The Bert Roth Award for Labour History, named for the late historian Herbert Roth is presented annually by the Labour History Project. It is awarded to the work that best depicts the history of work and resistance in New Zealand published in the previous calendar year. We take a broad perspective on the definition of labour history, including non-paid work, and pose the following questions:
• How well does the work reveal exploitation and people’s efforts to challenge exploitation?
• Does it give voice to those whose histories remain out of view or marginal to mainstream history?
• Is it well written or presented and is the work accessible to the public?
From the full deployment of state power in the service of war, judicial punishment, economic intervention, surveillance of citizens, and provision of social support to the efforts of individuals to improve their lives through sport, communal living and farming, or the brewing of beer, this year’s entries in the Berth Roth Award all make fascinating contributions. As well as the nominations, we want to acknowledge the release of a remastered version of Gaylene Preston’s incredible Labour History classic Bread & Roses. The purpose of this award is to celebrate the incredible work that goes on researching and communicating the history of survival and resistance.
Winner: Jared Davidson, Blood & Dirt: Prison Labour and the Making of New Zealand, (Wellington:Bridget Williams Books, 2023).
Jared Davidson puts labour at the centre both textually and visually in his book Blood & Dirt. Through his fine story-telling and analysis we learn of the centrality of prison labour to the built landscape and environmental transformation of Aotearoa New Zealand. Roads, sea walls and moles, forests and quarries transformed the country and the men who laboured on them.
Prison farms were built on land confiscated from Māori who might well be incarcerated on that land. Davidson’s analysis extends to the ‘penal triangle of New Zealand’s Pacific’ reminding readers of the powers of New Zealand’s empire. This deeply-researched book gives the reader a heightened awareness of how much the everyday lives of New Zealanders have been shaped by prison labour.
Runner-up: Toby Boraman, “Nullifying Austerity: Stoppages Against the Nil General Wage Order,” New Zealand Journal of History 57, no. 2 (2023): 65-92.
On 17 June 1968, Arbitration Court Judge Blair announced there would be no general wage rise for NZ workers, despite prices rising by 7.6 percent. Two months later, this order was quashed, and a 5 percent wage increase issued for workers nationally. The historical reasons for this change of heart have largely focused on the leaders of the Federation of Labour, the Employers’ Federation and the National Party. Toby Boraman, in this fine history from below, explores how a Wellington general strike and targeted direct action across the workforce, including national stoppages by brewery workers, meatworkers and seafarers, were crucial to overturning the nil wage order. This event marked the beginning of a new phase of heightened class conflict in the long 1970s.
Ryan Bodman, Rugby League in New Zealand: A People’s History, (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2023).
Since 1907, the game of rugby league has become part of the social and cultural fabric of working-class communities. League players were compensated 10 shillings a day for lost wages when playing away from home, which made league an accessible sport for working-class men. However, this compensation was cast as ‘professional’ by New Zealand Rugby Union (NZRU) officials and political elites, and the rugby league code was ostracised to the margins of New Zealand sporting society. In this fantastic people’s history, Bodman explores how rugby league cultures emerged among wharfies, coal miners, freezing workers, other working-class men’s occupations, and their trade unions; Māori footballers protesting the NZRU’s colour bar when choosing All Blacks teams touring South Africa; Kīngitanga patrons of rugby league; Irish Catholics responding to sectarianism in sport; newly arrived Pacific peoples; and patched gangs. Bodman sheds light on women’s labour at the heart of whānau-based league clubs, fundraising, catering and caring for children, and then in later decades, women breaking into coaching roles, administration work and playing league themselves.
Richard S. Hill and Steven Loveridge, Secret History: State Surveillance in New Zealand, 1900-1956, (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2023).
This comprehensive history exposes the labour of political police (plain-clothed detectives) in New Zealand between 1900 and 1956. Secret History explores how undercover political police and their agents, often informants from inside targeted socialist, labour, unemployed and anti-war movements, didn’t just watch and collect information on those movements, but under direction from Police Commissioners and their political masters, undermined, harassed and coerced people involved. This underbelly history jars shockingly with the common mythology that New Zealand was an “open, egalitarian and liberal society”.
