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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781869408381 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Auckland University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/01/2016 |
| Edition description: | None |
| Pages: | 328 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.10(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Helen Clark: Inside Stories
By Claudia Pond Eyley, Dan Salmon
Auckland University Press
Copyright © 2015 Claudia Pond Eyley and Dan SalmonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-86940-838-1
CHAPTER 1
Country girl to left-wing liberal
Helen Clark was brought up in a third-generation farming family at Te Pahu, on the slopes of Mount Pirongia in the Waikato region. At thirteen, her rural Kiwi upbringing was interrupted when she was sent to Auckland to board at Epsom Girls Grammar School. Her education continued at the University of Auckland where she enrolled in 1968 joining the other baby boomers who flocked to campuses around the country. Internationally, it was the era of student revolution, and her time at university was rich with protests against New Zealand's involvement in the Vietnam War, an increasing call for sporting boycotts against apartheid South Africa, and international mobilisation against nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific. The protest politics brought global issues home to this new generation, and the students turned their attention to university authorities, demanding a say in the way those institutions were run.
Helen Clark had enrolled in languages, but was attracted to the newly formed political studies department with its active student community and inspiring lecturers Professor Robert Chapman and Dr Ruth Butterworth. Helen went on to complete a masters degree and began researching for a PhD while teaching in the political studies department until her entry into Parliament in 1981.
* * *
HELEN CLARK I was born in 1950. My parents had married the year before. My mother had come to Te Pahu School as a young teacher. She was from Timaru and after doing a lot of jobs in the South Island, including on the West Coast and at her old school at Waimataitai Primary, she made the long journey by boat and train to Te Pahu. She ... met a young farmer who became my father and that was the community I was born into.
GEORGE CLARK, FATHER [Helen] was born in the maternity unit in Hamilton, and all the babies in those days were in a great big room — it could have been twenty babies in the room. And I walked in, I wondered which was going to be my one. So I'm looking around: 'Oh, that one doesn't look much. I don't like that one too much', and then I see 'Clark' on one of the beds. And I looked in and, you know, I reckon those blue eyes were shining up and looking at me. I thought, Well, I'm in for an interesting journey. So from way, way back, those blue eyes ...
My mother's people came from the Shetland Islands and we had blue eyes and Helen certainly had them.
HELEN CLARK Our farm on the slopes of Mount Pirongia in the Waikato is in an incredibly picturesque place, and in time my father expanded it so we owned the land both sides of the Kaniwhaniwha River. The land bordered the Pirongia Forest Park, which was a great experience for a child. I'll always have a strong affection for Te Pahu and for Mount Pirongia.
* * *
The land ... was acquired by my great-grandfather off plans in Britain around the turn of the previous century. He sailed out to New Zealand, probably from Liverpool, and came to this bush-covered area. His wife and sons followed a little later. It must have been a tough life for them, living in a rough dwelling hewed out of untreated timber until they could afford to build a better home. Eventually they cleared that bush and made it into the highly productive farming country that it is today.
In World War I all three boys were called up to the military service. My great-uncle Frank was killed at Gallipoli and that is said to have broken my great-grandmother's heart — to the extent that she wasn't told when another son, Herbert, died in the flu epidemic while he was in military camp before he could be deployed to France. At that point, it seems, the third and surviving son, my grandfather, was withdrawn from military training. As a child, I was very aware of the tremendous tragedy which had befallen this and other branches of my family.
My paternal grandmother's family had migrated up from Cromwell in the South Island around the beginning of World War I. They also experienced a lot of heartache, with my grandmother losing her brother in the war ... her sister dying in the flu epidemic, and her father dying in the course of the war as well. She met my grandfather who was from a neighbouring farm, and they married in 1920. Uncle Tom was born in 1921 and Dad in 1922. Until he retired to Waihi Beach in 1987 Dad spent his entire life on the farm at Te Pahu, except for three years when he boarded at Mount Albert Grammar in Auckland.
GEORGE CLARK You'd get up at five o'clock in the morning and you'd milk the cows and then you'd go and plough, all with the horses in those days too. And you'd come home and milk the cows at night and get in at about seven o'clock. I enjoyed it but I must have had the constitution to have withstood those things. I don't think you get [that work ethic] ... you're born with it. And the older people will always tell you, 'Any young fellow who learnt how to work, he'll never have troubles in life ...'
HELEN CLARK I grew up on a farm on a back road, on a metal road and it's a metal road to this day. I have three sisters. My sister Suzanne is fifteen months younger, then Jenefer five years later and Sandra nine and a half years younger, no brothers. And there were no other children around, so I had quite an isolated childhood in the sense that there were your parents, your younger siblings, then you go to school ... you were very self-sufficient as a farming family on a back road and, yes, it is a million miles from living in midtown Manhattan with probably far more people living in one apartment building than lived in your whole rural district when you were a child. And you gain a self-reliance, you have to be self-reliant people to live on backcountry farms even to this day ... and, yeah, my family were hard-working and extremely resilient.
