He was the banker who became a farmer who became the president of rural lobby organisation Federated Farmers.

Now, a year down the track, Bruce Wills says he is very encouraged with the progress made since he was elected in July last year.

Mr Wills spent more than 20 years in the banking industry before the opportunity arose for him to return to the family farm, Trelinnoe, on which he grew up, to farm in partnership with his brother, Scott, eight years ago. . .

Professor excited about new role – Sally Rae:

Professor Claire Massey’s new role as director of agrifood business at Massey University brings together her interest in entrepreneurship and her agricultural background.

And it is a job that she could not be happier about. “I’m so excited about it, I really, really am,” she told the Otago Daily Times recently.

Brought up on a dairy farm at Karaka, near Auckland, she is also the great-granddaughter of former prime minister William Ferguson Massey, and the university’s namesake. . .

Farm database grows:

Two farm industry groups are joining the national farm database FarmsOnLine.

From September Ovis Management Ltd (OML) and Johne’s Management Ltd (JML) will share their farmer contact details with the database.

“This is the information that we already use in our work to manage and control sheep measles and Johne’s Disease in sheep and deer,” says OML/JML joint chairman Geoff Neilson, Dunedin. . .

North Island overtakes South Island as sheep central:

Federated Farmers is welcoming Beef+Lamb NZ’s Economic Service confirming declines in the national sheep flock and beef herd may now be at an end. It also confirms the North Island has become the dominant island for both sheep and beef.

“It shows what a couple of good back to back seasons can do for stock numbers and morale,” observed Jeanette Maxwell, Federated Farmers Meat & Fibre chairperson. . .

University Honours farmer:

Lincoln University has recognised the efforts of South Canterbury dairy farmer Alvin Reid, who’s given many years service to the university.

Mr Reid farms at Winchester, just north of Temuka, and has been awarded the Lincoln University Medal.

He has interests in five dairy and dry stock properties covering 1300 hectares.

Some years ago I was investigating the influence of Ulster protestants on our history and their contribution to the creation of modern New Zealand.  I can’t remember the exact figures now, but if my memory serves me correctly, Ulster protestants were the single largest group of immigrants to New Zealand in the period before WWI, something around 16% of the total amount of migrants from the UK.  And New Zealand politics was dominated by two Ulster men, Sir Joseph Ward (Melbourne born of Irish parents) and William Ferguson Massey, for the first thirty years of last century.  Ward was a Catholic and less successful electorally than the Protestant Massey, with the latter our second longest serving Prime Minister (1912 to 1925).

With a reasonable appreciation of their own history of displacement – Ulster protestants are mainly descended from Scots non-conformist settler farmers deprived of land in their native Scotland and interposed between an English Anglican colonising elite and the Irish Catholic masses – they must have arrived in New Zealand and found themselves in a very similar position.  The middle-men in the colonial ‘game’ of dispossession of the locals.  (In the twenty years between 1860 and 1880, Maori went from numerical parity with the settler/invader/colonists to being outnumbered 10 to 1.)  So, it was similar to their historical experience in Ulster other than they, along with other migrants, were significantly in the majority.  There were two purpose built settlements in Katikati and Lake Ellesmere but Ulster protestants quickly settled throughout the country with one of their number, Massey, becoming Prime Minister in 1912.  Massey’s politics were conservative, rural-based, hostile to organised labour and imperial in disposition – herewith the origins of the National party.  And during WWI, Massey demonstrated the familiar Ulster middle-man temperament, trading access to the UK for NZ’s farm produce in exchange for lick-spittle support of the UK’s war aims.  To some extent, the two ‘sides’ of NZ politics emerged strongly during the Massey period; Labour, the urban masses and the unions on one side, rural interests and urban elites bound by hostility to the former on the other.  I wonder to what extent the sides that emerged from the 1981 Springbok tour were a latter day echo of the Massey ‘Cossacks’ era, turning on the fulcrum of the 1951 waterfront lock-out?

But what has this to do with my brother’s negativity?  I would suggest that a defining feature of Ulster protestant values in New Zealand is a brittle sourness.  You work hard and hope to get ahead and resent it when this doesn’t follow.  You personalise yor failure rather than looking to systemic causes.  You also tend to resent anyone who gets ahead through means other than having worked as hard as you, so you resent all self-perpetuating elites, particularly those rich and lazy Australians with all their minerals lying around.  You keep your head down and to yourself.  You are hostile to anything smacking of people getting too big for their boots.  You value hard physical labour, particularly if it involves farming.  You know what you are against but it gets less clear if asked to say what you’re for, other than the right to be left alone from anything sounding like a nanny state.  In essence, they are values that have never matured beyond knowing, deep down inside, that you are, if truth be told, an interloper, a middle-man, an instrument used by others to achieve their aims, and that someone might take it away from you; that one day, you will have to fight someone to stop them taking it away from you.  You have got something out of the deal too, no doubt about that, but you have had to work hard for it.  No-one has given you anything for free and you have never asked for it.  You just don’t understand the hand-out mentality, why can’t people pull themselves up by their boot straps like you and yours?  No wonder there is a sourness to it all, and no wonder it is brittle.  And I think it infects the national character of the hundreds of thousands, if not a million or two, of New Zealanders who have an Ulster protestant background, like my brother and I do.  It is not a particularly happy culture.  And it is to be contrasted with the other cultures bouncing around New Zealand that seem happier and more joyous.  For it is a mistake to assume that the Ulster culture exists in a vacuum, no, it competes for adherents in a mixed market.  But we are what we are, and change comes slowly.

