Re-reading Works on Poverty in Aotearoa New Zealand
This seminar series takes a fresh look at some major Aotearoa cultural works on poverty.
Across six weeks historians, curators, researchers, writers, and performers ‘re-read’ books, plays, novels, songs, and academic analyses from across the 20th century shedding light on the historic trajectories of poverty in our country. In looking back this series invites an evaluation of our contemporary situation, providing context for current issues such as inequality, our low wage economy, beneficiary shaming, gendered poverty and the long-lasting effects of colonisation. Held in collaboration with Te Pataka Toi Adam Art Gallery.
Seminar 1 - 24 April 2024
Poverty and Progress in New Zealand: thoughts on WB Sutch’s work in historical and intellectual context.
Presenter: Malcolm McKinnon
In 1941 the economist, public servant and intellectual W B Sutch published Poverty and Progress in New Zealand and a year later a companion volume, The Quest for Security in New Zealand. In the later 1960s Sutch published revised and expanded versions of both works: The Quest for Security in New Zealand 1840-1966 and Poverty and Progress in New Zealand: a re-assessment. In an aside in the latter Sutch noted that his title acknowledges Henry George’s immensely influential Progress and Poverty (1879) whilst in other passages in his works can be detected the influence of both Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes. In this talk I will examine and compare Sutch’s conception of and remedies for poverty and relate them to those advanced by these other thinkers.
Malcolm McKinnon is an historian and adjunct research associate in the School of History, Philosophy, Political Science and International Relations at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington. He is the author, among other works, of Treasury: a history of the New Zealand Treasury (Auckland University Press 2003) and The broken decade: prosperity, depression and recovery in New Zealand 1928-39 (Otago University Press 2016).
The discussion will open with observations from Dr Brian Easton. Brian wrote the early part of his Not in Narrow Seas while the JD Stout Fellow at the Stout Research Centre. He has written extensively on W.B. Sutch’s life and ideas.
Presentation by Malcolm McKinnon
Seminar 2 - 1 May 2024
Revisiting “The Folk Culture of the Dispossessed”
Presenter: Michael Brown
“The Folk Culture of the Dispossessed” is an article by Tony Simpson published in the Journal of the New Zealand Folklore Society in 1972. It is possibly the earliest study to consider how folklore (specifically song and verse) reveals the experiences and attitudes of the impoverished in New Zealand. It also holds significance as one of Simpson's earliest publications. Yet “The Folk Culture of the Dispossessed” has received little attention over the years, compared with the author's subsequent books and other writings. What was the context around the article's original publication and how was it received? What issues does it raise? In what other ways has poverty been represented in New Zealand vernacular culture?
Dr Michael Brown was the 2023 JD Stout Fellow. He works as Music Curator at the Alexander Turnbull Library.
Seminar 3 - 3 May 2024
Kath Akuhata-Brown
Washday: A short Film. Reframing the Narrative through Cinema
The film is a response to the book Washday at the Pa written by Ans Westra and featuring her iconic photography. When the book was published in 1964 and distributed to New Zealand schools it became the focus of Māori protest. A few months after the release of the book, and after pressure from Māori, in particular the Māori Women's Welfare League, the book was recalled. Though photographed in Ruatoria on the East Coast, the book tells the story of a day in the life of a family from Whanganui. Over the following decades much has been written and filmed about the book and the controversy.
Washday: Whai turns his car into a water pump while his young daughter, Hine, becomes a force of nature. The film brings together simple rituals of daily life in a small Māori family binding them together with the land, water, air and the constant spiritual presence of our gods and ancestors.
Q & A discussion, chaired/moderated by Julian Arahanga, Producer.
Kath Akuhata-Brown
ko Hikurangi te maunga, ko Waiapu te awa, Ko Ngati Porou te iwi. Ko Te Aitanga a Mate me Te Whānau a Hinerupe, Te Whanau a Tuwhakairiora ōku hapu.
Kath is a writer and director. Since very young Kath has attempted to show the world as she sees it. Discovering the tools and language to articulate this has been a challenging journey. Kath is a graduate of the Binger Film School at the Amsterdam School of the Arts in the Netherlands. She has written and directed television documentaries, docudrama and drama over a career spanning 30 years. She has been a Development and Script advisor and assessor as well as a board member on various industry guilds. Her first feature film Kōkā is due for release in 2025.
Seminar 4 - 8 May 2024
Dougal McNeill
Tooth and Nail: Mary Findlay’s Modern Realism
Mary Findlay’s Tooth and Nail (1974) was for many years a classic and widely-read and discussed work of New Zealand literature. Now out of print, Tooth and Nail deserves a new audience and a new appreciation. Findlay’s book is full of the life of Depression-era Wellington, and is a lively, moving, richly literary exploration of poverty and survival. Just as importantly for our moment now, the challenges Findlay faced as a writer throw up questions still relevant today: how to write about poverty without making those suffering from it appear impoverished? How to celebrate stubborn personality and survival without romanticising the conditions that force it upon us? How to make visible forms of work – in the home and in reproduction – that are kept invisible? Tooth and Nail is an exciting literary experiment, a lost object that should be in the canon of New Zealand modernism. In this talk I want to make the case for Tooth and Nail now.
