Posts by ChrisW
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Were the Kirks Catholics?
Norm was of a Salvation Army family, then (dnzb) -
In time his adherence to the Salvation Army faltered; no other religion replaced it, although Kirk respected several, particularly Catholicism, mainly because of contact with colleagues and bishops whom he met and liked.
Ruth Kirk - not sure, but they married in an Anglican church so doubt it.
Not that broad-minded in the social sense, a curate's egg it might once have been said.
Three months after the election and contrary to prior commitments he cancelled the 1973 Springbok tour to NZ. His tone of confident, honest sincerity in accounting for his change of mind - police advice that it would be hard to control the strife and he decided the damage to society would not be worth whatever principles were involved - was most impressive and memorable. What a contrast to Muldoon and 1981.
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Ah well, thanks for trying Damian (and Brenda). Now I'll just have to insist my memory was accurate, but guess you had to be there.
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Damian, was 1970s TV news or specific items thereof routinely archived, or was it haphazardly chancy?
Norm Kirk despatching the frigate HMNZS Otago to protest the French nuclear bomb tests at Moruroa was stirring, but I’ve no memory of his speech on the day being covered on TV news, although it is referenced as a particularly significant point in our developing nationhood. What I do remember is an interview with the commander of the frigate, perhaps on the eve of departure (25 June 1974) which stunned me at the time, but I’ve never seen/heard any reference to it since. Went something like this – I think on the wharf with the ship as back-drop –
Interviewer: “Commander Tyrrell, I understand you witnessed a number of nuclear bomb tests in the western Pacific in the 1950s, so you would have a better idea than most of us of the awesome power of these weapons. Tell me, what do you think of the possibility that nuclear weapons might be used in warfare?”
Commander Tyrell: “Wa- aaall, I don’t think it’s very goood, really. I mean, one doesn’t have a sporting charnce if they start lobbing one of those things at you!” This in manner and accent finely caricaturing an English officer-class twit, but in keeping with the era and attitude that I had thought ended in the middle stages of World War I. Clearly not.
I’d dearly like to see this again, test my memory – and bracketed with an extract from Norm Kirk’s speech “We are a small nation, but in the interests of justice we claim the attention of the world ...”, it would be good TV in your tight format. But perhaps you’d have to find an excuse to bring it forward, if not waiting till the end of June?
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Just a minor detail Craig, suggest focus on the main argument and allow GG one slip-up (that the spiritual connection to land may be more commonly expressed in Maori than in many other peoples in no way implies it is absent in all other peoples).
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I thought too the phrase from the Labour ad, "round the corner of the seventies" (or similar), was a curious coinage. Was it a common-place phrase from the time, or an attempt to describe the novelty of the new decade?
Certainly not a common-place, a puzzling one to me too. On reflection, I think it was saying: Here in the 1970s we're about to take off in a new direction. We're at a pivot point. A watershed, with the image of a ridge or dividing line (rather than the US version of catchment area). So indeed a curious coinage that didn't take.
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That's a concentrated few minutes of TV history large and small there, a great selection.
Connecting the 1972 Labour campaign ad, with Norm Kirk bounding up the steps to Parliament, to the anniversary of his death of heart failure etc less than two years later 31 August 1974 - that seems especially poignant. The sighs and what-ifs of history.
I remember the feel of the ad well, make things happen, the sense of dynamism, split screens pretty classy. But now I see such anomalies as using a shot of Maraetai Dam completed 20 years before to help convey that dynamism. And that song - Rob Guest? - a splendid period piece -
We’ve a country that’s old enough to have a past to turn to
And yet young enough to have a future we ourselves can make.
Round the corner of the seventies,
A new decade to understand the part that every one of us must undertake.
Make things happen ’cause it’s your turn now,
It’s too late to turn your back, the future’s here right now.
Make things happen, this year.That election pretty important to me then, just turned 20 which was newly the voting age, also the basis of balloting for Compulsory Military Training and my birthday had been picked out of the barrel. So, it was time for a change, and things really did happen - military involvement in Viet Nam and Compulsory Military Training ended by Cabinet decision at their first meeting.
All that and the mysteries of white dog poo too!
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Don't you guys have a magazine in your house?
Yes, "Library" was once an honest euphemism for toilet too, in honour of the magazine rack therein. Best Americanism - "where's the euphemism?"
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An increasing number of real estate agents now talk about "powder rooms" instead of toilets in their ads.
How strange - that's the last room I'd think of confronted by that name, "keeping one's powder dry" and all that. Or might it refer to the explosive power of the powder, nicely connecting back to the traditional "thunder box"?
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Yes, this week's Listener's letters – online version only - is extended with this substantial article by two of the specialist advisers to the Cartwright inquiry, Professors Linda Holloway and Charlotte Paul of Dunedin School of Medicine. It looks thorough in comprehensively demolishing Linda Bryder’s analysis of what Green was doing in researching/managing ‘carcinoma-in-situ’.
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Thanks Jeremy for bringing this thread back to the surface, rescuing Bart's post for the airing it deserves, especially the positivity of
by doing smart stuff we can improve NZ’s economy at the same time as reducing emissions.
I'd emphasise too that the cost of taking action to reduce net emissions must in all cases be assessed relative to a baseline not of business as usual, but one of increasing climatic adversity and difficulty in marketing our products in a hostile world if we were perceived as not pulling our weight.
This applies especially to farm production, so Bart, I'm uneasy on your reference to the danger of screwing over our farmers. Sure there's plenty scope for debate on the mechanisms, but successive governments have bent over backwards to avoid and delay impacting farmers. FedFarmer leadership is lacking, or totally mis-directed - the literally backward-looking "fart tax" bullshit is always just under the surface.
And I kindof think China will end up leading the world in green energy and just about everything else, based on the economics and energy of their numbers and their harnessing the US’s historic advantages of huge internal market-empire-frontier.