersen, extended trade union anti-racism work across the northern regions of the country, especially Auckland.

    Keywords: Anti-Racism; Trade Unions; Māori; Northern Drivers’ Union; Rugby Union; Apartheid

    Māori have always been at the forefront of campaigns to challenge racism. Māori activism, Aroha Harris argues, emerged out of long-term experiences of racism in New Zealand: assimilationist state policies and the attendant impact of everyday racist behaviours from “Pākehā fellow-citizens” (white New Zealanders). That Māori were denied access to certain spaces, jobs, and rugby teams – commonly called the colour bar – went largely unreported in the mainstream press. Pākehā were mostly oblivious to the reality of racial discrimination or in some circumstances actively supported it.[1] Māori migration from rural tribal heartlands to towns and cities (especially Auckland) in huge numbers in the 1950s and 1960s brought institutional racism into sharp focus.[2] For Ngāti Whātua, who had Auckland grow up around them, such racism was not new.

    Assimilation policies stemmed from nineteenth-century British colonialism. In 1840, two treaties were drawn up by representatives of the British Crown: an English language treaty that ceded Māori sovereignty to the British Crown; and a Māori-language version, Te Tiriti o Waitangi, understood and signed by Māori rangatira (chiefs), which guaranteed “rangatira retained their authority over their hapū and territories.” Te Tiriti allowed for a British governor to have authority over Pākehā who had settled in Aotearoa and be in relationship with rangatira as equals.[3] However, Te Tiriti was never honoured. Instead, with the justification of the English-language treaty, Britain colonised Aotearoa, alienating Māori land and destroying tribal political structures to facilitate and finance large-scale British settlement. As Harris writes, Te Tiriti “has been the cornerstone of Māori struggles to secure the rights that it guarantees, regain control of Māori affairs, and have their tangata whenua status recognised.”[4]

    The rise of modern Māori activism, spearheaded by the Māori Organisation on Human Rights (MOOHR) and Ngā Tamatoa, with confrontational methods and greater attention to racism, has been well canvassed historically.[5] What has received less attention are the collaborative efforts of both Pākehā and Māori trade unionists and the Communist Party of New Zealand to support Māori tribal leaders and young Māori activists in their anti-racism and land rights work.[6] This case study of the Northern Drivers’ Union examines such intersections, paying attention to the influence of communists, the outlawed Auckland Waterside Workers’ Union, and the broader Māori rank and file of the Northern Drivers’ Union in producing such solidarities. Enduring relationships and shared geography mattered.

    As Kerry Taylor argues, historically the Communist Party of New Zealand (CPNZ) attracted very few Māori members. Although Māori were cast as “potential allies of the working class,” they were positioned outside the working class and class relations were the principle CPNZ frame of reference.[7] Nevertheless, sporadic efforts by CPNZ members on local trades councils (especially those in the northern regions of New Zealand – Auckland, Waikato and the Bay of Plenty – and Wellington) to act in solidarity with Māori protesting the colour bar in sport and land alienation in the 1930s and 1940s, are important to understanding what occurred later in the Northern Drivers’ Union. The forging of the Māori Watersiders’ Union Association inside the Auckland Waterside Workers’ Union in the 1940s demonstrated “workplace whānau” ways of organising for young Pākehā union leaders such as Bill Andersen to follow in later decades.

    When the New Zealand Waterside Workers’ Union was dismantled by the government in 1951, 2,000 Auckland wharfies were blacklisted from the wharves. Approximately 200 wharfies became truck drivers, Bill Andersen among them, and they joined the Northern Drivers’ Union. The Northern Motor and Horse Drivers’ Union had grown out of the Auckland Carters’ Union and by the post-World War II era had branches representing truck, bus, construction vehicle, taxi and ambulance drivers in the Northland, Auckland, Waikato and Bay of Plenty regions. The Northern Drivers’ Union (Northern Drivers), along with regional drivers’ unions across New Zealand (such as the Wellington Drivers’ Union), belonged to the New Zealand Drivers’ Federation.[8] Ex-wharfies and communists elected Andersen into a Union leadership role in the mid-1950s. He would become a key player in the anti-racism history of the Northern Drivers’ Union. His successful efforts to democratise the Northern Drivers’ Union led to membership conversations, policy and action on the colour bar at home and abroad during the 1960s and 1970s.

    This analysis of the Northern Drivers’ Union connects with recent histories of trade union activism in civil rights, black nationalist and anti-apartheid movements. In his ground-breaking work, Peter Cole explored how unionised dockworkers in the San Francisco Bay area and in Durban participated in movements for racial equality and freedom.[9] With Peter Limb, Cole brought the history of Australian dockworkers’ anti-apartheid activism, under the auspices of the Waterside Workers’ Federation, into conversation with that of San Francisco dockworkers.[10] Cole and Limb argue that transnational solidarity, class-consciousness and political unionism (the influence of communism, syndicalism and other left-wing beliefs), as well as alliances beyond the waterfront, were crucial factors that led to anti-apartheid activism. African American dockworkers brought black nationalist and anti-colonial ideas to their trade unionism, but Indigenous workers are largely missing from this history.

    The Northern Drivers saw a growing Māori membership in the post-war years. Oral history interviewees, who worked as drivers from the late 1960s, estimate that by the 1970s 50 per cent of the Union’s 6,000 members were Māori.[11] These members brought their personal experiences of racism to their Pākehā union officials, to job meetings, to conversations at annual delegate conferences and to stop-work meetings. Their voices are difficult to discern, especially for the earlier years, because I am heavily reliant on Pākehā union officials’ reports, often written by Andersen himself, as published in Wheels and the Road Transport Worker. However, oral historiesprovide valuable insights into how regular Union forums encouraged conversations about racism and other social issues of concern to members. Drivers gathered at stop-work meetings to “grapple with … the question of racism, women’s rights, worker’s rights … world peace … It was not just about pay and conditions but the betterment of mankind, global issues.”[12] “The Northern Drivers’ Union was one of the most democratic unions I’ve ever worked with … We were against racism, supported the Māori movement.”[13] Interviewees described the Union “fight against racist situations” and indicated why local racism issues and the land rights movement gained far more attention and action from Union members than the more removed international anti-apartheid campaign.[14] They also reveal that Māori and Pākehā drivers considered racism a capitalist tool to divide the working class in the 1960s and 1970s. As Evan Te Ahu Poata-Smith suggests: “New Zealand’s working class is extremely diverse and a range of factors such as ethnicity, culture, nationality, gender and sexual orientation shapes working-class struggle and individual and collective experiences of class conflict.”[15] Ethnicity became a key consideration in working-class struggles conducted by the Northern Drivers and led to solidarity efforts with the Citizens’ Association for Racial Equality (CARE), Ngā Tamatoa and the Ōrākei Māori Committee Action Group.

    This article begins by examining communist and trade union solidarity prior to 1945, with Māori protesting the colour bar in rugby union team selection in 1937 and Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei land alienation in 1943. It then explores how such solidarity was disrupted by the Cold War and the defeat of militant New Zealand trade unionism in 1951. It follows Auckland ex-wharfies and Māori drivers into the Northern Drivers’ Union and unpacks efforts to rebuild democratic, class-solidarity-based unionism in the 1950s, led by communist Bill Andersen. Anti-racism work in support of CARE and the international anti-apartheid movement in the 1960s is examined, and then how such work shifted in response to the 1970s activities of Ngā Tamatoa and the Ōrākei Māori Committee Action Group. This case study of the Northern Drivers’ Union, in conversation with the Wellington Drivers’ Union, reveals the interplay between ethnicity and class in trade union struggles of the 1960s and 1970s.

    Anti-Racism Solidarity in 1937 and 1943

    Two key moments of anti-racism solidarity stand out in the 1930s and 1940s. The first, in 1937, centred on sport – specifically on rugby union. Rugby union had emerged as New Zealand’s national game, a symbol of “colonial nationhood,” in the early twentieth century. As Mark Falcous argues: “Amateur rugby was simultaneously promoted within the local conditions and imaginings of a fledgling settler colony seeking a national character distinct from the imperial centre.”[16] The All Blacks and New Zealand Maori teams were key in promoting mythologies of “egalitarianism” and “harmonious ‘race relations,’” and “early Māori adoption of rugby and considerable playing prominence could be read as proof of successful assimilation, cooperation and unproblematic unity with Pākehā.”[17] Rugby union games attracted the largest numbers of spectators of any New Zealand sport, as well as extensive media coverage, and so became the ideal target for anti-racism activism.

    South African Springbok team racism towards Māori players, and the New Zealand Rugby Union’s (NZRFU) capitulation to South African demands that only white players tour South Africa, led Te Arawa to advocate a “social and sporting boycott of the 1937 Springbok Tour.”[18] The CPNZ offered solidarity, calling for: “No further exchange of teams with South Africa unless guarantees are given that no colour lines will be drawn”; members were encouraged to attend protests.[19] There was “extensive protest and public debate, dominated by many senior Māori leaders,” including Kīngitanga leader Te Puea Herangi, but the NZRFU stood firm in its decision.[20] Enough Māori players left rugby union and joined Pākehā working-class men to play rugby league that a “Māori League Board of Control was formed in Auckland”; the Kīngitanga was the Board’s first patron.[21] Solidarities with working-class Pākehā were strengthened in Auckland over Māori land rights in 1943.[22]

    Due to communist wartime efforts – allying with social democrats in the class struggle against fascism – the CPNZ was at the height of its popularity, particularly in Auckland, in the early 1940s.[23] Trade union work was prioritised and with communist officials in the transport, labourers’ and carpenters’ unions, eight of the 11 Auckland Trades Council (ATC) elected executive were communists.[24] National CPNZ Chair, Scottish migrant Alexander (Alec) Drennan, was the ATC president.[25] Communist influence led the ATC to engage in solidarity work with local Māori on land rights, prompted by Kīngitanga leader Te Puea Hērangi in 1943.[26]

    Te Puea, with the assistance of Māori and Pākehā officials of the Auckland Labourers’ Union, brought a petition to the ATC which sought to prevent the Auckland City Council from evicting Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei from the last few acres of their land at Okahu Bay on the waterfront. Ngāti Whātua grievances were long-standing. Ngāti Whātua chief Apihai Te Kawau had facilitated Pākehā settlement of Auckland, gifting 3,000 acres to Governor Hobson in 1840. He also made it clear that the Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei tribal base, the 700-acre Ōrākei block on the waterfront, was inalienable. However, the Crown and consecutive governments disregarded this decree and the block was acquired piecemeal by dubious practices, until only the village was left for tangata whenua to live.[27] These last acres were now in danger. The ATC executive unanimously agreed “‘the Orakei Maoris be secured in their ancestral home’ and their village be ‘brought up to present day conditions.’”[28] In June, 200 unionised workers turned up to help Ngāti Whātua build a palisade around their marae and successfully prevented eviction.[29] Auckland Labourers’ Union secretary and party member Pat Potter was “the official Auckland Trades Council liaison person with Maori.”[30] These two moments – 1937 and 1943 – are illustrative of the connections made between communist trade unionists and Māori protesting racism. The Cold War would undermine such solidarity.

    Solidarity Disrupted: The Cold War and the Decline of Militant Trade Unionism, 1947–51

    In March 1946, 22-year-old Pākehā merchant seaman Gordon (Bill) Harold Andersen returned home to Auckland from war; he harboured a twin hatred of capitalism and racism. Andersen was radicalised by class exploitation on British ships and witnessing even worse exploitation of Arab dockworkers in British ports like Aden.[31] He joined the New Zealand seafaring community, the Seamen’s Union (SU) and the Maritime Branch of the CPNZ. In his trade union work, Andersen was mentored by older maritime trade union communist leaders such as Drennan, who set an example of united front communism – demonstrating how to build democratic, industrially militant cultures inside trade unions, and urging solidarity with local Māori to bring about a united working class.[32] Encouraged by CPNZ policy, Andersen engaged direct action tactics with employers to win better wages and conditions at sea and in port.

    As the Cold War intensified internationally, however, New Zealand communist fortunes began to wane. From 1947, there was a concerted and successful effort to remove communists from trade union office. Cold War anti-communist rhetoric was unleashed by Federation of Labour (FoL) leader Fintan Patrick Walsh and Labour government ministers, and was continued by the National government, elected in 1950.[33] Andersen was blacklisted from seafaring and Drennan voted out of ATC office in 1948. Drennan got Andersen a job on the Auckland wharves and he worked alongside Māori waterside workers who had their own Māori Watersiders’ Union Association, chaired by rugby league star Steve Watene, inside the Auckland Waterside Workers’ Union.[34]

    With communists removed from union office, support for Māori protesting the colour bar in sporting contacts with South Africa was weakened. Māori players were excluded from the All Black team touring South Africa in 1949 and maritime trade unionists and the CPNZ joined Māori protest efforts. The issue was discussed at the FoL conference and a rather weak remit agreed to: unions were to “make clear to the South African Rugby Board that the team to visit South Africa was not representative of New Zealand.”[35] The 1949 All Blacks tour of South Africa went ahead without Māori players.[36] As Diane Kirkby and Dmytro Ostapenko found in their work on Australian seafarers’ activism against apartheid, the emerging Cold War in the late 1940s caused division and “hampered” such trade union efforts.[37] The Auckland Carpenters’ Union was deregistered in 1949 and conflict came to a head when the militant New Zealand Waterside Workers’ Union (NZWWU) and a small number of other leftist delegates walked out of the 1950 FoL conference and formed a rival national organisation, the Trade Union Congress (TUC).[38]

    The final showdown was the 1951 waterfront lockout, triggered by a disagreement over a wage rise. Waterside workers (wharfies) refused overtime until the dispute was resolved, but employers called the action an illegal strike and locked out all wharfies from work until they gave up their claims.[39] Seafarers (despite opposition from their union president), miners, freezing workers, drivers, hydro workers, gas workers, harbour board employees and sugar workers declared solidarity strikes in support.[40] The National government backed employers and brought Waterfront Strike Emergency Regulations into force: the NZWWU registration was cancelled, funds and records seized, police powers were increased to arrest anyone aiding the wharfies, their side of the story was banned from the media, and troops were enlisted to unload cargo on the wharves. The FoL condemned the NZWWU leadership as “communist-dominated misleaders,” which undermined support strikes.[41] Despite his youth and short tenure as a wharfie, Andersen was a member of the Auckland Waterside Workers’ Lockout Committee.[42]

    After five months, the lockout ended in defeat and the NZWWU was replaced by 26 port unions. Andersen was amongst 2,000 blacklisted Auckland wharfies who took their beliefs in international solidarity, democratic unionism and now tempered militancy into other unions. As Andersen put it: “We learnt the hard lessons of when to fight, to select the issue on which to fight, when to advance and when to retreat in order to preserve organisation.”[43] The experience of defeat taught Andersen never to become a militant minority in the trade union movement or let a strike go beyond its peak; unity and organisation must be protected at all costs.[44] This approach would influence Andersen’s anti-racism solidarity efforts as well. Ex-wharfies supported Andersen to regain a leadership role, this time in the Northern Drivers’ Union.

    Northern Drivers’ Union Anti-Racism Policy

    Andersen became a truck driver and joined the Northern Drivers’ Union (Northern Drivers). In late February 1951, the Northern Drivers went on strike in support of the wharfies and offered their office as a base for the deregistered Auckland Waterside Workers’ Union. However, drivers voted to return to work after they were directed to do so by the FoL conference in March. Once the Wellington Drivers’ Union was deregistered for maintaining their support strike, further attempts to take Auckland drivers back out on strike were unsuccessful. Anti-communist union secretary Geoffrey Moore sought to align the Northern Drivers with the moderate Federation of Labour; he was unsuccessful.[45]

    Backed by the newly established CPNZ Drivers’ Industrial Branch and about 200 ex-wharfie drivers, Andersen was elected a union organiser in 1954.[46] He gained admiration for tying his wage to the Drivers’ Award and being an able negotiator with employers. Andersen was elected Northern Drivers’ secretary alongside new Pākehā organisers, communist Len Smith and militant ex-wharfie Jim Knox, in 1956. Andersen worked closely with communist Pat Kelly, a delegate in the Waikato region.[47] Mentored by communist Wellington Drivers’ Union organiser Chip Bailey, Andersen began instituting a delegate system to activate union members. Delegates were elected for 19 branches of the Union and worksites with over 20 members.[48] All union policy was discussed and voted on at annual delegate conventions, beginning in 1958; Northern Drivers’ policy was published in the NZ Drivers’ Federation newspaper Wheels. Andersen wrote a manual on how to be a “good Union delegate”: “fully take into account the ideas and mood of the workers on the job,” look out for that key point of agreement – the issue that most people care about and can unify around – and that is the issue to go ahead on; the manual was workshopped at annual delegate conventions and published in 1962.[49] Conventions and job meetings provided spaces for discussion of issues such as racism.

