From a shortlist of nine amazing labour history works produced in 2025, we awarded the 2026 Bert Roth Award to:
Rosemary Baird, The Middle of Nowhere: Stories of Working on the Manapōuri hydro project, Canterbury University Press.
For nine years from 1963 to 1972, hundreds of men worked to build the Manapōuri Power Station. The work was hard and physical in a rough and isolated environment. Rosemary Baird skilfully brings together oral history interviews and a large number of images to tell the stories of this time.
Oral history enables Rosemary Baird to fully explore the work and social cultures that people built in this isolated environment. She covers the men’s camps – masculine environments almost entirely free of women. This included the Wanganella,a former trans-Tasman ship, used as housing. The ship brought another men’s work culture to the cove – as with many ships, most of the caterers were gay men. She also discusses the lives of women who moved to Manapōuri and lived in the construction village.
The story of the Manapōuri hydro project is a story of global capitalism. American companies ran the project and workers. The power station enabled the opening of Tiwai Point Aluminium smelter, which processes material from Australia and then exports it. Like all stories of global capitalism, it is also an environmental story. The mining and processing of aluminium in Aotearoa and Australia has reshaped both environments. Opposition to raising the lake levels as part of the hydro project was a key moment for environmental movements. These global connections emphasise the importance of understanding the life and work involved in building the power station.
The book ends by listing the 18 men who died building the Manapōuri Power Station – bringing attention to the price they paid for the electricity that we still use today. The most important argument underlying this book is that the lives of the people who lived there mattered: the men who built the dam and the reproductive labour, both from women and gay men, that was essential to the project. Reading this book and listening to their voices provides a deep and rich picture of a nine-year period that has many connections with the past, present and future.
The Short List
Graeme Clarke, It’s Not My Fault, Rebel Press.
Graeme Clarke’s life story unfolds from the decision he made in 1971, as a young radical, to work at Todd Motors and organise the union. He covers the work involved in building strong unions in the 1970s and the brutal attacks that followed. There is a basic truth to the title – Graeme Clarke was one of the many people who resisted neoliberal changes that weren’t enacted by a whole generation, but people in power. By telling his life story as a series of smaller struggles, he makes that struggle accessible.
Jared Davidson,“Class in Colonial Aotearoa: An Alternative Historiography,”
Journal of New Zealand Studies NS39: 93-101, https://doi.org/10.26686/jnzs.iNS39.9895
In this essay, Jared Davidson critiques the stratification approach to class that fixes people by income, occupation, education, and an ever-growing number of categories. Instead, he argues, class should be understood as a social and cultural formation which cannot be defined abstractly, or in isolation, but only in terms of relationship. Class, therefore, is not a thing, but an activity, a verb rather than a noun. Jared briefly demonstrates the relationality of class struggles in 1840s Nelson and rural incendiarism in the late nineteenth century.
Cynthia Farquhar & Michaela Selway. Against the Odds: New Zealand’s first women doctors, Massey University Press.
Four hundred women graduated from the University of Otago’s Medical School between 1896 and 1967. This account explores the diverse experiences of 175 of those women and records the barriers they encountered: the limited science curriculum in almost all girls’ schools, sexist professors and fellow students, exclusion from some lecture courses (including gynaecology) and discrimination in employment. They also document their contributions to medical knowledge, practice and science in New Zealand and overseas, including improvements in child healthcare, reproductive rights, developments in anaesthesia, transplantation, and plastic surgery for children, such as treating cleft palates. Significant gaps in the history of New Zealand’s medical past are brought to light.
Jon Henning, Mr Burns’s Mill: A New Zealand Labour History, Old Mechanic.
Jon Henning’s book contains four essays, which explore different aspects of New Zealand labour history. The first essay focuses on nineteenth-century British labour history that influenced the development of attitudes to the history of labour in New Zealand. The second essay, which Henning characterizes as “self-indulgent”, focusses on aspects of the theories of Thomas Hobbes, Francis Hutcheson and Adam Smith in relation to the conflict between capital and labour and the moral issues which are embedded in that conflict. The third and “most important” essay is Mr Burns’s Mill. The essay uses the specific circumstances of the Mill to discuss the Employment of Females Act (1873) and its subsequent amendments. The Mill provides an effective anchor for the analysis of one of New Zealand’s early attempts at labour legislation and Henning uses his sources effectively to illustrate the attitudes of both capital and labour to such legislation. The last section is part essay, part literature review and examines the work of the 1890 Sweating Commission. Henning uses this framework for “a reconsideration of the development of political activism by workers in pursuit of their interests” (p.5).