Olive Jones, Commune: Chasing a utopian dream in Aotearoa, (Nelson: Potton & Burton, 2023).
Olive Jones’ deeply personal memoir recounts her experience of the rise and gradual decline of the Renaissance community on a 23-hectare farm in the Motueka Valley. Influenced by the countercultural movement of the 1970s and 80s, Olive was part of a generation of young people inspired to experiment in communal living as an antidote to
the excess and alienation of capitalism and to embrace a conscious rejection of the stifling conventions of mainstream culture. Inspiring, informative, and humorous, Commune traces the social history of an intentional community attempting to find alternative ways of living and working cooperatively and provides an important window into the history of the counterculture in Aotearoa.
Kō Te Reo O Ngā Tāngata – The People’s Voice, Exhibition: Wellington City Light Boxes, Courtney Place, 2023. https://wellington.govt.nz/news-and-events/news-and-information/our-wellington/2023/02/cp-lightboxes
Wellington people who live in social housing told their stories in a prominent exhibition space in Courtney Place. People who had lived in and created communities in social housing for years took photographs of the homes they had made. This exhibition played with the form within a newspaper – giving people in social housing authority over their own experiences in a world where too many people feel free to speak over and for them.
Peter Lineham, “The Battle of the City Missioners: Religion, Poverty and the Depression in Auckland in the 1930s,” New Zealand Journal of History 57, no. 1 (2023): 74-92.
Religion and money, politics, poverty and violence (state-sponsored, group and individual), the “Battle of the City Missioners” is analysed within the context of this network of factors during the Great Depression in Auckland. Lineham structures his account of the Churches’ attempts to mitigate the devastation of the Depression around the personalities and actions of two missioners: Methodist Colin Scrimgeour (of Uncle Scrim fame) and Anglican Jasper Calder. The different personalities, beliefs and approaches of the two men provide a framework that, more than anything else, displays the complete failure of both Church and State, in 1932, to deal with the consequences of the Depression. The appearance of the Labour Party in the first paragraph and of Walter Nash in the penultimate sentence foreshadows the political consequences of that failure.
Margaret Lovell-Smith, “I Don’t Believe in Murder”: Standing up for peace in World War I Canterbury, (Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 2023).
Lovell-Smith’s book is a history of the peace movement in Canterbury and of the men from Canterbury who were conscientious objectors during World War I. Although her main focus is the World War I years, she describes the development of the peace movement in Canterbury before the War, how those involved in the movement became objectors and/or supported the objectors during the War and the role of the movement after the War.
The peace movement had feminist, radical and socialist, as well as religious, roots and many of the objectors came from socialist backgrounds with links to the labour movement. “I Don’t Believe in Murder” gives the reader a clear understanding of the principles that motivated the objectors and the consequences (often imprisonment) of those principles. Margaret Lovell-Smith tells the individual stories with considerable verve, each story clearly situated in its specific local and historical context.
Greg Ryan, Continuous Ferment: A History of Beer and Brewing in New Zealand, (Auckland University Press, 2023).
Embedded in this fine history of beer consumption in New Zealand is the labour that enabled it. Ryan explores men’s brewery-building, beer-making, mergers and duopoly; women and children’s hop growing and harvesting; and business practices such as tying – an exclusive agreement between a brewery and hotel where cheap loans or reduced rent was provided to the publican in exchange for a guaranteed market for that brewery’s beer.
We learn about the workforces of breweries and hotels, their pay and conditions, trade union formation and industrial action. Ryan traverses little known actions such as an 1890 boycott on beer-drinking in Christchurch that proved intriguingly effective, as well as more familiar moments: Michael Joseph Savage leading Auckland brewery workers into the Red Federation of Labour and the 1913 strike. This is an excellent history that pays careful attention to class relations, gendered divisions of labour and racialised exclusions.
Joan Skinner, Labour of Love: A personal history of midwifery in Aotearoa, (Palmerston North: Massey University Press, 2023).
Joan Skinner places her own experience as a midwife, from trainee through to international expert, within a wider historical and political context. Skinner is clear about both the work and the struggles of power that surround childbirth. She addresses some of the complexities of that recent history – a neoliberal funding system