    Kelly attended a World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) conference in Leipzig, East Germany in October 1957 where apartheid was discussed, and he brought these ideas home. The FoL had belonged to the WFTU – formed in 1945 to unite all labour organisations into one international organisation – but, along with most peak union organisations in western democracies, left the WFTU and joined the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) in 1949. These two international bodies represented the Cold War divide. The WFTU had been speaking out “against apartheid as imperialist, capitalist and racist” since 1949. At their 1957 conference, a South African Congress of Trades Unions delegation attended and shared evidence about life under the apartheid system. In response, the conference “made an appeal to trade unions around the world to take solidarity actions ‘to put an end to racial discrimination and the persecution of their fellow workers in South Africa.’”[50] Kelly’s visit to the conference posed such a threat to the FoL leadership they sought to ban him from all Trades Council and FoL meetings in 1958.[51] The first Drivers’ Delegate Convention was held in 1958, where no doubt apartheid South Africa was discussed.

    Increasing numbers of Māori drivers joined these discussions, but they gave greater priority to local experiences of racism. As Māori moved from rural tribal homelands to the city in post-war New Zealand, they not only remade urban workplaces, they remade trade unions – those representing drivers, labourers, freezing workers, and pulp and paper workers.[52] They clustered together on particular worksites where collective ways of “being Māori … informed the practices and values” of the workplace.[53] For example, Māori men became truck-drivers for Winstones, J. J. Craigs, Vuksich & Borich and Auckland breweries, joining relatives and friends who already worked there. Older Māori men would become the foreman or Union delegate and act as a tribal elder for younger Māori men, “helping them to organise their social lives as well as their working lives.”[54] As the Northern Drivers’ delegate system expanded, Māori became increasingly involved in union affairs, such as Auckland ambulance driver John Willis and General Foods driver Rameka (Mac) Harris.[55]

    Māori drivers made their Pākehā union officials aware of incidents of racial discrimination in the workforce and organisers gained the reinstatement of Māori workers. Employers were not always the problem: Knox described a dispute at the Tauranga Bus Company where a South African driver was dismissed for his racist attitude to Māori passengers. After investigating, Knox supported his dismissal and explained to the man “that we in the trade union movement do not have racial discrimination and believe in all of our people in New Zealand working together, no matter what colour they may be.”[56]

    Drivers were also influenced by the “No Maoris, No Tour” campaign, led by the Citizens All Black Tour Association (CABTA) in 1959.[57] CABTA did not regard itself as part of the anti-apartheid movement; rather, it was protesting racial discrimination practiced by the NZRFU.[58] CABTA was led by Dr Rolland O’Regan (Wellington surgeon and Catholic layman) and Joan Stone (welfare officer with the Department of Māori Affairs and secretary of the Māori Women’s Welfare league). It involved Māori and churches leaders, “trade unions, student organisations, academics, teachers, journalists, public servants and rugby footballers.” Drivers numbered among the 150,000 people who signed the petition opposing racial discrimination in the selection of an All Blacks team to tour South Africa in 1960.[59] Job meetings held at trucking worksites for North Shore Transport, Opotiki County Council, Opotiki Borough Council and W. S. Henderson all passed a resolution: “Against Racial Discrimination in All Black Team.”[60] The all-Māori Howard Morrison Quartet popularised the cause with a song “My Old Man’s an All Black,” which mocked the NZRFU’s support for South African racist policies:

    Oh, my old man’s an All Black,

    He wears the silver fern,

    But his mates just couldn’t take him,

    So he’s out now for a turn.

    (Fi Fi Fo Fum, there’s no Horis in this scrum.)[61]

    South African apartheid was protested as a local racism issue.

    In May 1960, peaceful demonstrators in Sharpeville were shot down by police and the press brought the reality of South African apartheid home to the outside world. Northern Drivers’ anti-apartheid support can be traced from this moment. In Wheels, Andersen reported: “shootings, beatings and mass punishments of coloured South African workers have motivated a strong protest from this union.” He went on to say:

    The Northern Drivers’ Union is firmly opposed to the colour bar. We recognise that New Zealand is not completely free of guilt in this regard. We support the NZ Federation of Labour’s protest in the matter and urge the Government to use every opportunity to speak out boldly against the actions of the South African Government regarding the apartheid policy.”[62]

    The FoL called on the government to cancel the 1960 tour.[63] The Seafarers’ Union went further, stopping work for 24 hours to protest the massacre.[64] Prime Minister Walter Nash refused to intervene, leaving the decision to the NZRFU. Despite demonstrations of between 1,000 and 3,000 people (an unusually large number for the time), the tour went ahead.[65]

    Just under 60 delegates attended the July 1960 Drivers’ Delegate Convention in Auckland, where racial discrimination was discussed. Delegates unanimously agreed to the Union executive’s proposed “stand against racial discrimination wherever it may raise its ugly head.” Andersen reported: “racial discrimination has the effect of dividing the working people and … we should be united, irrespective of colour, religion or political beliefs.” In 1960, Northern Drivers’ Union members recognised that a colour bar existed “to some extent in New Zealand and it must be vigorously stamped out, root and branch.”[66] This policy made the Northern Drivers an explicitly anti-racist union and is significant given the mainstream Pākehā belief that New Zealand was a place of racial harmony.[67]

    1960s Anti-Racism Solidarity

    Encouraged by international trade union activity, the 1960s saw a broadening focus from “all-white All Blacks” to protesting apartheid and its consequences in South Africa. The South African Congress of Trade Unions called on trade unions to boycott South African goods in 1959 and the Australian Waterside Workers’ Federation responded by boycotting fish, carbide, and asbestos. The Australian Council of Trade Unions supported a partial boycott in 1960.[68]In 1962, the FoL conference agreed to support the boycott policy of the ICFTU and develop an industrial and economic boycott of South Africa.[69] Andersen banned South African goods from the Andersen household and at Northern Drivers’ Union meetings he drew attention to the colour bar as it operated both internationally and nationally. At a Franklin County Council job meeting, drivers discussed the Northern Drivers’ Union opposition to the colour bar in New Zealand sports teams, and related local experiences of the colour bar (particularly in nearby Pukekohe), and how to deal with it. Andersen responded: “This disease, so ugly and real in the USA … and in South Africa, is also in New Zealand and we must destroy it root and branch.”[70]

    The year 1963 saw union leadership changes, which would increase anti-racism activism. Drivers’ Union organiser Kelly left Auckland to take up a position in the Wellington Drivers’ Union with other communists Bailey, Ken Douglas and Tama Poata. When Bailey died suddenly in 1963, Douglas was elected secretary in his place.[71] FoL leader Walsh also died in 1963, and Auckland Trades Council president Tom Skinner became FoL president. New trade union affiliates increased the militancy of the FoL on issues like apartheid; Knox joined the FoL executive in 1964 and would be elected secretary in 1969.

                From the mid-1960s, the Northern Drivers’ Union was actively supportive of the Citizens’ Association for Racial Equality (CARE), which protested racism at home and abroad. CARE, a predominantly Pākehā group, formed in 1964 to focus both on race relations in South Africa and on racism experienced by Māori and Pacific Island migrants to Auckland city. Unlike CABTA, CARE was explicitly anti-apartheid, rather than just opposed to racism in All Black selection. CARE led protests during the 1965 Springbok tour of New Zealand, which were supported by the FoL.[72] Māori MPs Eruera Tirikātene and Matiu Rata were vocal in their opposition to apartheid, and Rata spoke against racial discrimination at the 1966 Drivers’ Delegate Convention. This time there was success: the planned 1967 All Blacks tour of South Africa was cancelled.[73]

                There were close interpersonal and professional connections between anti-racism activists and the union. Frank Haigh and Tom Newnham were elected president and secretary of CARE in 1966.[74] Andersen had a close working relationship with Haigh, who did legal work for the Northern Drivers’ Union, and CARE’s work was advertised in the new Northern Drivers’ Union newspaper, Road Transport Worker.CARE advocated the government pass a New Zealand Race Relations Act (to make race discrimination illegal) and contribute to the United Nations Trust Fund for Southern Africa. They established the first Citizens Advice Bureau in 1967 to advise new migrants to Auckland City. CARE was one of the very few Pākehā organisations that opposed the Māori Affairs Amendment Bill in 1967.[75]

                Although involved with CARE, the Northern Drivers lagged behind their Wellington-based comrades in actively opposing the Amendment Bill. The legislation empowered the government to define Māori land as “uneconomic” and to acquire it through compulsory purchase; Māori elders recognised this as yet another land grab and galvanised the Wellington Drivers’ Union (WDU) into action. WDU organiser Poata called a meeting of Māori drivers to discuss the issue and they formed the Māori Organisation on Human Rights (MOOHR). A stop-work meeting of 1,000 drivers supported a union submission opposing the Bill to the Parliamentary Select Committee.[76] The WDU executive agreed that MOOHR’s organisational work become part of Poata’s job description as a union official.[77] MOOHR opposed “apartheid, racism in all spheres of social and political life, and Māori involvement in unjust wars overseas.”[78] While MOOHR was influenced by “philosophies of Marxism and white liberalism … and the analyses of civil rights and anti-apartheid movements,” it was the forerunner of a “new wave of Māori activism” in the 1970s.[79] With no Māori officials, nothing like MOOHR was established in the Northern Drivers’ Union.

    The Northern and Wellington drivers’ unions were also affected by the Sino-Soviet split as communist union comrades went their separate ways. The CPNZ conducted “an intensive inner-party study of the differences in the world communist movement,” and the majority decided to support the Chinese position in 1964.[80] Unhappy with the move to a more ultra-left position, Andersen and other Auckland trade unionists left to form the Soviet-aligned Socialist Unity Party (SUP) in 1966.[81] Northern Drivers’ delegate and executive member Peter Cross went with Andersen, while organiser Len Smith stayed in the CPNZ. In Wellington, Kelly remained in the CPNZ, Douglas joined the SUP and Poata left communism and his WDU position in 1970.[82] The SUP engaged popular front policies and tempered industrial militancy to preserve organisation and gained some influence in the trade union movement; Andersen would be elected ATC Chair in 1976. CPNZ members understood the SUP as reformist sell-outs and union officials as “agents of the capitalist class,” and in turn, the SUP dismissed the CPNZ as “Peking Parrots” or “mouth militants.”[83] Such sectarianism undermined solidarity work at times.[84]

    “Honorary Whites” and Rugby Union Sporting Contacts with South Africa, 1970–76

    Rugby sporting contacts with South Africa continued to galvanise anti-racism activism into the 1970s, but an “honorary whites” policy would cause divisions. The South African Prime Minister John Vorster adapted the touring rules so Māori and Pacific Island players could be included in the All Blacks team as “honorary whites” in 1970.[85] In response, CARE hosted Dennis Brutus – President of the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee – to strengthen their campaign against sporting contacts with South Africa. Brutus was greeted on arrival by CARE and the New Zealand Federation of Māori Students leader Syd Jackson; Māori students had just resolved to oppose the 1970 All Blacks tour of South Africa whether or not Māori went as “honorary whites.”[86] Brutus spoke at the Auckland Town Hall and argued the tour would demonstrate New Zealand’s approval of apartheid laws.

    Trade unionists got involved in the controversy. Northern Drivers’ executive member Wally Foster, a Māori South Auckland Council driver, was involved in Māori land rights struggles and educated those around him. Young Pākehā driver Neil Chapman remembered: “He was a great reader of New Zealand history and he’d share those stories about land confiscation.” Foster was active with Andersen in challenging racist hiring practices in Pukekohe.[87] In 1969, Foster found Brutus a persuasive speaker, and in the Road Transport Worker,explained why drivers should oppose the 1970 Tour:

    Each year, at the Annual Convention of the Northern Drivers’ Union, when race relations are being discussed, the delegates have always adopted a policy which has condemned racial discrimination, racial prejudice, or racial disharmony. This is a very important part of our discussion of our annual conventions for the reason that Pākehās, Māoris, Islanders and others work side by side, engage at times in conflict with employers side by side, and go home at night to live in their communities side by side. Racial harmony is a question of bread and butter for all working people here in New Zealand … Every worker be he Pākehā, Māori or Islander has problems of a similar nature, for example, housing, making the wage packet spin out, feeding the family and sending children to school. These problems cannot be solved by allowing arguments over race or religion to divide us.[88]

    Foster presented opposing sporting contacts with apartheid South Africa as solidarity work to promote racial harmony of the working class, both domestically and internationally. Class identity was also central for Willis, the first Māori member elected an organiser and vice-president of the Northern Drivers in 1970.[89]

    Amongst the membership, however, there was vocal support for the 1970 tour. Some members argued: we shouldn’t “drag politics into sport”; the All Blacks could set South Africans a good example with a mixed-race team; and Māori play separately from Pākehā internationally sometimes, isn’t this racial discrimination? Other members responded: “why should we care?”[90] This last comment, I would argue, was not a sign of apathy or of implicit support for racial discrimination in sport; it signals instead that rugby union was not that important to them. The majority of drivers were rugby league supporters and no league teams had sporting contacts with South Africa. While the Northern Drivers’ executive were united in their opposition to the 1970 Tour, they did not gain the majority support of the membership for this policy.[91] The inclusion of Māori players in the All Blacks would have appeased some, and for league supporters rugby union games did little to galvanise their anti-racism activism. The WDU faced a similar situation: a motion opposing apartheid and recommending a boycott of all relations with South African was vigorously debated and then defeated at stop work meetings in 1970.[92] National Māori organisations were also divided: the New Zealand Māori Council supported the 1970 tour and the Māori Women’s Welfare League did not.[93]

    It was students who would take the lead in the New Zealand anti-apartheid movement in the 1970s. Students’ associations brought people together in July 1969 to form Halt All Racist Tours (HART) to end sporting contacts with South Africa. Auckland student Trevor Richards was Chair and Syd Jackson, Vice-Chair; Poata attended the first meeting and gave the organisation its name. CARE secretary Newnham became an active HART supporter, though the two organisations regularly disagreed over tactics.[94] HART was far more combative in its protest methods to oppose the 1970 tour: graffiti adorned rugby grounds, goal posts “were sawed down,” rugby trials were invaded, and Molotov cocktails and paint bombs thrown. However, much smaller numbers of people flocked to support this anti-apartheid protest.[95] The 1970 Tour went ahead with one Samoan and two Māori players selected for the All Blacks team as “honorary whites.” A Springbok tour of New Zealand was planned for 1973 and the anti-apartheid movement became more organised. The National Anti-Apartheid Committee (NAAC) was formed in March 1972 to coordinate and extend the activities of anti-apartheid groups, sharing space with the New Zealand University Students’ Association in Wellington.

    The Northern Drivers’ executive decided more union education was required and sponsored (with the SU) the visit of John Gaetsewe, Representative of the South African Congress of Trade Unions in May 1972.[96] He spoke at Northern Drivers’ stop-work meetings about how the apartheid system impacted South Africans designated “black” or “coloured,” with a particular focus on workers.[97] The Northern Drivers’ executive issued a statement: “we support the decisions of the United Nations Organisation, the FOL and the South African Congress of Trade unions to isolate South Africa whilst Apartheid remains.” But again, feelings ran high, especially amongst “ardent supporters of rugby as a game” at Northern Drivers’ policy meetings.[98] Northern Drivers’ president Ken Fabris responded: “This Union does not oppose sport in any form”; it opposes this tour because “of the effect it will have on many African trade unionists” and the denial of Black or Coloured South African workers’ rights. Fabris continued, “It is not CARE or HART who is trying to dictate to the people of New Zealand whom they can watch playing rugby, it is the Government of South Africa who says who is allowed to play overseas or at home.”[99] Some members claimed the Union should not be involved in political issues or oppose apartheid in South Africa before cleaning up “our own back yard.”[100] This argument echoes complaints by Māori members of CARE that too much attention was given to apartheid South Africa and not enough to race relations at home.[101] Members remained divided over the issue, but this time the Norman Kirk-led Labour government cancelled the 1973 Tour.[102]

    Annual stop-work meetings to set Union policy gave the Northern Drivers’ executive a platform to bring in public speakers to educate members and encourage discussion. Attending to members’ complaints, young Māori activist group Ngā Tamatoa was invited to come and speak about “back yard” racism in 1973.[103] Inner-city Auckland-based Ngā Tamatoa had emerged in 1970 and “combined Brown Power, Māori liberation and self-governance rhetoric, protest tactics and self-help programs to oppose racism and champion Māori culture and identity.”[104] Hana Jackson addressed the Northern Drivers and explained why Ngā Tamatoa was protesting annually at Waitangi, promoting the teaching of Māori language in schools and challenging institutional racism, particularly in the justice system.[105] After a lively discussion, the meeting resolved to give Ngā Tamatoa $100 to assist with their work; articles about Ngā Tamatoa campaigns were published in the Road Transport Worker.[106] Drivers’ monetary support is significant because at this time Ngā Tamatoa “were scorned by many Māori, who felt they were somehow bringing Māoridom into disrepute” due to their confrontational protest methods.[107]

    The Northern Drivers worked even more closely with CARE, most likely due to their less combative approach; they shared office space and staff in the mid-1970s. The executive reported proudly:

    The campaign against racial discrimination has increased in volume [and] [o]ur previously unpopular messages … have become more popular now. In many aspects of life, more and more people are appreciative that racism is a poison and is used by very powerful business interests to exploit black labour more ruthlessly than white, and also to pit black against white to the disadvantage of both … even that citadel of “white supremacy,” South Africa, is being forced to manoeuvre to offset world opinion.[108]

    Campaigns against racism in the workplace were gaining increasing support.