GEORGE CLARK [Helen] had a pet lamb even before she went to school, and she took it down to the local pet day. She loved her lambs like all the others. She was a good farm girl, she didn't like going docking so much, running up and down the hill chasing the little frisky lambs, but she did her part.
JENEFER WATERWORTH CLARK, SISTER We had horses, we'd go and shift stock up in the back paddocks.
SANDRA CLARK, SISTER I wasn't so good at milking the cows but Jenefer and Suzanne were. [We] had to get the firewood, chop the kindling, feed the chooks and feed the pig, other stuff on the farm that was more fun, shifting the stock and lambing, docking and shearing and yard work.
MARGARET CLARK, MOTHER George always had a wonderful vegetable garden. He imagined he was growing for an orphanage, not just a family of six!
GEORGE CLARK And we've always had an orchard. I remember we had one down on the flats that my grandfather planted. The kids used to call it Granny Hog's apple tree and they would help getting the apples. We had a huge orchard in those days.
SANDRA CLARK It was a wonderful childhood really: animals, space, freedom. Come home from school, drop your bag and go out and find your father. We did chores on the farm because we loved them. I never remember being asked to do anything we didn't want to do.
JENEFER WATERWORTH CLARK We never called Te Pahu a village. We just thought of it as a settlement. There was a hall where we went to social dos, there was a church, a shop and a garage, petrol pumps and a school. That was very much our growing up. We went to school and Mum went to the Country Women's Institute, and we would walk down from school to meet her there. The shop delivered the groceries in the early days and the garage is where we got our fuel. Mum was a churchgoer and we went along to Sunday school in those early years ...
SANDRA CLARK And Brownies and Guides were in the hall and we had money to go and spend in the shop once a week.
MARGARET CLARK There was a ladies' guild which I belonged to, which saved enough money to build a brick church many years later. There was a hall. There was the funny old shop, you can't imagine it. This little old man ... ran it, Mr Shaw ... He used to sell butter, sugar and tea and just the most basic things and he delivered the mail. How people survived you'd wonder — the bread was sitting in open boxes in a dusty, rusty old van. I don't even think it was covered, then he'd dump it in our mailbox, it wasn't wrapped or anything. But we all survived and our children survived, so a few germs can't do you too much harm.
SANDRA CLARK There was no preschool. Mum did a very good job at home. She would have done things that people now just take for granted: reading, writing, counting and drawing. Mum had been a teacher at the school at Te Pahu. She took her mothering job very seriously. A good mother, very well-looked-after children, we were well dressed and well fed, had the utmost respect for education. I think Dad's mother, Grandmother, had a high regard for education too, because Dad and his brother were sent up to Auckland to Mount Albert Grammar School back in the Depression, and she pushed for the local Kaniwhaniwha School to be opened rather than just teaching them at home.
HELEN CLARK There was no preschool education because it didn't exist in rural areas. There weren't even play centres to bring young mothers together, no such services. I often think how lonely my mother must have been on a backcountry farm. Every month there was the meeting of the Country Women's Institute and she was also in the Presbyterian women's guild, but they lived quite isolated lives. When I went to school at five, it was the first time that I had been outside of the bosom of the family and I developed, if I didn't already have, severe asthma which may have been hay fever, who knows; but the result was that after months at school my mother withdrew me on medical advice and she home-schooled me until my sister was ready to go to school the following year.
MARGARET CLARK There was a lot of importance on education in our household. There was in my parents' house too; they never had a chance to go to secondary school.
GEORGE CLARK Helen could read the Janet and John books before she even got to school and she's been reading ever since.
MARGARET CLARK She always has her nose in a book.
GEORGE CLARK Margaret always supplied the books, as you can see we have a lot of books.
MARGARET CLARK Yes, I was always interested in education.
GEORGE CLARK That old adage is still true today: 'Educate a woman and you educate a family.' Margaret can take all the credit on education and at night time doing all the spelling and all those kinds of things.
HELEN CLARK I regard myself fortunate in that I had a very stable education with eight years at Te Pahu School, then five years at Epsom Girls Grammar, and of course many years both as a student and teacher at the University of Auckland. These are the only three educational institutions that I have been to except for a Spanish language course in Madrid one summer, so [I've had] tremendous stability in education.
MARGARET CLARK The morning we took Helen to Epsom Girls Grammar School there were all these children waiting for the bus, the same bus that she would be catching if she'd still been at [the local] school. She didn't want the children to see her crying so she [lay] down on the back seat every time we went by. We ... 'dumped' her, you might say, at Epsom Girls Grammar School hostel, and she was a mass of tears, and George said, 'When Suzanne goes next year, you can take her, I am not going through all this again.'
SANDRA CLARK He made Mum take them ever after. It was horrible just leaving his daughters in the big city environment. He had been to Mount Albert Grammar School which affected his life hugely. We heard stories all our lives ... [about] those three years at Mount Albert, the things they got up to, him and his brother Tom. So sending his girls to Epsom, there's a sort of correlation there, going from the 'little' country to the big city. Yes, it had a huge impact on his life.
GEORGE CLARK I'd had that experience; I went to Mount Albert Grammar boarding school in 1936 from a thirteen-pupil school. So we all knew about going away to school in those days.
