Nostalgic for a joyous Left
I WAS A CAPTAIN COOK MAN, Grant Robertson was a Robbie Burns man. If you know anything about the great student pubs of Dunedin in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, those allegiances should tell you a lot.
While I was at varsity, the “Cook” had a reputation for entertaining more than just students. While the “new” Dunedin hospital was being built in the 70s, the pub’s “Back Bar” was patronised by construction workers. In the years prior to the University Staff Club opening its doors, the Cook’s “Corner Bar” remained a watering hole for the more adventurous sort of academic. Trade union officials, especially those employed by the Hotel, Hospital and Restaurant Workers Union, could also be found in the Corner Bar, along with poets, Hone Tuwhare, Peter Olds and John Gibb. The artist Eion Stevens also drank there. Not forgetting the pool-players, tough guys one didn’t interrogate too closely – unless one was looking for something a little more interesting than alcohol.
Meaning that, if you drank at the Cook, especially downstairs, your horizons simply couldn’t fail to be broadened. Upstairs, where the bands played, might have been more recognisably studenty, but, if you kept your ears open in the Back and Corner Bars, you could learn at least as much as you were being taught in all those lecture theatres on the other side of the Museum Reserve.
The Robbie Burns was different. For a start, its clientele was nothing like so bohemian. Law students drank at the Robbie Burns – alongside the true crème-de-la-crème of the university scene, medical students. The “Robbie” – as everybody called it – was just that little bit more – what? ‘Refined’? No, that isn’t right. How about “self-consciously superior”? Yes, that will do. That will do nicely.
Oh, and I nearly forgot, the Robbie was where most of the student politicos drank. The presidents of the Otago University Students Association and their hangers-on – the Robbie was their pub. That’s why Grant Robertson (Otago University Students Association President in 1993) and his mates drank there. Like talked with like – and liked it. To say they learned nothing would be wrong, but they certainly didn’t learn as much as the students who drank downstairs at the Cook. Unsurprising, I suppose that all those budding journalists who worked on the student newspaper, Critic, generally preferred the Cook to the Robbie.
And all this is related to the looming 2023 general election – how? Nostalgia is fine, in its place, but what has drinking in the 70s, 80s, and 90s got to do with voting in the 2020s? Nothing at all, I suppose, unless you’re willing to see those two Dunedin pubs as peculiar prefigurements, strange and symbolic representations, of what the New Zealand Left used to be, and what it has become. Because what could be more like the sprawling and rambunctious labour movement of the 1970s and 80s than the downstairs bars of the Captain Cook Tavern? And what could more resemble the preening, superior, student-politician-dominated Left of 2023, than the up-itself, yuppified, Robbie Burns Hotel of the 80s and 90s?
A party purporting to represent the people cannot be anything like the prissy affair of ambitious back-biters that the Labour Party and (God help them!) the Greens have become.
Entering a genuine left-wing political party should be like entering the Cook on a Friday night. It should be buzzing with conversations and barking with arguments. One should have as much chance of encountering a burly construction-worker, full of choice epithets for those with soft hands and even softer heads, as a Māori poet, a philosophy lecturer, and a Marxist union activist. A peoples party should, like the Cook, be a place to get educated, inspired, intoxicated and (if you’re lucky) seduced. You should walk out of a peoples party ready to change the world, your place in it, and, if you’ve met the right sort of leftists, your opinions.
What a people’s party can never be is a collection of cliques, where like meets like and no one else. Where newcomers are assessed with a calculating eye and a closed mind. Where the only trick worth learning is how to separate the mere seekers after power from the smug possessors of it. A true people’s party is full of smiles and snarls – not smirks. Its members speak freely and argue passionately – not in conformity with the current orthodoxy. When people’s party comrades finish arguing, they buy each other a beer – they do not sell each other out, or dob each other in. A people’s party welcomes and involves, it does not exclude and punish.
Of course the Cook – as I remember it – is nowhere to be found in the Dunedin of 2023. The building still stands, it’s a pizza parlour now with electronic games. But the city – and the country – that made it possible for the Cook’s earlier incarnation to thrive, no longer exists. The New Zealand of 50 years ago, or even 30 years ago, was an altogether different country, they did things differently then.