    This was also the time when Matiu Rata became Minister of Māori Affairs and pushed the third Labour government to take Māori Treaty rights seriously. The Waitangi Tribunal Act to investigate Māori claims relating to breaches of the Treaty of Waitangi after 1975 was legislated.[109] The 1975 Act prompted a coalescence of forces into the Māori land rights movement – Te Roopu o te Matakite (Te Matakite) – and a march was organised from Te Hapua to Wellington that same year. Māori, including many trade unionists, marched in their thousands, demanding that “Not one more acre of Māori land” be surrendered.[110] The march sparked debate on marae across the motu (island), and fired up support for land occupations to regain Māori land that had been wrongfully alienated. MOOHR and Ngā Tamatoa helped out by organising march logistics; CARE and trade unions donated money and food. Truck driver Syd Keepa recalled attending a Northern Drivers’ stop-work meeting where members discussed the Maori land march. All the delegates were white, he remembered, and didn’t understand the issues, but support for the march was carried by the members.[111] Democratic union processes enabled Māori members to gain Northern Drivers’ support for the land rights movement.

    Bastion Point and the Auckland Trades Council Green Ban

    As economic conditions deteriorated from 1973,the National Party, led by Robert Muldoon, wagedaverysuccessful election campaign presenting trade unionists as communist or anarchist thugs: it “scratched every itch of prejudice against the poor, particularly the brown poor.”[112] National won the election in November 1975, instituted a wage freeze, reduced immigration and supported the 1976 All Blacks tour of South Africa. Muldoon also announced that 24 hectares at Bastion Point, on the Auckland waterfront, would be subdivided, sold off, and “redeveloped as a pricey retirement village.”[113] Bastion Point, or Takaparawha, was Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei ancestral land from which, “on the pretext of protecting their health,” they had been evicted in the early 1950s; homes and the meeting house had been burned to the ground.[114] Eruini (Eddie) Hawke was a Ngāti Whātua wharfie who had stood loyal to the Waterside Workers’ Union in 1951; that year he lost his job, his union, and his marae. It was his son Joe Hawke who became the spokesperson for the Ōrākei Māori Committee Action Group and led an occupation of Bastion Point in early January 1977 that would last for 17 months. Eddie and his wife Piupiu provided the internal leadership and inspiration for those who joined the occupation.[115]

    The long-standing union connection between Eddie Hawke and Bill Andersen was thus extended to the next generation. Joe Hawke respected Bill for his assistance in forming a Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei league team at City Newton Rugby League Club in 1975.[116] Before the Bastion Point occupation began, a delegation from the Ōrākei Māori Action Committee came to the Auckland Trades Council, chaired by Andersen, and won a motion of support for a Green Ban on Bastion Point. The Council committed to policy that no subdivision or redevelopment work would be carried out at the Point. Keepa remembered the Green Ban was initially sold to trade union members as a class issue, which drew him in:

    Muldoon wanted to build rich people’s houses on there … So that was a big draw card, not only for me but some who were a bit iffy on Māori rights anyway … [I] was going up to support the people at Takaparawha to keep the rich white people out … I don’t think there was anything in it about supporting Māori rights. I think that’s how … [the Auckland Trades Council] sold it to the membership. It was about poor people against rich people … which I thought was a brilliant way of doing things. Rather than to say it was Māori land … so the whole Auckland Trades Council agreed to put the Green Ban on.[117]

    As the occupation went on however, conversations inside the Northern Drivers became focused on Māori land rights and the history of colonisation. Andersen explained:

    All the jokes about the “Pākehās stealing Māori land” are almost correct. The Pākehās who have stolen (legally on some occasions) Māori land were not drivers, storemen, labourers or carpenters. It was the stock and station companies and other carpet baggers – that is the rich Pākehās or their agents. Many of our Union members and other Union members are amongst those who have been or are being robbed. The great Māori Land March and the Bastion Point struggle represent the first real roll back in this long and infamous period of injustice against the Māori peoples.[118]

    On 25 May 1978, “seven hundred police and army personnel invaded Bastion Point,” arrested 222 people and charged them with trespass.[119] But the Green Ban remained in place and a successful Treaty claim would see Bastion Point restored to Ngāti Whātua in 1991.[120]

    Shifting attitudes to Māori land rights amongst drivers is evident in changes to Northern Drivers’ Union race relations policy. In 1977, members agreed to “opposition to all forms of racial discrimination at home and abroad.” But by 1978, policy was expanded to:

    (a) equality of all races and harmonious relations between all workers for mutual progress (b) Greater involvement of Polynesian members in various positions in the Union (c) Full support for justice for the Māori people for land rights (d) Opposition to all forms of apartheid in any area.[121]

    After 1970, the Northern Drivers’ executive never gained full membership support for opposition to sporting contacts with South Africa, but had greater success with Union activism that addressed racism at home.

    Green Ban activism had flow on effects. From 1978, Māori members were elected onto the Northern Drivers’ executive in greater numbers.[122] Mac Harris became an organiser in 1979 and John Willis was elected Union president in 1980. By the mid-1980s, five of the nine paid Northern Drivers’ officials and ten executive members were Māori.[123] Māori workers were prominent in strike action at Mangere Bridge, New Zealand’s first national General Strike in September 1979 and the Kinleith Paper Mill in 1980.[124] Working-class solidarity held strong for these ethnically diverse, male-dominated workforces and their unions at this moment in time. “An injury to one is an injury to all” was extended to injuries caused by colonisation. Working-class unity was given physical expression when the Northern Drivers and a range of other union allies moved into the newly built Auckland Trade Union Centre (TUC) in 1980. The Polynesian Resource Centre was formed there by Ngā Tamatoa activist and Northern Clerical Workers’ Union secretary Syd Jackson to educate trade unionists on institutional racism and Māori land alienation issues. HART also moved in and the TUC would become the Auckland headquarters for the anti-Springbok Tour coalition in 1981.[125]

    Conclusion

    A number of factors gave rise to the Northern Drivers’ Union anti-racism policy in 1960: the memory of communist trade union solidarity with Māori in protesting the colour bar and land alienation in the 1930s and 1940s; the influence of communist leadership; the implementation of democratic trade unionism; and the influx of Māori members to the Northern Drivers’ Union in the post-war decades. Māori drivers brought their experiences of racism both within and outside the workforce to the union, which communist trade unionists such as Andersen compared to the experiences of black and coloured workers in apartheid South Africa. Solidarity was promoted with the Citizens Association for Racial Equality to protest racism at home and abroad.

    Despite the international outlook and experiences of some key unionists such as Andersen, rank-and-file drivers considered local issues more important in the implementation of their anti-racism policy. This became clear in 1970 when Māori and Pacific Island rugby players were able to tour apartheid South Africa as “honorary whites” and the union executive were unable to mobilise members in opposition. Rugby union sporting contact with South Africa, the key focus of the broader New Zealand anti-apartheid movement during the 1970s, was not of great interest to drivers – most of whom were rugby league players and supporters. Drivers demanded that their union officials pay more attention to “our own backyard” and stop-work meetings were utilised to do just that. Ngā Tamatoa advocated for Treaty, Māori language and land rights, as well protesting institutional racism, and drivers became active in implementing the Auckland Trades Council Green Ban to support the Ōrākei Māori Committee Action Group’s occupation of Bastion Point. Empowered by such experiences, increasing numbers of Māori drivers became executive members and union organisers from this point.

    In charting the history of anti-racism in the New Zealand labour movement through the Northern Drivers’ Union, this article has emphasised the significance of personal relationships and connections. Solidarities formed during the 1951 waterfront lockout, between Bill Andersen, Jim Knox and Eddie Hawke, held strong. Into the 1960s and 70s, solidarities were forged with Frank Haigh in CARE, Syd Jackson in Ngā Tamatoa and Eddie’s sons Joe and Grant Hawke at Bastion Point. Not all solidarities would last. In the early 1980s, Ngā Tamatoa activists changed their focus to Māori sovereignty and demanded revolutionary change in Aotearoa. This was not greeted well by trade unionists such as Andersen, who understood Māori nationalism as a rejection of the class struggle; the Polynesian Resource Centre and HART were evicted from the Auckland Trade Union Centre in 1982.[126]

    Cybèle Locke is a New Zealand labour and oral historian in the History Programme at Victoria University of Wellington. She is Chair of the Labour History Project and a Labour History Associate Editor. She wrote Workers in the Margins: Union Radicals in Post-War New Zealand and a book-length biography of Auckland communist and trade union leader Bill Andersen is forthcoming with Bridget Williams Books in 2021.

    <cybele.locke@vuw.ac.nz>


    *          My sincere thanks for the helpful suggestions from Labour History’s two anonymous reviewers.

    [1].         Aroha Harris, Hīkoi: Forty Years of Māori Protest (Wellington: Huia Press, 2004), 17–20. How Māori experienced the “colour bar” in New Zealand has been given less historical attention: Angela Ballara, Proud to Be White? A Survey of Pākehā Prejudice in New Zealand (Auckland: Heineman, 1986); Atholl Anderson, Judith Binney and Aroha Harris, Tangata Whenua: A History (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2015), 307, 317–318, 344–45, 349; Cybèle Locke, “Solidarity Across the ‘Colour’ Line? Māori Representation in the Māoriland Worker 1910–1914,” New Zealand Journal of History 48, no. 2 (2014): 50–70.

    [2].         By 1961, the Māori population of Auckland was just shy of 20,000 (12 per cent of the total Māori population), employed in the semi-skilled and unskilled sectors of the workforce. Melissa Matutina Williams, Panguru and the City Kāinga Tahi, Kāinga Rua: An Urban Migration History (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2015), 182. The Auckland urban population was 450,000 in 1961.

    [3].         “He Whakaputanga me te Tiriti: The Declaration and the Treaty: The Report on Stage 1 of the Te Paparahi o Te Raki Inquiry,” Waitangi Tribunal Report 2014, Wai 1040, accessed January 2021, https://waitangitribunal.govt.nz/publications-and-resources/waitangi-tribunal-reports/.

    [4].         Harris, Hīkoi, 27.

    [5].         Harris, Hīkoi; Ranginui Walker, Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou: Struggle Without End (Auckland: Penguin, 2004); Angelique Stastny and Raymond Orr, “The Influence of the US Black Panthers on Indigenous Activism in Australia and New Zealand from 1969 Onwards,” Australian Aboriginal Studies 2 (2014): 60–74; Linda Johnson, “Māori Activism Across Borders, 1950–1980s” (PhD diss., Massey University, 2015). Due to lack of space, this article does not include the Polynesian Panthers who worked closely with Ngā Tamatoa. See Melani Anae, Lautofa Iuli, Leilani Burgoyne, eds, Polynesian Panthers: The Crucible Years 1971–74 (Auckland: Reed Publishers, 2006).

    [6].         For an analysis of Māori involvement in the freezing workers’ unions, clerical unions and organised unemployed, see Cybèle Locke, Workers in the Margins: Union Radicals in Post-War New Zealand (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2012). Deborah Wilson, Different White People: Radical Activism for Aboriginal Rights 1946–1972 (Crawley, WA: UWA Publishing, 2015).

    [7].         Kerry Taylor, “‘Potential Allies of the Working Class’: The Communist Party of New Zealand and Maori, 1921–52,” in On The Left: Essays on Socialism in New Zealand, ed. Pat Moloney and Kerry Taylor (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2002), 104.

    [8].         The 1894 Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act did not allow for national unions, just national “associations.” The New Zealand Drivers’ Federation was formed in 1909. The Federation negotiated the New Zealand Motor and Horse Drivers’ Award (collective agreement) covering 70 per cent of drivers nationally. Drivers’ union memberships increased from 8,983 in 1946 to 19,523 in 1971. Bert Roth, Trade Unions in New Zealand (Wellington: Reed Education, 1973), 162.

    [9].         Peter Cole, Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area (Urbana, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2018).

    [10].      Peter Cole and Peter Limb, “Hooks Down! Anti-Apartheid Activism and Solidarity among Maritimes Unions in Australia and the United States,” Labor History 58, no. 3 (2017): 303–26.

    [11].      Trade unions did not keep records of ethnicity. Neil Chapman told me it was as high as 75 per cent. Bert Roth reported that Māori chiefly joined the Auckland labourers’ and drivers’ unions, but only gave figures for the Northern and Taranaki Labourers’ Union: 1,000 Māori members (one sixth of the union’s members). Roth, Trade Unions, 133.

    [12].      Neil Chapman, oral interview with author, 4 September 2013. Equal pay was an issue of focus for drivers in the early 1970s despite the very small number of women drivers. Drivers had been part of the peace movement, anti-conscription and ban the bomb movements, since 1949.

    [13].      Rameka Harris, interview with author, 1 December 2014, First Union, Onehunga.

    [14].      Chapman, interview.

    [15].      Evan Te Ahu Poata-Smith, “Ka Tika A Muri, Ka Tika A Mua? Māori Protest Politics and the Treaty of Waitangi Settlement Process,” in Tangata Tangata: The Changing Ethnic Contours of New Zealand,ed.Paul Spoonley, Cluny Macpherson, David Pearson (Southbank, Vic.: Thomson Dunmore Press, 2004), 72.

    [16].      Mark Falcous, “Rugby League in the National Imaginary of New Zealand Aotearoa,” Sport in History 27, no. 3 (2007): 427–28.

    [17].      Falcous, “Rugby League in the National Imaginery,” 438. Middle-class Pākehā dominated amateur rugby because they had resources to attend practices and tours, unlike working-class players.

    [18].      Trevor Richards, Dancing on Our Bones: New Zealand, South Africa, Rugby and Racism (Wellington: BWB, 1999), 13.

    [19].      Taylor, “Potential Allies,” 110.

    [20].      Greg Ryan, “Anthropological Football: Māori and the 1937 Springbok Rugby Tour of New Zealand,” New Zealand Journal of History 34, no. 1 (2000): 60–79; Ron Palenski, “Rugby union – International rugby – Southern Hemisphere,” Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, accessed January 2021, http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/rugby-union/page-8.

    [21].      Ryan, “Anthropological Football,” 77–78; Falcous, “Rugby League in the National Imaginary,” 441.

    [22].      Richards, Dancing, 13–14.

    [23].      CPNZ membership was anywhere between 1,000 and 2,000.

    [24].      The ATC represented the largest number of private sector trade unionists in the New Zealand Federation of Labour.

    [25].      Kerry Taylor, “The Communist Party of New Zealand from its Origins until 1946” (PhD diss., Victoria University of Wellington, 1996), 181. Scottish shipyard builder Alec Drennan had immigrated to Auckland about 1925, been active in the Labourers’ Union and Labour Party, but was radicalised by the Depression and joined the CPNZ in 1931. Drennan joined the CPNZ National Committee in 1935 and was Auckland CPNZ Chair from the late 1930s. David Verran, “Drennan, Alexander,” Dictionary of New Zealand Biography (first published in 2000) in Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, accessed January 2021, https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/5d25/drennan-alexander.

    [26].      The Kingitanga originated as a pan-tribal independence movement in the 1850s and was instrumental in rallying armed resistance to Pākehā invasion of Māori territories during the wars in the North Island between 1860 and 1863. Michael King, Te Puea: A Biography (Auckland: Hodder and Stoughton, 1977), 217.

    [27].      Harris, Hikoi, 78–83.

    [28].      Communists regularly reported on Māori health, housing and education issues, Māori land grievances and the work of local tribal committees during the war. Taylor, “Potential Allies,”106.

    [29].      For a full discussion of this event, see Locke, Workers in the Margins, 20–29.

    [30].      Taylor, “Potential Allies,” 109.

    [31].      Cybèle Locke, “Communist Made at Sea and in Port: Maritime Class Relations during the Second World War,” International Journal of Maritime History 28 (2016): 532–549.

    [32].      Andersen also admired Jim Healy, “a gritty communist grassroots fighter” who led the Australian Waterside Workers’ Federation, and communist Eliot V. Elliott, Seamen’s Union of Australia national secretary. Cole and Limb, “Hooks Down,” 307; Bill Andersen to Tom Curphey, 12 June 1996, Bill Andersen personal papers, Rotorua.

    [33].      Walsh, FoL secretary Ken Baxter and Minister of Labour Angus McLagan were all ex-communists. Conrad Bollinger, Against the Wind: The Story of the New Zealand Seamen’s Union (Wellington: New Zealand Seaman’s Union, 1968), 131; Pat Walsh, “Walsh, Fintan Patrick,” Dictionary of New Zealand Biography (first published in 1998) in Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, accessed January 2021, https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/4w4/walsh-fintan-patrick.

