Personalizing Class Conflict Across the Tasman: the New Zealand Great Strike and Trans-Tasman Biography

Abstract

This is a revisionist account of the New Zealand 1913 Great Strike, placing it in a trans-Tasman framework rather than, as is more usual, local and international contexts. It uses the bitter relationship between Harry Holland and Billy Hughes to personalize and dramatize the wider dynamic between the New Zealand and Australian labour movements around 1913. It contests the view that that the Tasman world was dying or that New Zealanders’ resented ‘Australian intervention’ in the strike. Affective bonds which did not always match trading partnerships indicate the closeness of New Zealand and Australia peoples as indicated by a range of measures such as population exchange, the exchange of parcels in the mail and the strong push for trans-Tasman union and socialist federation. The effect of the 1913 Great Strike followed closely by the war was, however, to destroy the dream of a trans- Tasman ‘One Big Union’.