Scabs, bombers and a spider weaving its web
Many have compared Covid’s divide to the winter of ’81. On the 40th anniversary of the Springbok tour it is easy to analogise family division, broken friendships and community hostility. Seldom mentioned however, has been another anniversary of social discord. It's 70 years since the great strike/lockout of 1951. It remains New Zealand’s biggest industrial confrontation, one that created schisms in towns and communities that lasted for decades. My siblings, Don and Gair McRae were children at the time of the strike and shared some of their recollections of the splitting of a town. Gair: We were a mining family and we had moved from Puketihi in the King Country to the Waikato coalfield in 1949. Puketihi had been pretty much idyllic for us children. Literally half the families in the village were relatives. We were a big but tight clan, and us kids looked after each other, played at each other’s homes and in the bush. Dad was already influential in the King Country miners’ unio