    [34].      Manuka Henare, “Watene, Puti Tipene,” Dictionary of New Zealand Biography (first published in 2000) in Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, accessed January 2021, https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/5w12/watene-puti-tipene.

    [35].      Richards, Dancing,15.

    [36].      Ibid., 18.

    [37].      Diane Kirkby and Dmytro Ostapenko, “‘Second to None in the International Fight’: Australian Seafarers Internationalism and Maritime Unions,” Journal of Contemporary History 54, no. 2 (2019): 446.

    [38].      Bill Andersen, “60 Years of Struggle,” unpublished memoir, Bill Andersen personal papers, Rotorua, 12; Roth, Trade Unions, 68–70; David Grant, Jagged Seas: The New Zealand Seaman’s Union 1879–2003 (Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 2012),140.

    [39].      There is significant historical work on the 1951 waterfront dispute: Dick Scott, 151 Days (Auckland: New Zealand Waterside Workers’ Union, 1952); David Grant, ed., The Big Blue: Snapshots of the 1951 Waterfront Lockout (Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 2004); Anna Green, “Spelling, Go-Slows, Gliding Away and Theft: Informal Control Over Work on the New Zealand Waterfront 1915–1951,” Labour History, no. 63, (November 1992): 100–14; Anna Green, British Capital, Antipodean Labour: Working the New Zealand Waterfront 1915–1951 (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2001); Grace Millar, “Families and the 1951 New Zealand Waterfront Lockout” (PhD diss., Victoria University of Wellington, 2013); Grace Millar, “‘This is Not Charity’: the Masculine Work of Strike Relief,” History Workshop Journal 83 (2016): 176–93; Grace Millar, “‘We Never Recovered’: The Social Cost of the 1951 New Zealand Waterfront Dispute,” Labour History, no. 108 (May 2015): 89–101; Grace Millar, “‘As a Scab’: Rank and File Workers, Strike-breakers, and the End of the 1951 Waterfront Lockout,” New Zealand Journal of History 48, no. 2 (2014): 71–90. For accounts of Auckland watersiders, see H. Roth, Wharfie, “From Hand Barrows to Straddles”: Unionism on the Auckland Waterfront (Auckland: New Zealand Waterfront Workers’ Union, 1993); Jock Barnes, Never a White Flag: The Memoirs of Jock Barnes, Waterfront Leader (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1998).

    [40].      Grant, Jagged Seas, 148.

    [41].      Roth, Trade Unions, 76.

    [42].      Andersen never forgot the financial support from Australian wharfies and seamen, and the World Federation of Trade Unions for locked out New Zealand wharfies. Andersen, “60 Years of Struggle,” 16.

    [43].      Ibid., 19.

    [44].      More militant drivers called Andersen “3-Day Wonder” because he very rarely condoned strikes that went longer than three days. Marx Jones, oral interview with author, Auckland, 15 April 2015.

    [45].      Auckland Star, 20 November 1952.

    [46].      Andersen was part of a CPNZ Drivers’ industrial branch in early 1953, which aimed to remove the moderate union leader Geoffrey Moore and replace him with a militant. There were neighbourhood CPNZ branches in Eden-Roskill, Grey Lynn, Westmere, Avondale, Otahuhu, Penrose, Orakei, City, Newmarket, Papatoetoe, Mt Albert, Pt Chevalier and Onehunga at this time, and Railways and Maritime industrial branches. NZ Police, History Sheet of Person Associated with Subversive Activities, Gordon Harold Andersen Personal File, s.53/108; s.53/122; s.53/128, p. 5; S.54/349; Detective J. P. Marsh, Auckland Drivers’ Branch of the Communist Party Report, 14 March 1954, New Zealand Security Intelligence Service, declassified 11 November 2015, in possession of the author.

    [47].      Wheels, November 1956. Other ex-wharfies gained leadership roles in Auckland trade unions by the late 1950s as well, quietly seeding more militant and democratic cultures, which began to effect the FoL: Frank Barnard in the Auckland Freezing Workers’ Union; Johnny Mitchell in the Engine Drivers’ Union; Ronnie Black in the Seamen’s Union; Ron Jones in the Labourers’ Union; and Jim Knox was elected to the FoL executive in 1964. Kelly would become a powerful figure in the Wellington Trades Council.

    [48].      By 1956, there were 19 elected branch secretaries (in Paeroa, Helensville, Dargaville, Thames, Tauranga, Whakatane, Morrinsville, Te Kuiti, Otorohanga, Te Puke, Kaikohe, Te Aroha, Rotorua, Opotiki, Awanui, Tuakau, Hamilton, Whangarei and Taumaranui) and 55 job delegates. Wheels, November 1956.

    [49].      Northern Drivers’ Executive, A Case for Strong Trade Unionism (New Zealand: Northern Drivers’ Union, 1962), 17–18. This manual became a central tool for union education.

    [50].      And forwarded a resolution to the United Nations “condemning racial discrimination against non-white workers, including those in South Africa.” Kirkby and Ostapenko, “Second to None in the International Fight,” 447.

    [51].      Andersen defended Kelly to Northern Drivers’ members and argued the FoL was violating Kelly’s individual rights – Kelly did not represent any organisation at the WCTU conference. W. F. Dempsey and G. H. Andersen, “An Executive Statement Regarding NZ Federation of Labour’s Attitude to Mr P. J. Kelly,” 25 April 1958, from Gordon Harold Andersen Personal File, New Zealand Security Intelligence Service.

    [52].      Williams, Panguru and the City, 181–210.

    [53].      Ibid., 185, 205.

    [54].      James Ritchie, “Workers” in The Māori People in the Nineteen-Sixties, ed. Erik Schwimmer (Auckland: Longman Paul, 1968), 299.

    [55].      Māori names appeared on the list of Northern Drivers’ delegates printed in Wheels in the 1950s, but many drivers didn’t have or weren’t known by their Māori names in the Union, so this does not tell us much.

    [56].      Wheels, August 1960, 18.

    [57].      Wheels, February 1966, 12; Wheels, August 1960, 13. Northern Drivers’ executive member Bill Katterns was an active member of CABTA.

    [58].      Richards, Dancing, 27

    [59].      Richards, Dancing, 22.

    [60].      Wheels, August 1959.

    [61].      Ngāi Tūhoe Gerry Merito wrote the song and it was recorded at the Pukekohe Town Hall in 1960. Stephanie Gibson, Matariki Williams, and Puawai Cairns, eds, Protest Tautohetohe: Objects of Resistance, Persistence and Defiance (Wellington: Te Papa Press, 2019), 168.

    [62].      Wheels, May 1960, 5.

    [63].      Walsh had grown disaffected with the Labour government between 1957 and 1960 and became more accommodating of left-wing trade unionists as a result. Andersen, “60 Years of Struggle,” 9.

    [64].      This became an annual event. Noel Hilliard, in Grant, Jagged Seas,288; Kirkby and Ostapenko, “Second to None in the International Fight,” 448.

    [65].      Richards, Dancing,25–26.

    [66].      Wheels, August 1960, 13.

    [67].      Harris, Hikoi, 20.

    [68].      Cole and Limb, “Hooks Down,” 307. By this stage, the ICFTU also called on trade unions internationally to boycott South African goods. Kirkby and Ostapenko, “Second to None in the International Fight,” 447.

    [69].      This remit was moved by the North Island Waterside Workers’ Federation, but was also claimed by Andersen as a Northern Drivers’ remit. NZ Federation of Labour Minutes and Report of Proceedings of the 25th Annual Conference, 1–4 May 1962, 112, National Library, Wellington. Northern Drivers, Fifth Annual Convention, 1962, University of Auckland Library.

    [70].      Wheels, February 1966.

    [71].      David Grant, Man for All Seasons: The Life and Times of Ken Douglas (Auckland: Random House, 2010), 129–30.

    [72].      Richards, Dancing,31; Richard Thompson, Retreat from Apartheid: New Zealand’s Sporting Contacts with South Africa (Wellington: Oxford University Press, 1975), 41.

    [73].      Northern Drivers’ Union, Union News: Official Union News Bulletin, September 1966.

    [74].      First CARE Committee: Harold Innes (President), Gladys Salter (Secretary), Mrs J. Abrahams (Treasurer), W. Glass, Sarah Campion, Syd Pilkington (Carpenters’ Union), N. Karaka, Frank Haigh, W. McNaughton, Mabel Wilson. Early discussions were held on apartheid in South Africa and the position of Māori in New Zealand society, led by MP Matiu Rata, Koro Dewes and Dr Muriel Lloyd Pritchard. Both meetings were chaired by Dr John Reid, professor of English at Auckland University.

    [75].      Tom Newnham, ed., 25 Years of C.A.R.E. (Auckland: Citizens Association for Racial Equality, 1989), 3–5.

    [76].      Tama Te Kapua Poata, Poata: Seeing Beyond the Horizon: A Memoir (Wellington: Steele Roberts, 2012), 100.

    [77].      Ken Douglas, oral interview with author, 11 June 2015; Ken Douglas, email correspondence with author, 10 December 2015.

    [78].      Harris, Hīkoi, 38.

    [79].      Harris, Hīkoi, 40.

    [80].      The CPNZ was “the only Western communist party to take China’s side in the Sino-Soviet split.” Lisa Sacksen, “Switching Sides: The Communist Party of New Zealand and the Move Away from China,” in Trans-Tasman Labour History: Comparative or Transnational? Proceedings of the Trans Tasman Labour History Conference, ed. Raymond Markey (Auckland: AUT University, 2007), 76–77.

    [81].      Herbert Roth, “Moscow, Peking and NZ Communists,” Politics 4, no. 2 (November 1969): 168–85; Monique Ooman, “The Socialist Unity Party of New Zealand: A Study of the Incentives, Ideology and Organisation of a Small Communist Party” (MA thesis, University of Canterbury, 1981).

    [82].      Poata got frustrated with the CPNZ’s reliance on “foreign ideology” and lack of communalism. Poata, Poata: Seeing Beyond the Horizon, 99. Recruitment of Māori to the CPNZ was poor because Māori were understood as potential recruits to the class struggle. Māori struggles for self-determination were never seriously engaged until after the 1981 Springbok Tour. Taylor, “Potential Allies,” 114–15.

    [83].      David Grant, Jagged Seas, 185; Roger Fowler, oral interview with author, 14 April 2015; Glenn Andersen, oral interview with author, 2 March 2015.

    [84].      There is not space here to develop the impact of communist sectarianism more fully, but Socialist Unity Party trade unionists such as Andersen kept their distance from and disparaged ultra-leftist CPNZ members in Auckland trade unions and other organisations, such as the People’s Union. Expelled Wellington communists such as Kelly formed the Maoist Marxist Leninist Organisation in the 1970s and were very active in HART; the SUP was dismissive of HART tactics during the 1981 Springbok Tour.

    [85].      Harris, Hīkoi, 104; Malcolm Templeton, Human Rights and Sporting Contacts: New Zealand Attitudes to Race Relations in South Africa 1921–94 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1998), 50.

    [86].      Richards, Dancing,36.

    [87].      Chapman, interview.

    [88].      Wally Foster, “The Apartheid Question,” Road Transport Worker, June 1969.

    [89].      Willis was a member of the Socialist Unity Party. Harris, interview.

    [90].      Road Transport Worker, June 1969.

    [91].      Rank-and-file division affected the FoL as well: the 1969 annual conference voted overwhelmingly against the 1970 tour but could not promise strikes and boycotts from trade union members. Thompson, Retreat from Apartheid, 55.

    [92].      Rob Campbell, The Only Weapon: The History of the Wellington Drivers Union (Wellington: Wellington Drivers’ Union, 1976), 105.

    [93].      Harris, Hīkoi, 35.

    [94].      Richards, Dancing,43–45, 86.

    [95].      Only 30,000 signatures were collected to oppose the tour. Richards, Dancing, 50–51.

    [96].      General Foods delegate and excutive member Mac Harris remembered Andersen always asked him to host visitors from South Africa. Harris, interview.

    [97].      Road Transport Worker, issue 2, 1972. Gaetsawe then travelled to meet with Australian maritime unions. Cole and Limb, “Hooks Down,” 309.

    [98].      Road Transport Worker, early 1973.

    [99].      Ibid.

    [100].    Road Transport Worker, 1972.

    [101].    Newnham, 25 Years of C.A.R.E., 17–18.

    [102].    Michael Bassett, “Kirk, Norman Eric,” Dictionary of New Zealand Biography (first published in 2000) in Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, accessed January 2021, https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/5k12/kirk-norman-eric.

    [103].    Walker, Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou, 210. It was established by John Ohia, Paul Kotara, Ted Nia, Taura Eruera and Auckland university students Hana and Syd Jackson, Peter Rikys and Donna Awatere. Walker argues that Nga Tamatoa was initially divided between radicals John Ohia, Paul Kotara and Ted Nia, who modelled themselves on Black Power leaders, and the more conservative university students who would take control of the group, with more focus on reform.

    [104].    Cybèle Locke, “From Human Rights to Māori Sovereignty: Māori Radicalism and Trade Unions, 1967–1986,” in The Treaty on the Ground: Where We are Headed and Why it Matters, ed. Rachael Bell, Margaret Kawharu, Kerry Taylor, Michael Belgrave, and Peter Meihana (Palmerston North: Massey University Press, 2017), 73–90. Ngā Tamatoa built alliances with indigenous activists in Sydney and Melbourne, and the 1972 Ngā Tamatoa occupation of parliament was modelled on the Aboriginal tent embassy in Canberra. Stastny and Orr, “The Influence of the US Black Panthers on Indigenous Activism,” 66.

    [105].    Every Waitangi Day saw Ngā Tamatoa protests, arguing the 1840 Treaty was a fraud to dispossess Māori. By 1972, they had gathered 30,000 signatures in support of te reo Māori being taught in primary and secondary schools. Walker, Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou, 211; Harris, Hīkoi, 48.

    [106].    Road Transport Worker, December 1973.

    [107].    Harris, Hīkoi, 48.

    [108].    Paul Tolich, oral interview with author, 5 May 2015; Northern Drivers’ Union 1st Biennial Combined Delegates’ Convention, 2–3 December 1974.

    [109].    Walker, Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou,212.

    [110].    Ibid., 214; Sydney Keepa, oral interview with author, 6 September 2013.

    [111].    Keepa, interview.

    [112].    Ryan Bodman, “‘The Public Have Had a Gutsful and So Have We’: The Alienation of Organized Labour in New Zealand, 1968–1975,” New Zealand Journal of History 48, no. 1 (2014): 97; Jim McAloon and Peter Franks, Labour (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2016),184.

    [113].    Miranda Johnson, “‘The Land of the Wrong White Crowd’: Anti-Racist Organizations and Pākehā Identity Politics in the 1970s,” New Zealand Journal of History 39, no. 2 (2005): 140.

    [114].    Harris, Hīkoi, 82–83.

    [115].    Deirdre Nehua, in Takaparawhau: The People’s Story, ed. Sharon Hawke (Orakei: Moko Production, 1998), 68. Ngā Tamatoa members joined the occupation. It was supported by the CPNZ, SUP and the Socialist Action League.

    [116].    Auckland Rugby League News, 1975. Grant Hawke, phone conversation with author, 23 January 2015.

    [117].    It was only later that Keepa found out about his whakapapa links to Takaparawhau through Parehauraki and related to the issue on those terms. Keepa, interview.

    [118].    Road Transport Worker, December 1977.

    [119].    Sharon Hawke, in Takaparawhau, 7.

    [120].    Harris, Hīkoi, 86.

    [121].    Road Transport Worker, 1977; Road Transport Worker, 1978.

    [122].    For example, Winstones delegate Bill Abraham played a critical role in speaking at job meetings to gain support for the Green Ban and Bastion Point occupation. He was elected onto the executive in 1978, was active in land rights and became a founding member of the Mana Motuhake party in 1979. Trucker, June 1979. Chapman, interview.

    [123].    Trucker, May 1986.

    [124].    These were unions where Māori workers, and increasingly Pasifika workers, were more prevalent.

    [125].    Malcolm Maclean, “Football as Social Critique: Protest Movements, Rugby and History in Aotearoa, New Zealand,” The International Journal of the History of Sport 17, nos 2–3 (2000): 263–64.

    [126].    For full coverage of this event, see Cybèle Locke, “Māori Sovereignty and Black Feminism: Māori Women and the New Zealand Trade Union Movement in the Early 1980s,” in Indigenous Women and Work: From Labor to Activism, ed. Carol Williams (Baltimore: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 254–67.

