inside outside world

Today I remained inside my house for the entire day, excepting feeding the chooks twice and hanging washing out once. The purpose was to keep my children inside in the warm and to cosset and coddle my son out of his wheezing into improved health.

I will not even pretend it did great things for my sanity. The children were fine, within the usual realms of children challenges. Once again, the problem was the house. I need to leave the house. Every day.

So while I was inside more than ever, no longer discussing the financial literacy of the nation's youth with the local MP but instead teaching two young children how to share, then insisting on the sharing, more times than any non-parent might imagine.

I sneaked in some reading, but although I am enjoying Catcher in the Rye, the endless monologue of a depressed teenager isn't hugely uplifting. I read the weekend papers almost exhaustively, ignoring the milk spilt on them and blocking out the origins of the green shrek toothpaste smeared throughout my daughter's hair. I read about the woman behind a new book called Love in a Headscarf and found her blog. Spirit21 is my new must-read, a British Muslim woman thinking and analysing and living outside the square. Her header says it all:

'They built me a box to live in and painted my
caricature inside.
They said "this is you".
I said no thank you, I'd rather be me'

In my inbox today, the electronic version of the latest magazine of the (NZ) Labour History Project, formerly known as the Trade Union History Project. One of the best articles in this magazine was by David Grant on Mark Briggs and Archibald Baxter, conscientious objectors in World War One. Whereas Baxter wrote a wonderful memoir which I recall reading as a teenager (partly while in detention ha ha ha), Briggs was an ordinary working class man whose life has not received much attention until now. I copy here Grant's final two paragraphs from the article:

Mark Briggs will be best remembered for his experiences during
the First World War, and rightly so. I contend that Briggs was not a hero but
an ‘ordinary’ man caught up in extraordinary circumstances, events that
he faced with enormous moral courage. He and the other transported
objectors were tortured in varying degrees in the most astonishing incidence
of State-sanctioned cruelty in this country’s history. Forcibly taking the
14 men, without warning, to the front line to cure them of their
insensibility represented the nadir in the State’s bigotry towards legitimate
dissent. Twelve of the 14 succumbed to the army’s wishes, some in the most
trying of circumstances. In a poignant irony, one, William Little, was
killed within 18 days of becoming a stretcher bearer.

Baxter and Briggs prevailed, making them New Zealand’s
first successful dissenters, succeeding against all odds in a young,
immature, subservient, insecure and martial society that feared
nonconformity, even more so under the stresses of war. They stood at the apex
of the State’s intolerance towards such dissent. They are key in our
tradition of anti-militarism that includes Moriori leader Nunuku-whenua;
Taranaki’s Te Whiti o Rongomai and Tohu Kakahi; the brave young working class
men mostly from the West Coast and Canterbury who protested against
compulsory military training when it was first introduced in 1911; the
anti-conscriptionists of World War One; other pacifists before and in the
early days World War Two, and the myriad of antiwar activists who emerged in
the nuclear age. Briggs and particularly Baxter (through his book) became
heroes to many of these later activists. They are exemplars of the cause of
war resistance in this country, men of courage, spirit and principle, to be
lauded in the same breath as Te Whiti, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and
Nelson Mandela.

Grant also has a book out on these men and I'll be down at my local library making sure they have it/have it on order later this week. The Labour History Project website is here. Here on the Coast we have our very own labour history project and this is our website for the Blackball Working Class History Museum.

And the garden? I read in the (Christchurch, NZ) Press in the weekend an article by some uber-capitalist stockmarket enthusiast bemoaning people becoming hysterical about the market and planting vegetables instead of shopping. Like women who ask too many questions, lets paint sensible people who aren't conforming to the way the big boys want us to bail them out by describing them (me, probably 'us) as 'hysterical'.

I didn't get to get my hands dirty today, but I did consider the view from the study window. Since I moved the temporary chook shelter, I get a much better view of the far corner where we have planted cabbage trees over our children's buried placentas and a few blackcurrant bushes. The chooks have been clearing this area nicely and I think there is room for a plum tree this winter and - given how I get to see it so well from my computer now - some spring bulbs.

Use up the cupboard, men's housework

I'm less only half way through the my four week cupboard challenge and I'm already feeling rather tedious chronicling the cupboards which never give in.

Today: a triple batch of oat bread. I'm still only half way through the treacle jar and half way through the Surebake yeast jar. Blimey. Obviously if we were very poor with no new money coming in each fortnight, these things would appear to be running out scarily quickly. But we're not. I bought three loaf tins off Trademe (NZ equivalent of Ebay) earlier this year when I started to get into bread making again (last phase: 1995). It's no more work making three loaves of bread than making one and if they freeze well, then we might be saying goodbye to spending around $20 on bread each week. My oven would fit one more loaf tin on the rack so if I can get another off Trademe (I want an old one, not a new non-stick surface one), then I'll experiment with making quadruple batches of bread.

Then double chocolate muffins. I didn't even notice the container full of chocolate chips when I did the cupboard audit. Granted it was under my pile of clean resusable kitchen cloths, but still. Fionn asked for something chocolatey and we did indeed find and then make something chocolately.