Sadly, Jon Henning’s death, meant that he did not get the opportunity to finish the research project that these essays sprang from. However, this book adds substantially to our understanding of New Zealand’s labour history.
Tāme Iti, with Toi Kai Rākau Iti and Eugene Bingham, Mana, Allen & Unwin.
In this powerful memoir, Tāme Iti examines the centrality of mana, his Tūhoetanga, to his life journey. He writes: ‘You find mana in how you live your everyday life, how you care for your māra kai, how you respect and treat the taiao and other people, and how you stay true to your kaupapa’: to build mana motuhake, resist colonisation and address its harms (p.10). Mana isalso a story about mahi toi: Tāme’s journey from house painter to mill worker to artist, from Ngā Tamatoa poster-making to setting cars on fire in a collaborative Tūhoe exhibition on the Ruatoki confiscation line. ‘Art was a conduit, a connection, giving voice to things that needed to be said’ (p.179). In this vein, Mana is bookended by Tāme’s experience of punishment for speaking te reo at school – writing lines on a blackboard – and his powerful 2022 art installation that celebrates those that have fought for te reo Māori. People were encouraged to video themselves crossing out the ‘NOT’ on posters plastered on billboards across the motu reading: ‘TĀME ITI PRESENTS: I WILL NOT SPEAK MĀORI’. Hundreds of people did so in creative ways, ‘resisting, reclaiming, and expressing themselves’ (p.265). We all have a role in resistance, Tāme tells us, colonial habits and capitalism must be broken: ‘Mahi tonu, keep working. There is no end to it.’ (p.281)
Rebecca Macfie, Hardship and Hope: Stories of Resistance in the Fight Against Poverty in Aotearoa, Bridget Williams Books Texts.
Rebecca Macfie does exactly as the book title says: she balances the harsh reality of colonisation and interlocking systems that create and sustain poverty with six stories about extraordinary people who, with whanaungatanga, manaakitanga and aroha, empower their communities to challenge the status quo and offer whānau-centred solutions. She explores the work of those reclaiming whenua and building papakāinga housing for whānau at Te Hauke; ngā kōti rangatahi (youth courts) that bring children offenders onto the marae and reconnect them to te reo, tikanga and their whakapapa; He Whānau Whānui o Papakura that enables whānau to tell social service providers what works and what could work better; the Painga Project that works with Papakura schools to build student-centred support systems so kids thrive; He Whānau Manaaki o Tararua Free Kindergarten Association in Porirua that empowers whānau to be involved in their children’s early childhood education; and Manaaki Tairāwhiti, an iwi-led organisation that listens to whānau, demonstrates the systemic failures of government social services on the East Coast and has a plan for a redesigned social service system that meets whānau needs, if central government would hand over the finances. The words of Aboriginal activist Lilla Watson, quoted by Amanda Coulston (He Whānau Manaaki), act as both an invitation and a caution: ‘If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. If you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together’ (p.119).
Robert Sarkies (Director), Pike River, POP Films and Southern Light Films.
Taking the Pike River Mine disaster story to the cinema level offers the story to both national and international audiences. As a fictional re-enactment to be experienced emotionally, it serves both an educational purpose and provides the catharsis of tragedy. The central characters based on Anna Osborne and Sonja Rockhouse are portrayed as tender within family and relationship. Initially suspicious of each other, a bond slowly forms and then they are taught via Helen Kelly and her team, the techniques of presentation and power. They learn how to play the system and take other families along with them in the struggle for justice. In this regard, Anna and Sonja continue to do a great job for the union movement.
Cheryl Ware, Untold Intimacies: A History of Sex Work in Aotearoa, 1978-2008, Auckland University Press.
Focusing on the years between the regulation of brothels in the Massage Parlours Act 1978 and the national review of decriminalisation by the Prostitution Law Review Committee in 2008, this book draws on new and archived interviews to reveal both the increasing visibility and unity of a national network of sex workers, and the tensions that emerged as sex workers fought for financial, physical and emotional safety.
The book records the complexity of “how people experienced, remembered and articulated their involvement in sex work during these critical years, documenting” interactions with police and the criminal justice system, community building through the New Zealand Prostitutes Collective and informal networks, and sexual health activism during the HIV and AIDS epidemic (p.5). By engaging with the interviewees’ reflections on undertaking sex work, which are often in direct contrast to public stereotypes, Cheryl Ware makes an important contribution to our understanding of “the validity of sex work, the agency of those who work in the industry, and the complexity of individual experience” (p.5).