The Enemy Within: The Human Cost of State Surveillance in Aotearoa/New Zealand

Abstract

In December 1955, young Maire aged ten and her brother Keith aged eleven accompanied their mother Elsie to a meeting of the William Morris Group, a Christchurch-based organisation intended to provide ‘art for the people and by the people’. Elsie Locke and her husband Jack were also members of the New Zealand Communist Party, and Elsie had been under continual surveillance by the New Zealand Police since she first joined the party in 1933. Special Branch opened files for Maire and Keith in December 1955, for, as the ‘red diaper babies’ of two communist parents, they themselves were already marked as persons of interest.