So, how can one avoid channelling one’s inner Ulster?  I doubt there is a ready cure for it.  We insure against the possibility of defeat by glumly expecting it.  I know I have already started to play with idea of losing to South Africa in the semi-final or seeing the Wallabies walk off with the tiny little gold cup that is the William Webb Ellis trophy.  Sacrilege?  Perhaps, but such thoughts might actually assist in managing something less than winning.

In writing this piece I was not aware, until quite well into it, that in seeking an explanation based on my superficial understanding of Ulster protestants in New Zealand, I was proving my case, conforming to the stereotype.  I was seeking answers by turning inwards, mulling over the guilty entrails of my ancestors who helped themselves to the country without being invited.  I have, inadvertently, revealed much about my own relationship to my descendants and inherited culture and if one looks at those who will be wearing the All Black jersey, I doubt that more than one or two, share it.  So, if they do not win, I will understand very little about why this has happened but once again turn inwards seeking comfort by channelling my inner Ulster.

The historian Dr. James Watson recently published a biography of the former Prime Minister of New Zealand, William Ferguson Massey. Massey was born in my hometown of Limavady in 1856 and emigrated to New Zealand in 1870, quickly establishing himself as a leading politician in the Reform Party, a right-wing party representing the interests of large landowners. I am not one for sentimental localism and, whilst I understand there is a deal of pride in Limavady producing a man who became the Prime Minister of a country and played a role in the Paris Peace Conference, I must admit that the celebration of Massey leaves me cold.

Let me state from the outset that my objections to Massey have nothing to do with his Unionism, nor his membership of the Orange Order. In 2008, Sinn Fein carried these sorts of objections to a ridiculous degree by proposing the removal of the statue of Massey outside the Limavady Borough Council offices. Massey is an historical figure with strong roots to the town so I thought this idea to be ridiculous.

No, my objections stem rather from a number of incidents which occurred during Massey’s premiership with regards to the trade union movement in New Zealand. Massey became Prime Minister in 1912, in the middle of a period of serious industrial unrest not only in New Zealand but in the United States, Britain (the ‘Great Unrest’ after which this blog is named) and Ireland, with the Dublin Lock-Out of 1913 standing out as one of the defining moments of Irish trade unionism. In New Zealand, as with elsewhere, much of this unrest was led by proponents of revolutionary syndicalism. James Connolly for instance had recently returned to Ireland from the US, having been an organizer for the syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and Tom Mann, veteran of the great London Dock Strike of 1889, helped establish the Industrial Syndicalist Education League which operated between 1910 and 1913.

1912 saw the outbreak of the Waihi miners’ strike amongst gold miners, just before Massey came to power. The Waihi Goldmining Company was notorious for industrial accidents and refused to pay compensation; workers toiled in horrendous conditions for subsistence wages and if they were not injured, maimed or killed in the mines, miners’ phthisis- tuberculosis- was guaranteed to do lifelong damage to the workers’ lungs.  When the companies formed a scab union to break the power of the Federation of Labour, the workers called a strike. Massey reacted furiously, promising to crush the ‘enemies of order’, and before long it is estimated that ten percent of New Zealand’s police force was dispatched to Waihi. In the region of sixty miners were imprisoned, and the IWW began to increase in influence. Then, in October, the company used blackleg labour to re-open the mine, prompting further confrontations. Tensions increased further until the 12 November, on ‘Black Tuesday’, when a union meeting was attacked by police and armed scab labourers. During the ensuing scuffle, Fred Evans, a trade unionist, was beaten to death by the police after wounding a police officer in the stomach. The police officer, Constable Gerald Wade, recovered but Evans was left lying for an hour and a half in police cells and never regained consciousness.  Five days later, at his funeral, thousands lined the streets in memory of their martyred comrade,  one of only two people to die in the history of New Zealand industrial disputes.

The following year, a strike of Wellington shipwrights spread through New Zealand, almost becoming a General Strike. Firstly, miners, including three union representatives, were sacked at a company in Huntly on October 6th. Twelve days later, the shipwrights called a strike and, when they attempted to return to work they found that scabs had taken their place. As a consequence, a meeting was held and 1,500 workers resolved “That no work shall be accepted until such time as the victimised men are re-instated”. The events at Huntly and Wellington were by this stage attracting national attention, and Wobblies in Auckland and Wellington called for concerted action.

Massey reacted to these outbreaks of militancy with violence, using his links with the Legion of Frontiersmen, to send mounted troops (‘Massey’s Cossacks’) to attack the strikers. It is fair to say that my sympathies in these matters do not lie with William Massey. I may hail from the same town as the late Prime Minister, but my allegiances are with the labour movement and the international working class. Perhaps as local people celebrate Massey’s links with my town, local trade unionists will commemorate those martyred and maimed by his violent response to New Zealand’s ‘Great Unrest’.