International Socialists

The other side of the story

The Ballad of Fifty-one
Bill Sewell
(Wellington: Headworx, 2003)
$19.95

Reviewed by Dougal McNeill

The best political poetry manages its task in the best of both words, its argument so closely bound to the sound and rhythm of the work you can almost stop realising an argument is taking place. Ideas, propaganda, and commitment: in the best works of political verse these are the motivating and driving energies of the art, not some didactic afterthought. The Ballad of Fifty-one, a collection of loosely connected poems centred around the 1951 Waterfront Lockout, is a superb example of this type of writing. Published shortly after Wellington poet Bill Sewell’s premature death, it is a testament not only to his impressive and considerable talents as an artist but also to the drama and inspiration of the story of the Lockout itself.

These are poems confident of their place in the world and in the struggle. Although there are many minor points to quarrel with in their historical arguments it is obvious they are treasures for our side. In his preface Sewell makes this clear:

These poems make no attempt to be even handed. While they recognise the wharfies were no angels, they place the blame for the crisis squarely where the bulk of it belongs: with the National Government, the employers, and the economic forces they represented.

Sewell captures brilliantly the air of vague menace and escalation leading up to the confrontation, when Holland’s National government was determined to smash the Watersiders’ Union as a warning for all working people. He writes of the class tensions, conflicts and misinformation informing the seemingly quiet and conservative 1950s, where “beneath the sand, under the skin / something is rank and it smells to high heaven” (“High Summer”). For Sewell, post-51 New Zealand is left “in an innocence that reeked / of guilt” (“The Legacy”), and the lies, violence and basic attacks on democratic freedoms which the government employed to beat the watersiders all receive savage treatment in satirical poems.

The jargon and official phrases of repression all get their proper treatment – quoting Holland that there is an “enemy within” Sewell goes on to define this enemy as “your next door neighbour… / with his cabbages”! (“The Enemy Within”). As the Bush regime and its cronies turn language for their own ends over the “war on terror” these poems make topical reading.

The Ballad of Fifty-one is by no means socialist literature, and Sewell’s claim that Jock Barnes had “his head in the sand” (“Fuzz”) is historically questionable to say the least. But these poems are inspired by a marvellous sense of anger at the unjust depictions of watersiders, which still have currency today. Playing with the still common idea that the workers were lazy one poems ends that the work was “easy as…/ falling off a log. / Or being felled by one” (“Easy Money”) and the scumbag cartoonist of the New Zealand Herald gets a poem all to himself with the wonderful stanza:

No wonder that forty years after the fact
we scooped up the same lies,
applauding the objectivity he lacked
and its rollicking disguise 
(“The Cartoonist”).

Some of the poems relying on full rhyme and regular metre are a bit too obvious to enjoy, and Sewell can over-egg the pudding with metaphor and “blokey” speech. But he is capable of some wonderful lines (“a twist in the tide, the slop of the swell” stuck in my head, “By Ships We Live”). There are also fun moments, and some familiar lines of verse get quoted in clever ways. Sewell turns phrases upside down in “Modes of Resistance” where “Not I but another / scooped down in the hold” and “let time be still” is followed by the – perfectly reasonable – modification of “or at least stretch in to overtime.”

The Ballad of Fifty-one is a brilliant example of the kind of verse our side needs – filled with a sense of history but alive to the impact and importance of the present, political but not preachy and, above all, entertaining in its examples of the pleasures learning and thinking offer us in the struggle to understand and change the world. New Zealand literature has lost a powerful and exciting talent.