Separate topic. I'm doing some Favourite Handyman jobs tonight. His turn for the flu so I've brought two basketloads of wood in for tonight's fire. At the history of labourism day I went to at Easter in Blackball, Neville Bennett (retired University of Canterbury history lecturer who introduced me to some very interesting schools of historical thought when I was an undergraduate) spoke about housework as the key means that working class people survived. He mentioned not just the usual female domestic stuff which I've read about forever it seems (valid though it is). He also talked about men catching rabbits, chopping wood, mending things. Today I was reflecting that much discussion about how women's domestic work keeps families going in poor times, particularly in previous generations in NZ, is in a suburban context. Urbanisation has taken many male 'housework' jobs out. Certainly in London when our home was gas heated, Favourite Handyman had no extra burden of work in winter.

Not that I'm suggesting that such roles must be gender prescribed. Just thinking that in times past they have been and I'm sure I'm not the only feminist to find herself at home looking after children, doing washing and cooking meals because they largely have to be done during hours before breadwinner gets home and then opting against also taking on wood chopping and fire lighting. Oh and I pass on the job of emptying the mousetrap. Cos yes we do kill mice in our house. Every single one we can.

Three women of Blackball

On Easter Sunday I listened to a number of speakers on subjects relating to working class activism, many of them on historical topics. Brian Wood had read out the names of nearly 170 men who were on the 1908 Blackball cribtime strike list the day before and yet by the end of the weekend I still had heard the names of only two Blackball women and them in passing.

The fire of old rose in me. A shadow of the endlessly obsessed historian of women's lives of the early and mid 1990s, but a sign that the fire had never gone out. I have set myself the goal of finding the names and something of the lives of three actual Blackball women over the next few months, and writing it up for May Day celebrations in Blackball in 1909. Drawing on the methods I developed (ha! stumbled upon by just looking at everything I could lay my hands and eyes on until I worked out what archival wonders had the best yields) when writing my MA thesis on women and the liquor industry on the Central Otago goldfields, I plan to look for women through the lens of booze. There will be a temperance list to look at somewhere I suppose as well.

For those outside of New Zealand, New Zealand was the first country to grant women the right to vote in national elections in 1893. This legislation was won on the back of the temperance movement, powerfully supported by the Women's Christian Temperance Union. My thesis challenged the dichotomy that women = good and booze = bad and good women didn't run pubs. Some very fine and successful women did exactly that in Central Otago. I had a great time researching the wild women, the drinkers and the sly grog sellers, as well.

Once I've got the temperance list out of the way, I'll be onto my favourite stuff. Court records for drunkenness arrests. Liquor licensing records. Newspaper reports relating to booze and boozers. I think much of it may be at the Christchurch branch of National Archives but am hopeful that I can make a start on the West Coast.

This is going to cut into gardening time. I might even use some of the student nanny's visit to get started. oooooooh I must be fired up to use gardening time for an indoor pursuit.

A story from Central Otago

Once upon a time, soon after World War Two, the good people of the New Zealand Broadcasting Service took their huge truck around parts of New Zealand, recording interviews with people they met. This was hot new technology, developed during the war. One of their trips was through Central Otago, an intensely beautiful and also harsh landscape. Although it's now famous for wine and skiing, it used to be famous for gold. So the people interviewed in the 1950s were mostly as old as possible, sons and daughters of the earliest white settlers.

These physically enormous tapes (made of acetate) are of great value to linguists who are interested in researching the origins of the New Zealand accent. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time when the very wonderful Elizabeth Gordon of the University of Canterbury was looking for a history researcher to find out more about the interviewees from these tapes and to interview and record their descendants. Which is how I got to spend ages in libraries in Otago and Wellington and to drive round Central Otago looking up tiny museums and interviewing descendants of the interviewees. Along the way I fell in love.

With this:
So I went on to do my MA on women in the liquor industry on the nineteenth century goldfields of Central Otago. Which meant I got to go back there. New Zealand women won the right to vote in general elections in 1893 on the back of the temperance movement which argued that the woman's vote was a vote for temperance. Throughout the same period, parliamentary debate on liquor licensing often focused on the question: did a woman behind the bar raise the tone of a drinking establishment, or were hotels so corrupting that women had to be protected (read: prohibited) from running them? What I found on the goldfields was a much wider range of experiences. Wonderful, fabulous women running very astute hotel businesses. Degenerate lushes causing a stir with their drunkenness on a regular basis. Inventive women running sly grog shanties which turned into peppermint tea houses when the police came to call - at 3am.

Here on the West Coast I'm back in old goldfields country again, which I quite like.

So what has this got to do with anything? I just can't separate my life story from this idea of growing an activist. Growing an activist has just been me growing. I wasn't born difficult I'm told, (it started when I was about six according to my Dad). I've been fortunate, extremely fortunate, to have had many opportunities to get inside the heads of other inspiring people. And I love the stories of all people. And so I thought I'd share this little box of my history.

I will go back to history again some day. I may yet do more work recording the stories of our living taonga, the elderly men and women of our community. I won't do it for money from the elderly though. That's not giving dignity to the silent in our community. And giving the silent, the quiet, the underheard, a voice, a la Paulo Friere, is something I think is really worthwhile.