The New Zealand Left, or at least the Left I encountered in the 1970s – and fought for across the 1980s and 90s – has, like the Cook, also ceased to exist. What killed it? The debilitating fear of freedom which is the inescapable companion of societies that devote themselves entirely to the pursuit of power and money, and construe the absence of these prizes as proof of culpable incapacity. In societies such as ours has become, there is no tolerance for sprawling, or brawling, or carousing. All ends are closed, all destinations known, all opinions pre-approved, all conduct scrutinised and judged.
If you can believe it, the University of Otago, alarmed by the twenty-first century student body’s predilection for drunkenness and couch-burning, bought up most of the great student pubs – and shut them down. The last time I was in Dunedin, however, I noticed that the Robbie Burns had somehow survived. It was being refurbished, brought up-to-date. Its owners were promising “Emerson’s on tap”.
The thought occurred to me that New Zealand itself has become the Robbie writ large – a place where only the crème-de-la-crème feel entirely at home. Ours is increasingly a nation of the anxious and the embittered. A country which has not only forgotten how to fight, but also no longer remembers how to have fun.
What New Zealand, and the New Zealand Left, needs most is a rollickingly good Friday night at the Cook, as it was, and, with just a little bit of luck, and a lot of courage, could be again.
Chris Trotter is New Zealand’s leading leftwing political commentator, with 30 years of experience writing professionally about New Zealand politics. He now writes regularly for the Democracy Project, producing his column “From the Left”.
Chris, you are showing your age, you young chap. Back in the 60s, the Bowler (aka Bowling Green hotel) was where we drank. That building now houses university departments.
The Cook was full of rugby head BComs by the 90s and not much of a lefty hang out.
The Ori was my local and my I could tell some stories. None of which are political.
So, unfortunately, was the whole university. The rot truly set in when BComs began to outnumber the students enrolled for BAs.
Roger Douglas has a lot to answer for.
I would agree with that
Parents had 1acre of vegetable farm in a small SI town. Aware as a kid, summer crop sales would barely pay off the overdraft built up during winter. It was real Denis Glover, Tom and Elizabeth stuff.
Mum forced me to go to Uni after school. To a naive kid from the sticks who’d never heard of class war etc it was eye-opening. Early 70s, Vic Uni, Salient articles, were diatribes, gutter language, and the Salient staff seemed at each other’s throats as to whether Maoist or Soviet aligned. Infantile, and as land owners, my indigent parents, were the enemy, of these so called supporters of the poor and oppressed. There were attempts to get us students to head down from our lofty ivory towers and join oppressed workers on Friday night marches in Willis Street. All of which workers were much better off than my supposedly “capitalist” parents. It was confusing but I sensed condescension in the attitudes and behaviours of these leftist student leaders.
Cooks and Stewards used to hire students to work on ferries in Christmas holiday period, compulsory unionism of course and the union head on Aranui was the biggest crook ordering us student workers to carry boxes of food from rail decks up to his cabin.
Few years later (1980) I hired a van to take my few belongings from Wellington to Blenheim. At the Kaiwharawhara terminal waiting to board, a union wharfie threatened to not allow me to board because by self-moving with my little hire van I was taking work away from workers in the removal industry. Truly petty, and frightening, power-play.
So I tend towards cynicism wrt rose tinted recollections of socialist past rosier times, it is all variations on a theme of power and dominance. It was always thus. No answers sorry, just giving a view from another angle.
I see.
So never really a leftie at all then…
Houtman, that’s an interesting background that shapes your views. As a young person from a middle class family I did lots of manual work (waterblasted a cathedral, made beds, tanned hides, cut up meat, poured metal, drove trucks, cut up fish, packed glass etc). The issue is those job types have diminished or gone. I’d criticise the current Left for their lack of awareness of what working life is, but there again I don’t stand behind a coffee machine all day so maybe I’m out of touch.
Years spent in commerce running operations might have made me turn Right, but no, you don’t forget your origins just as most farmers will always vote National.
What worries me most about today’s Left and Right is that both sides are indistinguishable and prefer to prattle about identity minutae as opposed to real issues such as child poverty. I see no vision nor a concrete path to achieve it.