    The New Zealand Northern Drivers’ Union: Trade Union Anti-Racism Work, 1937–80

    Cybèle Locke*

    Running head: Locke ● NZ Northern Drivers’ Union

    There is a picture to include after footnote 59. Here is the caption:

    A Poster for the Petition Opposing the Exclusion of Māori from the All Black Team Touring South Africa in 1960

    Courtesy of the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, Eph-C-RACIAL-1959-01

    In 1960, the Northern Drivers’ Union of New Zealand instituted its anti-racism policy. How this came about, and what it meant for union struggles in the following two decades, are the central concerns of this article. Effectively, the implementation of democratic organising principles within the Northern Drivers’ Union assisted the formation of anti-racism policy and practice. Union officials linked domestic racism with the experiences of black workers under apartheid in South Africa from 1960, which generated calls for a boycott of South Africa and local support for the Citizens’ Association for Racial Equality. Anti-apartheid sentiment in relation to South African rugby tours, which had galvanised unionists in the 1960s, became a source of division by the 1970s as attention turned to more “local” experiences of racism. In particular, this article considers how Māori rank and file, working together with Pākehā union officials such as communist Bill Andersen, extended trade union anti-racism work across the northern regions of the country, especially Auckland.

    Keywords: Anti-Racism; Trade Unions; Māori; Northern Drivers’ Union; Rugby Union; Apartheid

    Māori have always been at the forefront of campaigns to challenge racism. Māori activism, Aroha Harris argues, emerged out of long-term experiences of racism in New Zealand: assimilationist state policies and the attendant impact of everyday racist behaviours from “Pākehā fellow-citizens” (white New Zealanders). That Māori were denied access to certain spaces, jobs, and rugby teams – commonly called the colour bar – went largely unreported in the mainstream press. Pākehā were mostly oblivious to the reality of racial discrimination or in some circumstances actively supported it.[1] Māori migration from rural tribal heartlands to towns and cities (especially Auckland) in huge numbers in the 1950s and 1960s brought institutional racism into sharp focus.[2] For Ngāti Whātua, who had Auckland grow up around them, such racism was not new.

    Assimilation policies stemmed from nineteenth-century British colonialism. In 1840, two treaties were drawn up by representatives of the British Crown: an English language treaty that ceded Māori sovereignty to the British Crown; and a Māori-language version, Te Tiriti o Waitangi, understood and signed by Māori rangatira (chiefs), which guaranteed “rangatira retained their authority over their hapū and territories.” Te Tiriti allowed for a British governor to have authority over Pākehā who had settled in Aotearoa and be in relationship with rangatira as equals.[3] However, Te Tiriti was never honoured. Instead, with the justification of the English-language treaty, Britain colonised Aotearoa, alienating Māori land and destroying tribal political structures to facilitate and finance large-scale British settlement. As Harris writes, Te Tiriti “has been the cornerstone of Māori struggles to secure the rights that it guarantees, regain control of Māori affairs, and have their tangata whenua status recognised.”[4]

    The rise of modern Māori activism, spearheaded by the Māori Organisation on Human Rights (MOOHR) and Ngā Tamatoa, with confrontational methods and greater attention to racism, has been well canvassed historically.[5] What has received less attention are the collaborative efforts of both Pākehā and Māori trade unionists and the Communist Party of New Zealand to support Māori tribal leaders and young Māori activists in their anti-racism and land rights work.[6] This case study of the Northern Drivers’ Union examines such intersections, paying attention to the influence of communists, the outlawed Auckland Waterside Workers’ Union, and the broader Māori rank and file of the Northern Drivers’ Union in producing such solidarities. Enduring relationships and shared geography mattered.

    As Kerry Taylor argues, historically the Communist Party of New Zealand (CPNZ) attracted very few Māori members. Although Māori were cast as “potential allies of the working class,” they were positioned outside the working class and class relations were the principle CPNZ frame of reference.[7] Nevertheless, sporadic efforts by CPNZ members on local trades councils (especially those in the northern regions of New Zealand – Auckland, Waikato and the Bay of Plenty – and Wellington) to act in solidarity with Māori protesting the colour bar in sport and land alienation in the 1930s and 1940s, are important to understanding what occurred later in the Northern Drivers’ Union. The forging of the Māori Watersiders’ Union Association inside the Auckland Waterside Workers’ Union in the 1940s demonstrated “workplace whānau” ways of organising for young Pākehā union leaders such as Bill Andersen to follow in later decades.

    When the New Zealand Waterside Workers’ Union was dismantled by the government in 1951, 2,000 Auckland wharfies were blacklisted from the wharves. Approximately 200 wharfies became truck drivers, Bill Andersen among them, and they joined the Northern Drivers’ Union. The Northern Motor and Horse Drivers’ Union had grown out of the Auckland Carters’ Union and by the post-World War II era had branches representing truck, bus, construction vehicle, taxi and ambulance drivers in the Northland, Auckland, Waikato and Bay of Plenty regions. The Northern Drivers’ Union (Northern Drivers), along with regional drivers’ unions across New Zealand (such as the Wellington Drivers’ Union), belonged to the New Zealand Drivers’ Federation.[8] Ex-wharfies and communists elected Andersen into a Union leadership role in the mid-1950s. He would become a key player in the anti-racism history of the Northern Drivers’ Union. His successful efforts to democratise the Northern Drivers’ Union led to membership conversations, policy and action on the colour bar at home and abroad during the 1960s and 1970s.

    This analysis of the Northern Drivers’ Union connects with recent histories of trade union activism in civil rights, black nationalist and anti-apartheid movements. In his ground-breaking work, Peter Cole explored how unionised dockworkers in the San Francisco Bay area and in Durban participated in movements for racial equality and freedom.[9] With Peter Limb, Cole brought the history of Australian dockworkers’ anti-apartheid activism, under the auspices of the Waterside Workers’ Federation, into conversation with that of San Francisco dockworkers.[10] Cole and Limb argue that transnational solidarity, class-consciousness and political unionism (the influence of communism, syndicalism and other left-wing beliefs), as well as alliances beyond the waterfront, were crucial factors that led to anti-apartheid activism. African American dockworkers brought black nationalist and anti-colonial ideas to their trade unionism, but Indigenous workers are largely missing from this history.

    The Northern Drivers saw a growing Māori membership in the post-war years. Oral history interviewees, who worked as drivers from the late 1960s, estimate that by the 1970s 50 per cent of the Union’s 6,000 members were Māori.[11] These members brought their personal experiences of racism to their Pākehā union officials, to job meetings, to conversations at annual delegate conferences and to stop-work meetings. Their voices are difficult to discern, especially for the earlier years, because I am heavily reliant on Pākehā union officials’ reports, often written by Andersen himself, as published in Wheels and the Road Transport Worker. However, oral historiesprovide valuable insights into how regular Union forums encouraged conversations about racism and other social issues of concern to members. Drivers gathered at stop-work meetings to “grapple with … the question of racism, women’s rights, worker’s rights … world peace … It was not just about pay and conditions but the betterment of mankind, global issues.”[12] “The Northern Drivers’ Union was one of the most democratic unions I’ve ever worked with … We were against racism, supported the Māori movement.”[13] Interviewees described the Union “fight against racist situations” and indicated why local racism issues and the land rights movement gained far more attention and action from Union members than the more removed international anti-apartheid campaign.[14] They also reveal that Māori and Pākehā drivers considered racism a capitalist tool to divide the working class in the 1960s and 1970s. As Evan Te Ahu Poata-Smith suggests: “New Zealand’s working class is extremely diverse and a range of factors such as ethnicity, culture, nationality, gender and sexual orientation shapes working-class struggle and individual and collective experiences of class conflict.”[15] Ethnicity became a key consideration in working-class struggles conducted by the Northern Drivers and led to solidarity efforts with the Citizens’ Association for Racial Equality (CARE), Ngā Tamatoa and the Ōrākei Māori Committee Action Group.

    This article begins by examining communist and trade union solidarity prior to 1945, with Māori protesting the colour bar in rugby union team selection in 1937 and Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei land alienation in 1943. It then explores how such solidarity was disrupted by the Cold War and the defeat of militant New Zealand trade unionism in 1951. It follows Auckland ex-wharfies and Māori drivers into the Northern Drivers’ Union and unpacks efforts to rebuild democratic, class-solidarity-based unionism in the 1950s, led by communist Bill Andersen. Anti-racism work in support of CARE and the international anti-apartheid movement in the 1960s is examined, and then how such work shifted in response to the 1970s activities of Ngā Tamatoa and the Ōrākei Māori Committee Action Group. This case study of the Northern Drivers’ Union, in conversation with the Wellington Drivers’ Union, reveals the interplay between ethnicity and class in trade union struggles of the 1960s and 1970s.

    Anti-Racism Solidarity in 1937 and 1943

    Two key moments of anti-racism solidarity stand out in the 1930s and 1940s. The first, in 1937, centred on sport – specifically on rugby union. Rugby union had emerged as New Zealand’s national game, a symbol of “colonial nationhood,” in the early twentieth century. As Mark Falcous argues: “Amateur rugby was simultaneously promoted within the local conditions and imaginings of a fledgling settler colony seeking a national character distinct from the imperial centre.”[16] The All Blacks and New Zealand Maori teams were key in promoting mythologies of “egalitarianism” and “harmonious ‘race relations,’” and “early Māori adoption of rugby and considerable playing prominence could be read as proof of successful assimilation, cooperation and unproblematic unity with Pākehā.”[17] Rugby union games attracted the largest numbers of spectators of any New Zealand sport, as well as extensive media coverage, and so became the ideal target for anti-racism activism.

    South African Springbok team racism towards Māori players, and the New Zealand Rugby Union’s (NZRFU) capitulation to South African demands that only white players tour South Africa, led Te Arawa to advocate a “social and sporting boycott of the 1937 Springbok Tour.”[18] The CPNZ offered solidarity, calling for: “No further exchange of teams with South Africa unless guarantees are given that no colour lines will be drawn”; members were encouraged to attend protests.[19] There was “extensive protest and public debate, dominated by many senior Māori leaders,” including Kīngitanga leader Te Puea Herangi, but the NZRFU stood firm in its decision.[20] Enough Māori players left rugby union and joined Pākehā working-class men to play rugby league that a “Māori League Board of Control was formed in Auckland”; the Kīngitanga was the Board’s first patron.[21] Solidarities with working-class Pākehā were strengthened in Auckland over Māori land rights in 1943.[22]

    Due to communist wartime efforts – allying with social democrats in the class struggle against fascism – the CPNZ was at the height of its popularity, particularly in Auckland, in the early 1940s.[23] Trade union work was prioritised and with communist officials in the transport, labourers’ and carpenters’ unions, eight of the 11 Auckland Trades Council (ATC) elected executive were communists.[24] National CPNZ Chair, Scottish migrant Alexander (Alec) Drennan, was the ATC president.[25] Communist influence led the ATC to engage in solidarity work with local Māori on land rights, prompted by Kīngitanga leader Te Puea Hērangi in 1943.[26]

    Te Puea, with the assistance of Māori and Pākehā officials of the Auckland Labourers’ Union, brought a petition to the ATC which sought to prevent the Auckland City Council from evicting Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei from the last few acres of their land at Okahu Bay on the waterfront. Ngāti Whātua grievances were long-standing. Ngāti Whātua chief Apihai Te Kawau had facilitated Pākehā settlement of Auckland, gifting 3,000 acres to Governor Hobson in 1840. He also made it clear that the Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei tribal base, the 700-acre Ōrākei block on the waterfront, was inalienable. However, the Crown and consecutive governments disregarded this decree and the block was acquired piecemeal by dubious practices, until only the village was left for tangata whenua to live.[27] These last acres were now in danger. The ATC executive unanimously agreed “‘the Orakei Maoris be secured in their ancestral home’ and their village be ‘brought up to present day conditions.’”[28] In June, 200 unionised workers turned up to help Ngāti Whātua build a palisade around their marae and successfully prevented eviction.[29] Auckland Labourers’ Union secretary and party member Pat Potter was “the official Auckland Trades Council liaison person with Maori.”[30] These two moments – 1937 and 1943 – are illustrative of the connections made between communist trade unionists and Māori protesting racism. The Cold War would undermine such solidarity.

    Solidarity Disrupted: The Cold War and the Decline of Militant Trade Unionism, 1947–51

    In March 1946, 22-year-old Pākehā merchant seaman Gordon (Bill) Harold Andersen returned home to Auckland from war; he harboured a twin hatred of capitalism and racism. Andersen was radicalised by class exploitation on British ships and witnessing even worse exploitation of Arab dockworkers in British ports like Aden.[31] He joined the New Zealand seafaring community, the Seamen’s Union (SU) and the Maritime Branch of the CPNZ. In his trade union work, Andersen was mentored by older maritime trade union communist leaders such as Drennan, who set an example of united front communism – demonstrating how to build democratic, industrially militant cultures inside trade unions, and urging solidarity with local Māori to bring about a united working class.[32] Encouraged by CPNZ policy, Andersen engaged direct action tactics with employers to win better wages and conditions at sea and in port.

    As the Cold War intensified internationally, however, New Zealand communist fortunes began to wane. From 1947, there was a concerted and successful effort to remove communists from trade union office. Cold War anti-communist rhetoric was unleashed by Federation of Labour (FoL) leader Fintan Patrick Walsh and Labour government ministers, and was continued by the National government, elected in 1950.[33] Andersen was blacklisted from seafaring and Drennan voted out of ATC office in 1948. Drennan got Andersen a job on the Auckland wharves and he worked alongside Māori waterside workers who had their own Māori Watersiders’ Union Association, chaired by rugby league star Steve Watene, inside the Auckland Waterside Workers’ Union.[34]

    With communists removed from union office, support for Māori protesting the colour bar in sporting contacts with South Africa was weakened. Māori players were excluded from the All Black team touring South Africa in 1949 and maritime trade unionists and the CPNZ joined Māori protest efforts. The issue was discussed at the FoL conference and a rather weak remit agreed to: unions were to “make clear to the South African Rugby Board that the team to visit South Africa was not representative of New Zealand.”[35] The 1949 All Blacks tour of South Africa went ahead without Māori players.[36] As Diane Kirkby and Dmytro Ostapenko found in their work on Australian seafarers’ activism against apartheid, the emerging Cold War in the late 1940s caused division and “hampered” such trade union efforts.[37] The Auckland Carpenters’ Union was deregistered in 1949 and conflict came to a head when the militant New Zealand Waterside Workers’ Union (NZWWU) and a small number of other leftist delegates walked out of the 1950 FoL conference and formed a rival national organisation, the Trade Union Congress (TUC).[38]

    The final showdown was the 1951 waterfront lockout, triggered by a disagreement over a wage rise. Waterside workers (wharfies) refused overtime until the dispute was resolved, but employers called the action an illegal strike and locked out all wharfies from work until they gave up their claims.[39] Seafarers (despite opposition from their union president), miners, freezing workers, drivers, hydro workers, gas workers, harbour board employees and sugar workers declared solidarity strikes in support.[40] The National government backed employers and brought Waterfront Strike Emergency Regulations into force: the NZWWU registration was cancelled, funds and records seized, police powers were increased to arrest anyone aiding the wharfies, their side of the story was banned from the media, and troops were enlisted to unload cargo on the wharves. The FoL condemned the NZWWU leadership as “communist-dominated misleaders,” which undermined support strikes.[41] Despite his youth and short tenure as a wharfie, Andersen was a member of the Auckland Waterside Workers’ Lockout Committee.[42]

    After five months, the lockout ended in defeat and the NZWWU was replaced by 26 port unions. Andersen was amongst 2,000 blacklisted Auckland wharfies who took their beliefs in international solidarity, democratic unionism and now tempered militancy into other unions. As Andersen put it: “We learnt the hard lessons of when to fight, to select the issue on which to fight, when to advance and when to retreat in order to preserve organisation.”[43] The experience of defeat taught Andersen never to become a militant minority in the trade union movement or let a strike go beyond its peak; unity and organisation must be protected at all costs.[44] This approach would influence Andersen’s anti-racism solidarity efforts as well. Ex-wharfies supported Andersen to regain a leadership role, this time in the Northern Drivers’ Union.

    Northern Drivers’ Union Anti-Racism Policy

    Andersen became a truck driver and joined the Northern Drivers’ Union (Northern Drivers). In late February 1951, the Northern Drivers went on strike in support of the wharfies and offered their office as a base for the deregistered Auckland Waterside Workers’ Union. However, drivers voted to return to work after they were directed to do so by the FoL conference in March. Once the Wellington Drivers’ Union was deregistered for maintaining their support strike, further attempts to take Auckland drivers back out on strike were unsuccessful. Anti-communist union secretary Geoffrey Moore sought to align the Northern Drivers with the moderate Federation of Labour; he was unsuccessful.[45]

    Backed by the newly established CPNZ Drivers’ Industrial Branch and about 200 ex-wharfie drivers, Andersen was elected a union organiser in 1954.[46] He gained admiration for tying his wage to the Drivers’ Award and being an able negotiator with employers. Andersen was elected Northern Drivers’ secretary alongside new Pākehā organisers, communist Len Smith and militant ex-wharfie Jim Knox, in 1956. Andersen worked closely with communist Pat Kelly, a delegate in the Waikato region.[47] Mentored by communist Wellington Drivers’ Union organiser Chip Bailey, Andersen began instituting a delegate system to activate union members. Delegates were elected for 19 branches of the Union and worksites with over 20 members.[48] All union policy was discussed and voted on at annual delegate conventions, beginning in 1958; Northern Drivers’ policy was published in the NZ Drivers’ Federation newspaper Wheels. Andersen wrote a manual on how to be a “good Union delegate”: “fully take into account the ideas and mood of the workers on the job,” look out for that key point of agreement – the issue that most people care about and can unify around – and that is the issue to go ahead on; the manual was workshopped at annual delegate conventions and published in 1962.[49] Conventions and job meetings provided spaces for discussion of issues such as racism.