Dougal McNeill teaches in the English Literatures & Creative Communication Programme at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University Wellington and is the author of Forms of Freedom: Marxist Essays in New Zealand and Australian Literature (Otago University Press, 2024).
Seminar 5 - 15 May 2024
Cybèle Locke
‘Dare to Struggle, Dare to Sing’: Protesting Poverty through Song
This talk explores the historical contexts for three songs, ‘People of Aotearoa’, ‘Just like Yesterday’ and the ‘Social Responsibility Song’. They were created by people involved in unemployed and beneficiary-led organisations who campaigned to end poverty in 1980s and 1990s New Zealand. Huhana Oneroa, from Te Whare Awhina in Mangamuka, brought Māori cultural ways of working into the national unemployed and beneficiaries’ movement, Te Roopu Rawakore o Aotearoa, as it formed In 1985. Gifting the waiata ‘People of Aotearoa’ to the movement was an important part of this process. Te Roopu Rawakore did not survive the 1991 benefit cuts, but the Auckland Unemployed Workers’ Rights Centre (AUWRC) did. From that base Sue Bradford and Chris Skinner wrote ‘Just Like Yesterday’ in 1994, which historicised people’s experiences of poverty.
‘From the soup kitchens of the thirties
To the food banks of today
It’s sixty years of history
But it’s just like yesterday.’
The AUWRC Street Theatre Group created the ‘Social Responsibility Song’ in 1998, as a campaigning tool to challenge proposed National government policies that would worsen poverty.
The chorus goes:
‘Let the world know our truth
The rich grow richer
The poor grow poorer
In the city of gales
The ship of justice is sinking.’
Cybèle Locke is a senior lecturer in the History Programme at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington. Twentieth-century working-class narratives are central in Cybèle’s research work. Her first book, Workers in the Margins: Union Radicals in Post-war New Zealand, explores the roles women, Māori, Pasifika and unemployed workers played in working-class organisations and protest.
Seminar 6 - 22 May 2024
Anna Green
Tony Simpson and The Sugarbag Years (1974)
Tony Simpson’s seminal study The Sugarbag Years: An Oral History of the 1930s Depression in New Zealand was first published in 1974. Widely read and cited in the decades since, it acquired paramount status as a testament to the desperate struggle of men, women and families during the economic collapse of the 1930s and the harsh response of many of those in power. This presentation will begin by exploring how Tony Simpson went about this oral history project and finding those whom he interviewed, and consider the initial reception of the book. Turning to the present, it will then ask how contemporary approaches to memory and remembering, drawn from the interdisciplinary field of memory studies, might expand our understanding of these Depression oral histories? Finally, I would like to pose a question for the audience: what should be the place of the 1930s Depression and The Sugarbag Years in the new national history curriculum?
Anna Green is an oral historian, an Adjunct Professor at the Stout Research Centre, Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington, and currently president of the National Oral History Association Te Kete Kōrero-a-Waha o Te Motu. She taught history at tertiary level in Aotearoa New Zealand and the United Kingdom, and her research and publications are in the fields of oral history, public history, memory studies and history and theory. She is currently writing a book about intergenerational family memory among the descendants of nineteenth-century British and European settlers.
Seminar 7 - 29 May 2024
Nicola Hyland
‘Wednesday to come‘: Mana wahine and poverty in Aotearoa
Wednesday to come (1984) nā Renèe (Ngāti Kahungunu) is viewed as a ground-breaking depiction of the everyday life of a whānau during the Great Depression. In 2022, a remounted production of her play staged at Circa Theatre in Wellington depicted three generations of Māori women, mirroring the distinctive challenges faced by Renee’s own mother, Rose: “Hard times back there – hard times here. Nothing’s changed… nothing’s changed…”. This seminar will offer a re-reading of this seminal play through the lens of wāhine Māori, exploring ways the text draws on whakapapa and experiences of being a Māori mother while poor. In bringing ringawera to the forefront of her narrative, Renèe illuminated the ongoing struggles of inequality in Aotearoa New Zealand’s history and in present society – manifestly for Māori women.
Dr Nicola Hyland is a Senior Lecturer in Theatre. Her iwi are Te Atihaunui-a-Pāpārangi and Ngāti Hauiti. Nicola's research investigates Māori performance and theatre, Indigenous performance and popular culture, intersections of youth, gender and sexuality in Indigenous performance, and affect and wairua in performance. Nicola has worked as a director, dramaturg and collaborative practitioner of devised performance work in Aotearoa and Australia, as well as roles as script adviser and cultural consultant. As a practitioner, she is committed to integrating tikanga Māori in the rehearsal space and advocating for decolonised and indigenised approaches to theatre-making.