Thanks Nick and JS. Was trying in muddled way, to say, not a fan of left -right distinctions it feels like a tribal game to me; and; unions used to have a lot of power when they were compulsory, power corrupts, so (no) surprise, unions had corruption back then.
As I said, no answers sorry.
Chris! That was bloody brilliant!
It encapsulates perfectly my feelings for the current version of the left. I refer to them as ‘Persons who don’t know how to start a lawn mower’ which far less elegant than your images of The Cook.
This current abomination claiming to represent workers are more likely to ‘attend’ the ballet, sip white wine in art galleries and throw random Maori nouns into English sentences just to show how PC they are. Few have done a day of manual work.
In my youth in the UK the left were men. Men who had survived the Great Depression, fought their way across half the world in WW2 and were hoping for a better future. They knew a few things. They fought fascism not only overseas but also Mosely’s fascists in the East End of London. They will be turned in their graves to see the modern left actively promoting racial segregation.
Thanks once again Chris – you have your finger on the pulse.
I don’t think the NZ/AO left are promoting apartheid. Maori need to have more say in keeping the country safe from the depredations of unfettered capitalism. They appear to be the only ones who can gather together for mutual self-help. Pakeha are too fractured, and the middle class who have been socially ambitious have become merely bourgeoisie not enlightened, educated and self-actualised.
They are caught between these two perspectives::
1 Social ambition aims to create a better world and in a better world society will be nurtured, humanity will thrive and provide positive growth.
and
2 Social ambition aims to create a better world and in a better world society will be nurtured, humanity will thrive and provide positive growth.
I don’t think sensitivity and concern for the viability of the country and respect for all the citizens regardless of their wealth and status; plus the encircling tendency shown by Maori, can be found amongst Pakeha. It is my surmise that Maori will over-react to having more power but if a balanced, careful approach could be taken, not forgetting that we had already achieved much mutual understanding, the change from the decision-making cabal at present, and the desire of pakeha neoliberals to appear to be concerned about indigenous people’s rights and wellbeing might carry us forward despite various problems that will arise.
This sounds nebulous but we have destroyed the slightly firmer society that previously functioned. Seeing neolibs are such smart-arses in their opinion, we shouldn’t take much notice of their certainties now, after their successful achievement of making the largest smoothie containing everything of this country ever conjured up.
Got my link wrong for No2 in social ambition – this is comparative to Nio1.
Personal vs Social Ambitions – Ikigai Coaching
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18/03/2018 —
It’s social ambition, the desire to achieve something in society. Let it be a prestigious job, an expensive car or an important social status.
So, you really think Māori are “gathered together”? If you knew more about the goings-on among Māori, you’d know they’re often at each other’s throat over Treaty claims and utu from historic grievances.
And you also seem to assume Māori aren’t capitalist. Most strange when noting the extreme acquisitiveness of the larger tribes when it comes to grabbing any and all assets under the cover of the Treaty.
100% + Correct Douglas & Prebble shafted the Labour Party and the NZ Public with their Neoliberal Agenda and the Sale of State Assets which had been paid for by our forebears.
Yes the sale of state assets. They sold the assets and gave the money to the banks. At least in the disintegrated Soviet Union the state asset shares were given directly to the workers.
I’m sure the Cook felt like a broad church left Chris – but was it? Were the arguments always joyous and civil, was there no-one there who wanted to lord it over others, did no-one think themselves intellectually or morally superior to anyone else? If so, it was a bar full of angels, not humans. And would outright racists have been welcomed into these joyous discussions – or indeed, it being the 1970’s, how many of the animated talkers and thinkers themselves held opinions about Maori in those pre-Waitangi Tribunal days that were perhaps a tad unsavoury? And were women included as equals in the joyous atmosphere and no-one ever sneered at gays and all the guys with kids got home to help cook dinner or the kids with their homework?
You have written some good history in the past like No Left Turn which is still on my shelves and faded from the sun. It has resisted periodic purges of my old books because with books, like people, one hangs onto emotional favourites and repositories of memory. You are capable of clear vision and nuance – better than this. The left has many challenges and we all want a broad church organised around unshakeable principles but with flex and tolerance of variation and robust civility. It has always been hard to achieve, there was no ideal past.