    Kelly attended a World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) conference in Leipzig, East Germany in October 1957 where apartheid was discussed, and he brought these ideas home. The FoL had belonged to the WFTU – formed in 1945 to unite all labour organisations into one international organisation – but, along with most peak union organisations in western democracies, left the WFTU and joined the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) in 1949. These two international bodies represented the Cold War divide. The WFTU had been speaking out “against apartheid as imperialist, capitalist and racist” since 1949. At their 1957 conference, a South African Congress of Trades Unions delegation attended and shared evidence about life under the apartheid system. In response, the conference “made an appeal to trade unions around the world to take solidarity actions ‘to put an end to racial discrimination and the persecution of their fellow workers in South Africa.’”[50] Kelly’s visit to the conference posed such a threat to the FoL leadership they sought to ban him from all Trades Council and FoL meetings in 1958.[51] The first Drivers’ Delegate Convention was held in 1958, where no doubt apartheid South Africa was discussed.

    Increasing numbers of Māori drivers joined these discussions, but they gave greater priority to local experiences of racism. As Māori moved from rural tribal homelands to the city in post-war New Zealand, they not only remade urban workplaces, they remade trade unions – those representing drivers, labourers, freezing workers, and pulp and paper workers.[52] They clustered together on particular worksites where collective ways of “being Māori … informed the practices and values” of the workplace.[53] For example, Māori men became truck-drivers for Winstones, J. J. Craigs, Vuksich & Borich and Auckland breweries, joining relatives and friends who already worked there. Older Māori men would become the foreman or Union delegate and act as a tribal elder for younger Māori men, “helping them to organise their social lives as well as their working lives.”[54] As the Northern Drivers’ delegate system expanded, Māori became increasingly involved in union affairs, such as Auckland ambulance driver John Willis and General Foods driver Rameka (Mac) Harris.[55]

    Māori drivers made their Pākehā union officials aware of incidents of racial discrimination in the workforce and organisers gained the reinstatement of Māori workers. Employers were not always the problem: Knox described a dispute at the Tauranga Bus Company where a South African driver was dismissed for his racist attitude to Māori passengers. After investigating, Knox supported his dismissal and explained to the man “that we in the trade union movement do not have racial discrimination and believe in all of our people in New Zealand working together, no matter what colour they may be.”[56]

    Drivers were also influenced by the “No Maoris, No Tour” campaign, led by the Citizens All Black Tour Association (CABTA) in 1959.[57] CABTA did not regard itself as part of the anti-apartheid movement; rather, it was protesting racial discrimination practiced by the NZRFU.[58] CABTA was led by Dr Rolland O’Regan (Wellington surgeon and Catholic layman) and Joan Stone (welfare officer with the Department of Māori Affairs and secretary of the Māori Women’s Welfare league). It involved Māori and churches leaders, “trade unions, student organisations, academics, teachers, journalists, public servants and rugby footballers.” Drivers numbered among the 150,000 people who signed the petition opposing racial discrimination in the selection of an All Blacks team to tour South Africa in 1960.[59] Job meetings held at trucking worksites for North Shore Transport, Opotiki County Council, Opotiki Borough Council and W. S. Henderson all passed a resolution: “Against Racial Discrimination in All Black Team.”[60] The all-Māori Howard Morrison Quartet popularised the cause with a song “My Old Man’s an All Black,” which mocked the NZRFU’s support for South African racist policies:

    Oh, my old man’s an All Black,

    He wears the silver fern,

    But his mates just couldn’t take him,

    So he’s out now for a turn.

    (Fi Fi Fo Fum, there’s no Horis in this scrum.)[61]

    South African apartheid was protested as a local racism issue.

    In May 1960, peaceful demonstrators in Sharpeville were shot down by police and the press brought the reality of South African apartheid home to the outside world. Northern Drivers’ anti-apartheid support can be traced from this moment. In Wheels, Andersen reported: “shootings, beatings and mass punishments of coloured South African workers have motivated a strong protest from this union.” He went on to say:

    The Northern Drivers’ Union is firmly opposed to the colour bar. We recognise that New Zealand is not completely free of guilt in this regard. We support the NZ Federation of Labour’s protest in the matter and urge the Government to use every opportunity to speak out boldly against the actions of the South African Government regarding the apartheid policy.”[62]

    The FoL called on the government to cancel the 1960 tour.[63] The Seafarers’ Union went further, stopping work for 24 hours to protest the massacre.[64] Prime Minister Walter Nash refused to intervene, leaving the decision to the NZRFU. Despite demonstrations of between 1,000 and 3,000 people (an unusually large number for the time), the tour went ahead.[65]

    Just under 60 delegates attended the July 1960 Drivers’ Delegate Convention in Auckland, where racial discrimination was discussed. Delegates unanimously agreed to the Union executive’s proposed “stand against racial discrimination wherever it may raise its ugly head.” Andersen reported: “racial discrimination has the effect of dividing the working people and … we should be united, irrespective of colour, religion or political beliefs.” In 1960, Northern Drivers’ Union members recognised that a colour bar existed “to some extent in New Zealand and it must be vigorously stamped out, root and branch.”[66] This policy made the Northern Drivers an explicitly anti-racist union and is significant given the mainstream Pākehā belief that New Zealand was a place of racial harmony.[67]

    1960s Anti-Racism Solidarity

    Encouraged by international trade union activity, the 1960s saw a broadening focus from “all-white All Blacks” to protesting apartheid and its consequences in South Africa. The South African Congress of Trade Unions called on trade unions to boycott South African goods in 1959 and the Australian Waterside Workers’ Federation responded by boycotting fish, carbide, and asbestos. The Australian Council of Trade Unions supported a partial boycott in 1960.[68]In 1962, the FoL conference agreed to support the boycott policy of the ICFTU and develop an industrial and economic boycott of South Africa.[69] Andersen banned South African goods from the Andersen household and at Northern Drivers’ Union meetings he drew attention to the colour bar as it operated both internationally and nationally. At a Franklin County Council job meeting, drivers discussed the Northern Drivers’ Union opposition to the colour bar in New Zealand sports teams, and related local experiences of the colour bar (particularly in nearby Pukekohe), and how to deal with it. Andersen responded: “This disease, so ugly and real in the USA … and in South Africa, is also in New Zealand and we must destroy it root and branch.”[70]

    The year 1963 saw union leadership changes, which would increase anti-racism activism. Drivers’ Union organiser Kelly left Auckland to take up a position in the Wellington Drivers’ Union with other communists Bailey, Ken Douglas and Tama Poata. When Bailey died suddenly in 1963, Douglas was elected secretary in his place.[71] FoL leader Walsh also died in 1963, and Auckland Trades Council president Tom Skinner became FoL president. New trade union affiliates increased the militancy of the FoL on issues like apartheid; Knox joined the FoL executive in 1964 and would be elected secretary in 1969.

                From the mid-1960s, the Northern Drivers’ Union was actively supportive of the Citizens’ Association for Racial Equality (CARE), which protested racism at home and abroad. CARE, a predominantly Pākehā group, formed in 1964 to focus both on race relations in South Africa and on racism experienced by Māori and Pacific Island migrants to Auckland city. Unlike CABTA, CARE was explicitly anti-apartheid, rather than just opposed to racism in All Black selection. CARE led protests during the 1965 Springbok tour of New Zealand, which were supported by the FoL.[72] Māori MPs Eruera Tirikātene and Matiu Rata were vocal in their opposition to apartheid, and Rata spoke against racial discrimination at the 1966 Drivers’ Delegate Convention. This time there was success: the planned 1967 All Blacks tour of South Africa was cancelled.[73]

                There were close interpersonal and professional connections between anti-racism activists and the union. Frank Haigh and Tom Newnham were elected president and secretary of CARE in 1966.[74] Andersen had a close working relationship with Haigh, who did legal work for the Northern Drivers’ Union, and CARE’s work was advertised in the new Northern Drivers’ Union newspaper, Road Transport Worker.CARE advocated the government pass a New Zealand Race Relations Act (to make race discrimination illegal) and contribute to the United Nations Trust Fund for Southern Africa. They established the first Citizens Advice Bureau in 1967 to advise new migrants to Auckland City. CARE was one of the very few Pākehā organisations that opposed the Māori Affairs Amendment Bill in 1967.[75]

                Although involved with CARE, the Northern Drivers lagged behind their Wellington-based comrades in actively opposing the Amendment Bill. The legislation empowered the government to define Māori land as “uneconomic” and to acquire it through compulsory purchase; Māori elders recognised this as yet another land grab and galvanised the Wellington Drivers’ Union (WDU) into action. WDU organiser Poata called a meeting of Māori drivers to discuss the issue and they formed the Māori Organisation on Human Rights (MOOHR). A stop-work meeting of 1,000 drivers supported a union submission opposing the Bill to the Parliamentary Select Committee.[76] The WDU executive agreed that MOOHR’s organisational work become part of Poata’s job description as a union official.[77] MOOHR opposed “apartheid, racism in all spheres of social and political life, and Māori involvement in unjust wars overseas.”[78] While MOOHR was influenced by “philosophies of Marxism and white liberalism … and the analyses of civil rights and anti-apartheid movements,” it was the forerunner of a “new wave of Māori activism” in the 1970s.[79] With no Māori officials, nothing like MOOHR was established in the Northern Drivers’ Union.

    The Northern and Wellington drivers’ unions were also affected by the Sino-Soviet split as communist union comrades went their separate ways. The CPNZ conducted “an intensive inner-party study of the differences in the world communist movement,” and the majority decided to support the Chinese position in 1964.[80] Unhappy with the move to a more ultra-left position, Andersen and other Auckland trade unionists left to form the Soviet-aligned Socialist Unity Party (SUP) in 1966.[81] Northern Drivers’ delegate and executive member Peter Cross went with Andersen, while organiser Len Smith stayed in the CPNZ. In Wellington, Kelly remained in the CPNZ, Douglas joined the SUP and Poata left communism and his WDU position in 1970.[82] The SUP engaged popular front policies and tempered industrial militancy to preserve organisation and gained some influence in the trade union movement; Andersen would be elected ATC Chair in 1976. CPNZ members understood the SUP as reformist sell-outs and union officials as “agents of the capitalist class,” and in turn, the SUP dismissed the CPNZ as “Peking Parrots” or “mouth militants.”[83] Such sectarianism undermined solidarity work at times.[84]

    “Honorary Whites” and Rugby Union Sporting Contacts with South Africa, 1970–76

    Rugby sporting contacts with South Africa continued to galvanise anti-racism activism into the 1970s, but an “honorary whites” policy would cause divisions. The South African Prime Minister John Vorster adapted the touring rules so Māori and Pacific Island players could be included in the All Blacks team as “honorary whites” in 1970.[85] In response, CARE hosted Dennis Brutus – President of the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee – to strengthen their campaign against sporting contacts with South Africa. Brutus was greeted on arrival by CARE and the New Zealand Federation of Māori Students leader Syd Jackson; Māori students had just resolved to oppose the 1970 All Blacks tour of South Africa whether or not Māori went as “honorary whites.”[86] Brutus spoke at the Auckland Town Hall and argued the tour would demonstrate New Zealand’s approval of apartheid laws.

    Trade unionists got involved in the controversy. Northern Drivers’ executive member Wally Foster, a Māori South Auckland Council driver, was involved in Māori land rights struggles and educated those around him. Young Pākehā driver Neil Chapman remembered: “He was a great reader of New Zealand history and he’d share those stories about land confiscation.” Foster was active with Andersen in challenging racist hiring practices in Pukekohe.[87] In 1969, Foster found Brutus a persuasive speaker, and in the Road Transport Worker,explained why drivers should oppose the 1970 Tour:

    Each year, at the Annual Convention of the Northern Drivers’ Union, when race relations are being discussed, the delegates have always adopted a policy which has condemned racial discrimination, racial prejudice, or racial disharmony. This is a very important part of our discussion of our annual conventions for the reason that Pākehās, Māoris, Islanders and others work side by side, engage at times in conflict with employers side by side, and go home at night to live in their communities side by side. Racial harmony is a question of bread and butter for all working people here in New Zealand … Every worker be he Pākehā, Māori or Islander has problems of a similar nature, for example, housing, making the wage packet spin out, feeding the family and sending children to school. These problems cannot be solved by allowing arguments over race or religion to divide us.[88]

    Foster presented opposing sporting contacts with apartheid South Africa as solidarity work to promote racial harmony of the working class, both domestically and internationally. Class identity was also central for Willis, the first Māori member elected an organiser and vice-president of the Northern Drivers in 1970.[89]

    Amongst the membership, however, there was vocal support for the 1970 tour. Some members argued: we shouldn’t “drag politics into sport”; the All Blacks could set South Africans a good example with a mixed-race team; and Māori play separately from Pākehā internationally sometimes, isn’t this racial discrimination? Other members responded: “why should we care?”[90] This last comment, I would argue, was not a sign of apathy or of implicit support for racial discrimination in sport; it signals instead that rugby union was not that important to them. The majority of drivers were rugby league supporters and no league teams had sporting contacts with South Africa. While the Northern Drivers’ executive were united in their opposition to the 1970 Tour, they did not gain the majority support of the membership for this policy.[91] The inclusion of Māori players in the All Blacks would have appeased some, and for league supporters rugby union games did little to galvanise their anti-racism activism. The WDU faced a similar situation: a motion opposing apartheid and recommending a boycott of all relations with South African was vigorously debated and then defeated at stop work meetings in 1970.[92] National Māori organisations were also divided: the New Zealand Māori Council supported the 1970 tour and the Māori Women’s Welfare League did not.[93]

    It was students who would take the lead in the New Zealand anti-apartheid movement in the 1970s. Students’ associations brought people together in July 1969 to form Halt All Racist Tours (HART) to end sporting contacts with South Africa. Auckland student Trevor Richards was Chair and Syd Jackson, Vice-Chair; Poata attended the first meeting and gave the organisation its name. CARE secretary Newnham became an active HART supporter, though the two organisations regularly disagreed over tactics.[94] HART was far more combative in its protest methods to oppose the 1970 tour: graffiti adorned rugby grounds, goal posts “were sawed down,” rugby trials were invaded, and Molotov cocktails and paint bombs thrown. However, much smaller numbers of people flocked to support this anti-apartheid protest.[95] The 1970 Tour went ahead with one Samoan and two Māori players selected for the All Blacks team as “honorary whites.” A Springbok tour of New Zealand was planned for 1973 and the anti-apartheid movement became more organised. The National Anti-Apartheid Committee (NAAC) was formed in March 1972 to coordinate and extend the activities of anti-apartheid groups, sharing space with the New Zealand University Students’ Association in Wellington.

    The Northern Drivers’ executive decided more union education was required and sponsored (with the SU) the visit of John Gaetsewe, Representative of the South African Congress of Trade Unions in May 1972.[96] He spoke at Northern Drivers’ stop-work meetings about how the apartheid system impacted South Africans designated “black” or “coloured,” with a particular focus on workers.[97] The Northern Drivers’ executive issued a statement: “we support the decisions of the United Nations Organisation, the FOL and the South African Congress of Trade unions to isolate South Africa whilst Apartheid remains.” But again, feelings ran high, especially amongst “ardent supporters of rugby as a game” at Northern Drivers’ policy meetings.[98] Northern Drivers’ president Ken Fabris responded: “This Union does not oppose sport in any form”; it opposes this tour because “of the effect it will have on many African trade unionists” and the denial of Black or Coloured South African workers’ rights. Fabris continued, “It is not CARE or HART who is trying to dictate to the people of New Zealand whom they can watch playing rugby, it is the Government of South Africa who says who is allowed to play overseas or at home.”[99] Some members claimed the Union should not be involved in political issues or oppose apartheid in South Africa before cleaning up “our own back yard.”[100] This argument echoes complaints by Māori members of CARE that too much attention was given to apartheid South Africa and not enough to race relations at home.[101] Members remained divided over the issue, but this time the Norman Kirk-led Labour government cancelled the 1973 Tour.[102]

    Annual stop-work meetings to set Union policy gave the Northern Drivers’ executive a platform to bring in public speakers to educate members and encourage discussion. Attending to members’ complaints, young Māori activist group Ngā Tamatoa was invited to come and speak about “back yard” racism in 1973.[103] Inner-city Auckland-based Ngā Tamatoa had emerged in 1970 and “combined Brown Power, Māori liberation and self-governance rhetoric, protest tactics and self-help programs to oppose racism and champion Māori culture and identity.”[104] Hana Jackson addressed the Northern Drivers and explained why Ngā Tamatoa was protesting annually at Waitangi, promoting the teaching of Māori language in schools and challenging institutional racism, particularly in the justice system.[105] After a lively discussion, the meeting resolved to give Ngā Tamatoa $100 to assist with their work; articles about Ngā Tamatoa campaigns were published in the Road Transport Worker.[106] Drivers’ monetary support is significant because at this time Ngā Tamatoa “were scorned by many Māori, who felt they were somehow bringing Māoridom into disrepute” due to their confrontational protest methods.[107]

    The Northern Drivers worked even more closely with CARE, most likely due to their less combative approach; they shared office space and staff in the mid-1970s. The executive reported proudly:

    The campaign against racial discrimination has increased in volume [and] [o]ur previously unpopular messages … have become more popular now. In many aspects of life, more and more people are appreciative that racism is a poison and is used by very powerful business interests to exploit black labour more ruthlessly than white, and also to pit black against white to the disadvantage of both … even that citadel of “white supremacy,” South Africa, is being forced to manoeuvre to offset world opinion.[108]

    Campaigns against racism in the workplace were gaining increasing support.