JENEFER WATERWORTH CLARK It [was] very sad for us when Helen went off to Epsom Girls ... We were a long way from Auckland in those days, a big trip.
SANDRA CLARK They used to be called the 'biggies', waving goodbye to the 'biggies'. I used to get into their stamp albums ... Basically they [both older sisters] were gone forever, because they went on to university in Auckland, coming home only three times in a year.
GINNY COWSILL, SCHOOL FRIEND I became friendly with Helen Clark as a boarder at Epsom Girls Grammar School. We met in 1963. I was from Cambridge in the Waikato and since Helen was from Te Pahu in the Waikato we became friendly as Waikato farm-girl chums.
I went down and stayed with the Clarks at Te Pahu, a lovely family. There were four beautiful girls, a 'corker' family, not dissimilar to my family. They were sheep and beef farmers on rolling countryside, a big old house, humble people not flashy or pretentious. I went to Helen's Aunty Fay's house in Auckland. Helen had a great relationship with her Aunt Fay, [her father's sister]; they were really strong Labour supporters.
We had common backgrounds. We were both a bit rebellious against the system, both spoke our minds. Her father was similar to my mother. We'd disagree with our parents and talk about it at the hostel. We had that mutual understanding, we both didn't like being incarcerated in boarding school, we were both eldest children, came from similar farming backgrounds and we were used to the wide open spaces. They had rules that we thought were petty, like 'no walking on the grass'. I remember getting gated once for cutting across the grass and couldn't leave the hostel for three weeks. It was pretty tough. We felt like fish out of water, hadn't had the experience of the city life and were missing the family atmosphere, so we chummed up, had a good bunch of friends and stuck together. It was very routine, day to day, ruled by the bells: dinner bells, get-up bells, lunch bells. On Sundays there was church whether you liked it or not. Most of us were of Protestant backgrounds and we'd race for our breakfast [then] line up in a crocodile to walk to church on Sunday mornings. We had a bell for that!
The food really was your institutional-type food, really good for your waist, NOT! Porridge in the morning, toast, rubber eggs, plastic bacon, apple pie, bread rolls, salad things for lunch ... one day we went on strike because allegedly Joyce [the cook] lost the tip of her finger while she was mincing the corned beef. When we heard [that], we led a protest – led by moi and Helen – and we refused to eat the dinner that night.
We were aliens really because of our middle New Zealand backgrounds. I had been to a mixed school in our district where there was a big Maori population, 70 per cent of the population were Maori. On the first day at Epsom Girls ... there were 1100 to 1200 girls and I was overwhelmed by the size of the school, but we had day-girl friends who took us out, largely in the holidays for a week or so. As a friend [Helen] was my counter balance. We had a lot of fun. Politically our parents had similar views ... my parents were National Party, her parents were National Party. She could see things from very much a socialist point of view and disagreed with her parents. We had our minds and ears opened with different opinions at school from different teachers ...
We used to have fun, huge debates and huge talks about things, played Scrabble, played cards. We went to school dances together. They were pretty nauseating. We had dancing lessons at school so we'd be dancing with girls. Then the hostel had dances with Dilworth School boys and we'd dance with these poor little pimply boys ...! It gave us a chance to put on a little lipstick, and we thought that we were just Christmas, but the poor boys would squirm as they took us for a dance. They were more formal days of dancing. I remember learning the Maxima – it still rings in my ears those days of dancing. Then we danced with Mount Albert boys. We'd scurry outside and smoke with the boys rather than be ... forced to dance. That was a lot of fun. We danced with St Kentigern's boys, too, that was very nice.
We had limited pocket money, so we made our own clothes. We all sewed our own gowns, including ball gowns. We were allowed into Newmarket once every three weeks, once a month to John Courts in the city. Fortunately my parents had an account for me, and we picked out our colours, fabrics, patterns and set to, stitching up the gowns and having wonderful fun. She was very good at languages, Latin, German, top of the class. She went on to university and studied the language side of things at first. [Helen] really enjoyed the arts even though she wasn't good at art, she's no good at painting and I don't blame her for getting someone else to do her painting. Ha ha! I was good at art, I was a slob at sports. I was just a big fatty on the sideline and Helen was certainly good at hockey.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Helen Clark: Inside Stories by Claudia Pond Eyley, Dan Salmon. Copyright © 2015 Claudia Pond Eyley and Dan Salmon. Excerpted by permission of Auckland University Press.
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Table of Contents
Preface vii
List of figures ix
Timeline x
1 Country girl to left-wing liberal 1
2 Getting extremely involved in politics 23
3 Meeting Peter 33
4 MP for Mount Albert 45
5 In government and going nuclear free 61
6 Cabinet minister in a divided party 79
7 Tough years in opposition 97
8 Facing down a coup 115
9 Prime minister 129
10 The business of government 141
11 Media relations 165
12 A day in the life 179
13 Domestic reform and global independence 201
14 Race relations 213
15 2005: Election controversy and new coalition partners 233
16 A historic third term or third-term-itis? 249
17 End of an era 267
18 New York City 281
Biographies 299
Further reading 306
Index 308