    This was also the time when Matiu Rata became Minister of Māori Affairs and pushed the third Labour government to take Māori Treaty rights seriously. The Waitangi Tribunal Act to investigate Māori claims relating to breaches of the Treaty of Waitangi after 1975 was legislated.[109] The 1975 Act prompted a coalescence of forces into the Māori land rights movement – Te Roopu o te Matakite (Te Matakite) – and a march was organised from Te Hapua to Wellington that same year. Māori, including many trade unionists, marched in their thousands, demanding that “Not one more acre of Māori land” be surrendered.[110] The march sparked debate on marae across the motu (island), and fired up support for land occupations to regain Māori land that had been wrongfully alienated. MOOHR and Ngā Tamatoa helped out by organising march logistics; CARE and trade unions donated money and food. Truck driver Syd Keepa recalled attending a Northern Drivers’ stop-work meeting where members discussed the Maori land march. All the delegates were white, he remembered, and didn’t understand the issues, but support for the march was carried by the members.[111] Democratic union processes enabled Māori members to gain Northern Drivers’ support for the land rights movement.

    Bastion Point and the Auckland Trades Council Green Ban

    As economic conditions deteriorated from 1973,the National Party, led by Robert Muldoon, wagedaverysuccessful election campaign presenting trade unionists as communist or anarchist thugs: it “scratched every itch of prejudice against the poor, particularly the brown poor.”[112] National won the election in November 1975, instituted a wage freeze, reduced immigration and supported the 1976 All Blacks tour of South Africa. Muldoon also announced that 24 hectares at Bastion Point, on the Auckland waterfront, would be subdivided, sold off, and “redeveloped as a pricey retirement village.”[113] Bastion Point, or Takaparawha, was Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei ancestral land from which, “on the pretext of protecting their health,” they had been evicted in the early 1950s; homes and the meeting house had been burned to the ground.[114] Eruini (Eddie) Hawke was a Ngāti Whātua wharfie who had stood loyal to the Waterside Workers’ Union in 1951; that year he lost his job, his union, and his marae. It was his son Joe Hawke who became the spokesperson for the Ōrākei Māori Committee Action Group and led an occupation of Bastion Point in early January 1977 that would last for 17 months. Eddie and his wife Piupiu provided the internal leadership and inspiration for those who joined the occupation.[115]

    The long-standing union connection between Eddie Hawke and Bill Andersen was thus extended to the next generation. Joe Hawke respected Bill for his assistance in forming a Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei league team at City Newton Rugby League Club in 1975.[116] Before the Bastion Point occupation began, a delegation from the Ōrākei Māori Action Committee came to the Auckland Trades Council, chaired by Andersen, and won a motion of support for a Green Ban on Bastion Point. The Council committed to policy that no subdivision or redevelopment work would be carried out at the Point. Keepa remembered the Green Ban was initially sold to trade union members as a class issue, which drew him in:

    Muldoon wanted to build rich people’s houses on there … So that was a big draw card, not only for me but some who were a bit iffy on Māori rights anyway … [I] was going up to support the people at Takaparawha to keep the rich white people out … I don’t think there was anything in it about supporting Māori rights. I think that’s how … [the Auckland Trades Council] sold it to the membership. It was about poor people against rich people … which I thought was a brilliant way of doing things. Rather than to say it was Māori land … so the whole Auckland Trades Council agreed to put the Green Ban on.[117]

    As the occupation went on however, conversations inside the Northern Drivers became focused on Māori land rights and the history of colonisation. Andersen explained:

    All the jokes about the “Pākehās stealing Māori land” are almost correct. The Pākehās who have stolen (legally on some occasions) Māori land were not drivers, storemen, labourers or carpenters. It was the stock and station companies and other carpet baggers – that is the rich Pākehās or their agents. Many of our Union members and other Union members are amongst those who have been or are being robbed. The great Māori Land March and the Bastion Point struggle represent the first real roll back in this long and infamous period of injustice against the Māori peoples.[118]

    On 25 May 1978, “seven hundred police and army personnel invaded Bastion Point,” arrested 222 people and charged them with trespass.[119] But the Green Ban remained in place and a successful Treaty claim would see Bastion Point restored to Ngāti Whātua in 1991.[120]

    Shifting attitudes to Māori land rights amongst drivers is evident in changes to Northern Drivers’ Union race relations policy. In 1977, members agreed to “opposition to all forms of racial discrimination at home and abroad.” But by 1978, policy was expanded to:

    (a) equality of all races and harmonious relations between all workers for mutual progress (b) Greater involvement of Polynesian members in various positions in the Union (c) Full support for justice for the Māori people for land rights (d) Opposition to all forms of apartheid in any area.[121]

    After 1970, the Northern Drivers’ executive never gained full membership support for opposition to sporting contacts with South Africa, but had greater success with Union activism that addressed racism at home.

    Green Ban activism had flow on effects. From 1978, Māori members were elected onto the Northern Drivers’ executive in greater numbers.[122] Mac Harris became an organiser in 1979 and John Willis was elected Union president in 1980. By the mid-1980s, five of the nine paid Northern Drivers’ officials and ten executive members were Māori.[123] Māori workers were prominent in strike action at Mangere Bridge, New Zealand’s first national General Strike in September 1979 and the Kinleith Paper Mill in 1980.[124] Working-class solidarity held strong for these ethnically diverse, male-dominated workforces and their unions at this moment in time. “An injury to one is an injury to all” was extended to injuries caused by colonisation. Working-class unity was given physical expression when the Northern Drivers and a range of other union allies moved into the newly built Auckland Trade Union Centre (TUC) in 1980. The Polynesian Resource Centre was formed there by Ngā Tamatoa activist and Northern Clerical Workers’ Union secretary Syd Jackson to educate trade unionists on institutional racism and Māori land alienation issues. HART also moved in and the TUC would become the Auckland headquarters for the anti-Springbok Tour coalition in 1981.[125]

    Conclusion

    A number of factors gave rise to the Northern Drivers’ Union anti-racism policy in 1960: the memory of communist trade union solidarity with Māori in protesting the colour bar and land alienation in the 1930s and 1940s; the influence of communist leadership; the implementation of democratic trade unionism; and the influx of Māori members to the Northern Drivers’ Union in the post-war decades. Māori drivers brought their experiences of racism both within and outside the workforce to the union, which communist trade unionists such as Andersen compared to the experiences of black and coloured workers in apartheid South Africa. Solidarity was promoted with the Citizens Association for Racial Equality to protest racism at home and abroad.

    Despite the international outlook and experiences of some key unionists such as Andersen, rank-and-file drivers considered local issues more important in the implementation of their anti-racism policy. This became clear in 1970 when Māori and Pacific Island rugby players were able to tour apartheid South Africa as “honorary whites” and the union executive were unable to mobilise members in opposition. Rugby union sporting contact with South Africa, the key focus of the broader New Zealand anti-apartheid movement during the 1970s, was not of great interest to drivers – most of whom were rugby league players and supporters. Drivers demanded that their union officials pay more attention to “our own backyard” and stop-work meetings were utilised to do just that. Ngā Tamatoa advocated for Treaty, Māori language and land rights, as well protesting institutional racism, and drivers became active in implementing the Auckland Trades Council Green Ban to support the Ōrākei Māori Committee Action Group’s occupation of Bastion Point. Empowered by such experiences, increasing numbers of Māori drivers became executive members and union organisers from this point.

    In charting the history of anti-racism in the New Zealand labour movement through the Northern Drivers’ Union, this article has emphasised the significance of personal relationships and connections. Solidarities formed during the 1951 waterfront lockout, between Bill Andersen, Jim Knox and Eddie Hawke, held strong. Into the 1960s and 70s, solidarities were forged with Frank Haigh in CARE, Syd Jackson in Ngā Tamatoa and Eddie’s sons Joe and Grant Hawke at Bastion Point. Not all solidarities would last. In the early 1980s, Ngā Tamatoa activists changed their focus to Māori sovereignty and demanded revolutionary change in Aotearoa. This was not greeted well by trade unionists such as Andersen, who understood Māori nationalism as a rejection of the class struggle; the Polynesian Resource Centre and HART were evicted from the Auckland Trade Union Centre in 1982.[126]

    Cybèle Locke is a New Zealand labour and oral historian in the History Programme at Victoria University of Wellington. She is Chair of the Labour History Project and a Labour History Associate Editor. She wrote Workers in the Margins: Union Radicals in Post-War New Zealand and a book-length biography of Auckland communist and trade union leader Bill Andersen is forthcoming with Bridget Williams Books in 2021.

    <cybele.locke@vuw.ac.nz>


    *          My sincere thanks for the helpful suggestions from Labour History’s two anonymous reviewers.

    [1].         Aroha Harris, Hīkoi: Forty Years of Māori Protest (Wellington: Huia Press, 2004), 17–20. How Māori experienced the “colour bar” in New Zealand has been given less historical attention: Angela Ballara, Proud to Be White? A Survey of Pākehā Prejudice in New Zealand (Auckland: Heineman, 1986); Atholl Anderson, Judith Binney and Aroha Harris, Tangata Whenua: A History (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2015), 307, 317–318, 344–45, 349; Cybèle Locke, “Solidarity Across the ‘Colour’ Line? Māori Representation in the Māoriland Worker 1910–1914,” New Zealand Journal of History 48, no. 2 (2014): 50–70.

    [2].         By 1961, the Māori population of Auckland was just shy of 20,000 (12 per cent of the total Māori population), employed in the semi-skilled and unskilled sectors of the workforce. Melissa Matutina Williams, Panguru and the City Kāinga Tahi, Kāinga Rua: An Urban Migration History (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2015), 182. The Auckland urban population was 450,000 in 1961.

    [3].         “He Whakaputanga me te Tiriti: The Declaration and the Treaty: The Report on Stage 1 of the Te Paparahi o Te Raki Inquiry,” Waitangi Tribunal Report 2014, Wai 1040, accessed January 2021, https://waitangitribunal.govt.nz/publications-and-resources/waitangi-tribunal-reports/.

    [4].         Harris, Hīkoi, 27.

    [5].         Harris, Hīkoi; Ranginui Walker, Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou: Struggle Without End (Auckland: Penguin, 2004); Angelique Stastny and Raymond Orr, “The Influence of the US Black Panthers on Indigenous Activism in Australia and New Zealand from 1969 Onwards,” Australian Aboriginal Studies 2 (2014): 60–74; Linda Johnson, “Māori Activism Across Borders, 1950–1980s” (PhD diss., Massey University, 2015). Due to lack of space, this article does not include the Polynesian Panthers who worked closely with Ngā Tamatoa. See Melani Anae, Lautofa Iuli, Leilani Burgoyne, eds, Polynesian Panthers: The Crucible Years 1971–74 (Auckland: Reed Publishers, 2006).

    [6].         For an analysis of Māori involvement in the freezing workers’ unions, clerical unions and organised unemployed, see Cybèle Locke, Workers in the Margins: Union Radicals in Post-War New Zealand (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2012). Deborah Wilson, Different White People: Radical Activism for Aboriginal Rights 1946–1972 (Crawley, WA: UWA Publishing, 2015).

    [7].         Kerry Taylor, “‘Potential Allies of the Working Class’: The Communist Party of New Zealand and Maori, 1921–52,” in On The Left: Essays on Socialism in New Zealand, ed. Pat Moloney and Kerry Taylor (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2002), 104.

    [8].         The 1894 Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act did not allow for national unions, just national “associations.” The New Zealand Drivers’ Federation was formed in 1909. The Federation negotiated the New Zealand Motor and Horse Drivers’ Award (collective agreement) covering 70 per cent of drivers nationally. Drivers’ union memberships increased from 8,983 in 1946 to 19,523 in 1971. Bert Roth, Trade Unions in New Zealand (Wellington: Reed Education, 1973), 162.

    [9].         Peter Cole, Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area (Urbana, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2018).

    [10].      Peter Cole and Peter Limb, “Hooks Down! Anti-Apartheid Activism and Solidarity among Maritimes Unions in Australia and the United States,” Labor History 58, no. 3 (2017): 303–26.

    [11].      Trade unions did not keep records of ethnicity. Neil Chapman told me it was as high as 75 per cent. Bert Roth reported that Māori chiefly joined the Auckland labourers’ and drivers’ unions, but only gave figures for the Northern and Taranaki Labourers’ Union: 1,000 Māori members (one sixth of the union’s members). Roth, Trade Unions, 133.

    [12].      Neil Chapman, oral interview with author, 4 September 2013. Equal pay was an issue of focus for drivers in the early 1970s despite the very small number of women drivers. Drivers had been part of the peace movement, anti-conscription and ban the bomb movements, since 1949.

    [13].      Rameka Harris, interview with author, 1 December 2014, First Union, Onehunga.

    [14].      Chapman, interview.

    [15].      Evan Te Ahu Poata-Smith, “Ka Tika A Muri, Ka Tika A Mua? Māori Protest Politics and the Treaty of Waitangi Settlement Process,” in Tangata Tangata: The Changing Ethnic Contours of New Zealand,ed.Paul Spoonley, Cluny Macpherson, David Pearson (Southbank, Vic.: Thomson Dunmore Press, 2004), 72.

    [16].      Mark Falcous, “Rugby League in the National Imaginary of New Zealand Aotearoa,” Sport in History 27, no. 3 (2007): 427–28.

    [17].      Falcous, “Rugby League in the National Imaginery,” 438. Middle-class Pākehā dominated amateur rugby because they had resources to attend practices and tours, unlike working-class players.

    [18].      Trevor Richards, Dancing on Our Bones: New Zealand, South Africa, Rugby and Racism (Wellington: BWB, 1999), 13.

    [19].      Taylor, “Potential Allies,” 110.

    [20].      Greg Ryan, “Anthropological Football: Māori and the 1937 Springbok Rugby Tour of New Zealand,” New Zealand Journal of History 34, no. 1 (2000): 60–79; Ron Palenski, “Rugby union – International rugby – Southern Hemisphere,” Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, accessed January 2021, http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/rugby-union/page-8.

    [21].      Ryan, “Anthropological Football,” 77–78; Falcous, “Rugby League in the National Imaginary,” 441.

    [22].      Richards, Dancing, 13–14.

    [23].      CPNZ membership was anywhere between 1,000 and 2,000.

    [24].      The ATC represented the largest number of private sector trade unionists in the New Zealand Federation of Labour.

    [25].      Kerry Taylor, “The Communist Party of New Zealand from its Origins until 1946” (PhD diss., Victoria University of Wellington, 1996), 181. Scottish shipyard builder Alec Drennan had immigrated to Auckland about 1925, been active in the Labourers’ Union and Labour Party, but was radicalised by the Depression and joined the CPNZ in 1931. Drennan joined the CPNZ National Committee in 1935 and was Auckland CPNZ Chair from the late 1930s. David Verran, “Drennan, Alexander,” Dictionary of New Zealand Biography (first published in 2000) in Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, accessed January 2021, https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/5d25/drennan-alexander.

    [26].      The Kingitanga originated as a pan-tribal independence movement in the 1850s and was instrumental in rallying armed resistance to Pākehā invasion of Māori territories during the wars in the North Island between 1860 and 1863. Michael King, Te Puea: A Biography (Auckland: Hodder and Stoughton, 1977), 217.

    [27].      Harris, Hikoi, 78–83.

    [28].      Communists regularly reported on Māori health, housing and education issues, Māori land grievances and the work of local tribal committees during the war. Taylor, “Potential Allies,”106.

    [29].      For a full discussion of this event, see Locke, Workers in the Margins, 20–29.

    [30].      Taylor, “Potential Allies,” 109.

    [31].      Cybèle Locke, “Communist Made at Sea and in Port: Maritime Class Relations during the Second World War,” International Journal of Maritime History 28 (2016): 532–549.

    [32].      Andersen also admired Jim Healy, “a gritty communist grassroots fighter” who led the Australian Waterside Workers’ Federation, and communist Eliot V. Elliott, Seamen’s Union of Australia national secretary. Cole and Limb, “Hooks Down,” 307; Bill Andersen to Tom Curphey, 12 June 1996, Bill Andersen personal papers, Rotorua.

    [33].      Walsh, FoL secretary Ken Baxter and Minister of Labour Angus McLagan were all ex-communists. Conrad Bollinger, Against the Wind: The Story of the New Zealand Seamen’s Union (Wellington: New Zealand Seaman’s Union, 1968), 131; Pat Walsh, “Walsh, Fintan Patrick,” Dictionary of New Zealand Biography (first published in 1998) in Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, accessed January 2021, https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/4w4/walsh-fintan-patrick.

    [34].      Manuka Henare, “Watene, Puti Tipene,” Dictionary of New Zealand Biography (first published in 2000) in Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, accessed January 2021, https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/5w12/watene-puti-tipene.

    [35].      Richards, Dancing,15.

    [36].      Ibid., 18.

    [37].      Diane Kirkby and Dmytro Ostapenko, “‘Second to None in the International Fight’: Australian Seafarers Internationalism and Maritime Unions,” Journal of Contemporary History 54, no. 2 (2019): 446.

    [38].      Bill Andersen, “60 Years of Struggle,” unpublished memoir, Bill Andersen personal papers, Rotorua, 12; Roth, Trade Unions, 68–70; David Grant, Jagged Seas: The New Zealand Seaman’s Union 1879–2003 (Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 2012),140.

    [39].      There is significant historical work on the 1951 waterfront dispute: Dick Scott, 151 Days (Auckland: New Zealand Waterside Workers’ Union, 1952); David Grant, ed., The Big Blue: Snapshots of the 1951 Waterfront Lockout (Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 2004); Anna Green, “Spelling, Go-Slows, Gliding Away and Theft: Informal Control Over Work on the New Zealand Waterfront 1915–1951,” Labour History, no. 63, (November 1992): 100–14; Anna Green, British Capital, Antipodean Labour: Working the New Zealand Waterfront 1915–1951 (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2001); Grace Millar, “Families and the 1951 New Zealand Waterfront Lockout” (PhD diss., Victoria University of Wellington, 2013); Grace Millar, “‘This is Not Charity’: the Masculine Work of Strike Relief,” History Workshop Journal 83 (2016): 176–93; Grace Millar, “‘We Never Recovered’: The Social Cost of the 1951 New Zealand Waterfront Dispute,” Labour History, no. 108 (May 2015): 89–101; Grace Millar, “‘As a Scab’: Rank and File Workers, Strike-breakers, and the End of the 1951 Waterfront Lockout,” New Zealand Journal of History 48, no. 2 (2014): 71–90. For accounts of Auckland watersiders, see H. Roth, Wharfie, “From Hand Barrows to Straddles”: Unionism on the Auckland Waterfront (Auckland: New Zealand Waterfront Workers’ Union, 1993); Jock Barnes, Never a White Flag: The Memoirs of Jock Barnes, Waterfront Leader (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1998).

    [40].      Grant, Jagged Seas, 148.

    [41].      Roth, Trade Unions, 76.

    [42].      Andersen never forgot the financial support from Australian wharfies and seamen, and the World Federation of Trade Unions for locked out New Zealand wharfies. Andersen, “60 Years of Struggle,” 16.

    [43].      Ibid., 19.

    [44].      More militant drivers called Andersen “3-Day Wonder” because he very rarely condoned strikes that went longer than three days. Marx Jones, oral interview with author, Auckland, 15 April 2015.

    [45].      Auckland Star, 20 November 1952.

    [46].      Andersen was part of a CPNZ Drivers’ industrial branch in early 1953, which aimed to remove the moderate union leader Geoffrey Moore and replace him with a militant. There were neighbourhood CPNZ branches in Eden-Roskill, Grey Lynn, Westmere, Avondale, Otahuhu, Penrose, Orakei, City, Newmarket, Papatoetoe, Mt Albert, Pt Chevalier and Onehunga at this time, and Railways and Maritime industrial branches. NZ Police, History Sheet of Person Associated with Subversive Activities, Gordon Harold Andersen Personal File, s.53/108; s.53/122; s.53/128, p. 5; S.54/349; Detective J. P. Marsh, Auckland Drivers’ Branch of the Communist Party Report, 14 March 1954, New Zealand Security Intelligence Service, declassified 11 November 2015, in possession of the author.

    [47].      Wheels, November 1956. Other ex-wharfies gained leadership roles in Auckland trade unions by the late 1950s as well, quietly seeding more militant and democratic cultures, which began to effect the FoL: Frank Barnard in the Auckland Freezing Workers’ Union; Johnny Mitchell in the Engine Drivers’ Union; Ronnie Black in the Seamen’s Union; Ron Jones in the Labourers’ Union; and Jim Knox was elected to the FoL executive in 1964. Kelly would become a powerful figure in the Wellington Trades Council.

    [48].      By 1956, there were 19 elected branch secretaries (in Paeroa, Helensville, Dargaville, Thames, Tauranga, Whakatane, Morrinsville, Te Kuiti, Otorohanga, Te Puke, Kaikohe, Te Aroha, Rotorua, Opotiki, Awanui, Tuakau, Hamilton, Whangarei and Taumaranui) and 55 job delegates. Wheels, November 1956.

    [49].      Northern Drivers’ Executive, A Case for Strong Trade Unionism (New Zealand: Northern Drivers’ Union, 1962), 17–18. This manual became a central tool for union education.

    [50].      And forwarded a resolution to the United Nations “condemning racial discrimination against non-white workers, including those in South Africa.” Kirkby and Ostapenko, “Second to None in the International Fight,” 447.

    [51].      Andersen defended Kelly to Northern Drivers’ members and argued the FoL was violating Kelly’s individual rights – Kelly did not represent any organisation at the WCTU conference. W. F. Dempsey and G. H. Andersen, “An Executive Statement Regarding NZ Federation of Labour’s Attitude to Mr P. J. Kelly,” 25 April 1958, from Gordon Harold Andersen Personal File, New Zealand Security Intelligence Service.

    [52].      Williams, Panguru and the City, 181–210.

    [53].      Ibid., 185, 205.

    [54].      James Ritchie, “Workers” in The Māori People in the Nineteen-Sixties, ed. Erik Schwimmer (Auckland: Longman Paul, 1968), 299.

    [55].      Māori names appeared on the list of Northern Drivers’ delegates printed in Wheels in the 1950s, but many drivers didn’t have or weren’t known by their Māori names in the Union, so this does not tell us much.

    [56].      Wheels, August 1960, 18.

    [57].      Wheels, February 1966, 12; Wheels, August 1960, 13. Northern Drivers’ executive member Bill Katterns was an active member of CABTA.

    [58].      Richards, Dancing, 27

    [59].      Richards, Dancing, 22.

    [60].      Wheels, August 1959.

    [61].      Ngāi Tūhoe Gerry Merito wrote the song and it was recorded at the Pukekohe Town Hall in 1960. Stephanie Gibson, Matariki Williams, and Puawai Cairns, eds, Protest Tautohetohe: Objects of Resistance, Persistence and Defiance (Wellington: Te Papa Press, 2019), 168.

    [62].      Wheels, May 1960, 5.

    [63].      Walsh had grown disaffected with the Labour government between 1957 and 1960 and became more accommodating of left-wing trade unionists as a result. Andersen, “60 Years of Struggle,” 9.

    [64].      This became an annual event. Noel Hilliard, in Grant, Jagged Seas,288; Kirkby and Ostapenko, “Second to None in the International Fight,” 448.

    [65].      Richards, Dancing,25–26.

    [66].      Wheels, August 1960, 13.

    [67].      Harris, Hikoi, 20.

    [68].      Cole and Limb, “Hooks Down,” 307. By this stage, the ICFTU also called on trade unions internationally to boycott South African goods. Kirkby and Ostapenko, “Second to None in the International Fight,” 447.

    [69].      This remit was moved by the North Island Waterside Workers’ Federation, but was also claimed by Andersen as a Northern Drivers’ remit. NZ Federation of Labour Minutes and Report of Proceedings of the 25th Annual Conference, 1–4 May 1962, 112, National Library, Wellington. Northern Drivers, Fifth Annual Convention, 1962, University of Auckland Library.

    [70].      Wheels, February 1966.

    [71].      David Grant, Man for All Seasons: The Life and Times of Ken Douglas (Auckland: Random House, 2010), 129–30.

    [72].      Richards, Dancing,31; Richard Thompson, Retreat from Apartheid: New Zealand’s Sporting Contacts with South Africa (Wellington: Oxford University Press, 1975), 41.

    [73].      Northern Drivers’ Union, Union News: Official Union News Bulletin, September 1966.

    [74].      First CARE Committee: Harold Innes (President), Gladys Salter (Secretary), Mrs J. Abrahams (Treasurer), W. Glass, Sarah Campion, Syd Pilkington (Carpenters’ Union), N. Karaka, Frank Haigh, W. McNaughton, Mabel Wilson. Early discussions were held on apartheid in South Africa and the position of Māori in New Zealand society, led by MP Matiu Rata, Koro Dewes and Dr Muriel Lloyd Pritchard. Both meetings were chaired by Dr John Reid, professor of English at Auckland University.

    [75].      Tom Newnham, ed., 25 Years of C.A.R.E. (Auckland: Citizens Association for Racial Equality, 1989), 3–5.

    [76].      Tama Te Kapua Poata, Poata: Seeing Beyond the Horizon: A Memoir (Wellington: Steele Roberts, 2012), 100.

    [77].      Ken Douglas, oral interview with author, 11 June 2015; Ken Douglas, email correspondence with author, 10 December 2015.

    [78].      Harris, Hīkoi, 38.

    [79].      Harris, Hīkoi, 40.

    [80].      The CPNZ was “the only Western communist party to take China’s side in the Sino-Soviet split.” Lisa Sacksen, “Switching Sides: The Communist Party of New Zealand and the Move Away from China,” in Trans-Tasman Labour History: Comparative or Transnational? Proceedings of the Trans Tasman Labour History Conference, ed. Raymond Markey (Auckland: AUT University, 2007), 76–77.

    [81].      Herbert Roth, “Moscow, Peking and NZ Communists,” Politics 4, no. 2 (November 1969): 168–85; Monique Ooman, “The Socialist Unity Party of New Zealand: A Study of the Incentives, Ideology and Organisation of a Small Communist Party” (MA thesis, University of Canterbury, 1981).

    [82].      Poata got frustrated with the CPNZ’s reliance on “foreign ideology” and lack of communalism. Poata, Poata: Seeing Beyond the Horizon, 99. Recruitment of Māori to the CPNZ was poor because Māori were understood as potential recruits to the class struggle. Māori struggles for self-determination were never seriously engaged until after the 1981 Springbok Tour. Taylor, “Potential Allies,” 114–15.

    [83].      David Grant, Jagged Seas, 185; Roger Fowler, oral interview with author, 14 April 2015; Glenn Andersen, oral interview with author, 2 March 2015.

    [84].      There is not space here to develop the impact of communist sectarianism more fully, but Socialist Unity Party trade unionists such as Andersen kept their distance from and disparaged ultra-leftist CPNZ members in Auckland trade unions and other organisations, such as the People’s Union. Expelled Wellington communists such as Kelly formed the Maoist Marxist Leninist Organisation in the 1970s and were very active in HART; the SUP was dismissive of HART tactics during the 1981 Springbok Tour.

    [85].      Harris, Hīkoi, 104; Malcolm Templeton, Human Rights and Sporting Contacts: New Zealand Attitudes to Race Relations in South Africa 1921–94 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1998), 50.

    [86].      Richards, Dancing,36.

    [87].      Chapman, interview.

    [88].      Wally Foster, “The Apartheid Question,” Road Transport Worker, June 1969.

    [89].      Willis was a member of the Socialist Unity Party. Harris, interview.

    [90].      Road Transport Worker, June 1969.

    [91].      Rank-and-file division affected the FoL as well: the 1969 annual conference voted overwhelmingly against the 1970 tour but could not promise strikes and boycotts from trade union members. Thompson, Retreat from Apartheid, 55.

    [92].      Rob Campbell, The Only Weapon: The History of the Wellington Drivers Union (Wellington: Wellington Drivers’ Union, 1976), 105.

    [93].      Harris, Hīkoi, 35.

    [94].      Richards, Dancing,43–45, 86.

    [95].      Only 30,000 signatures were collected to oppose the tour. Richards, Dancing, 50–51.

    [96].      General Foods delegate and excutive member Mac Harris remembered Andersen always asked him to host visitors from South Africa. Harris, interview.

    [97].      Road Transport Worker, issue 2, 1972. Gaetsawe then travelled to meet with Australian maritime unions. Cole and Limb, “Hooks Down,” 309.

    [98].      Road Transport Worker, early 1973.

    [99].      Ibid.

    [100].    Road Transport Worker, 1972.

    [101].    Newnham, 25 Years of C.A.R.E., 17–18.

    [102].    Michael Bassett, “Kirk, Norman Eric,” Dictionary of New Zealand Biography (first published in 2000) in Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, accessed January 2021, https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/5k12/kirk-norman-eric.

    [103].    Walker, Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou, 210. It was established by John Ohia, Paul Kotara, Ted Nia, Taura Eruera and Auckland university students Hana and Syd Jackson, Peter Rikys and Donna Awatere. Walker argues that Nga Tamatoa was initially divided between radicals John Ohia, Paul Kotara and Ted Nia, who modelled themselves on Black Power leaders, and the more conservative university students who would take control of the group, with more focus on reform.

    [104].    Cybèle Locke, “From Human Rights to Māori Sovereignty: Māori Radicalism and Trade Unions, 1967–1986,” in The Treaty on the Ground: Where We are Headed and Why it Matters, ed. Rachael Bell, Margaret Kawharu, Kerry Taylor, Michael Belgrave, and Peter Meihana (Palmerston North: Massey University Press, 2017), 73–90. Ngā Tamatoa built alliances with indigenous activists in Sydney and Melbourne, and the 1972 Ngā Tamatoa occupation of parliament was modelled on the Aboriginal tent embassy in Canberra. Stastny and Orr, “The Influence of the US Black Panthers on Indigenous Activism,” 66.

    [105].    Every Waitangi Day saw Ngā Tamatoa protests, arguing the 1840 Treaty was a fraud to dispossess Māori. By 1972, they had gathered 30,000 signatures in support of te reo Māori being taught in primary and secondary schools. Walker, Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou, 211; Harris, Hīkoi, 48.

    [106].    Road Transport Worker, December 1973.

    [107].    Harris, Hīkoi, 48.

    [108].    Paul Tolich, oral interview with author, 5 May 2015; Northern Drivers’ Union 1st Biennial Combined Delegates’ Convention, 2–3 December 1974.

    [109].    Walker, Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou,212.

    [110].    Ibid., 214; Sydney Keepa, oral interview with author, 6 September 2013.

    [111].    Keepa, interview.

    [112].    Ryan Bodman, “‘The Public Have Had a Gutsful and So Have We’: The Alienation of Organized Labour in New Zealand, 1968–1975,” New Zealand Journal of History 48, no. 1 (2014): 97; Jim McAloon and Peter Franks, Labour (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2016),184.

    [113].    Miranda Johnson, “‘The Land of the Wrong White Crowd’: Anti-Racist Organizations and Pākehā Identity Politics in the 1970s,” New Zealand Journal of History 39, no. 2 (2005): 140.

    [114].    Harris, Hīkoi, 82–83.

    [115].    Deirdre Nehua, in Takaparawhau: The People’s Story, ed. Sharon Hawke (Orakei: Moko Production, 1998), 68. Ngā Tamatoa members joined the occupation. It was supported by the CPNZ, SUP and the Socialist Action League.

    [116].    Auckland Rugby League News, 1975. Grant Hawke, phone conversation with author, 23 January 2015.

    [117].    It was only later that Keepa found out about his whakapapa links to Takaparawhau through Parehauraki and related to the issue on those terms. Keepa, interview.

    [118].    Road Transport Worker, December 1977.

    [119].    Sharon Hawke, in Takaparawhau, 7.

    [120].    Harris, Hīkoi, 86.

    [121].    Road Transport Worker, 1977; Road Transport Worker, 1978.

    [122].    For example, Winstones delegate Bill Abraham played a critical role in speaking at job meetings to gain support for the Green Ban and Bastion Point occupation. He was elected onto the executive in 1978, was active in land rights and became a founding member of the Mana Motuhake party in 1979. Trucker, June 1979. Chapman, interview.

    [123].    Trucker, May 1986.

    [124].    These were unions where Māori workers, and increasingly Pasifika workers, were more prevalent.

    [125].    Malcolm Maclean, “Football as Social Critique: Protest Movements, Rugby and History in Aotearoa, New Zealand,” The International Journal of the History of Sport 17, nos 2–3 (2000): 263–64.

    [126].    For full coverage of this event, see Cybèle Locke, “Māori Sovereignty and Black Feminism: Māori Women and the New Zealand Trade Union Movement in the Early 1980s,” in Indigenous Women and Work: From Labor to Activism, ed. Carol Williams (Baltimore: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 254–67.