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Book Review
| Melanie Nolan, Kin: A Collective Biography of a New Zealand Working Class Family, Canterbury University Press, Christchurch, New Zealand, 2005. pp. 252. NZ $39.95 paper.
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| Because of a limited home market, historical monographs in New Zealand tread a challenging path between popular and academic appeal; between explanation and positioning for an anticipated overseas audience, and oversimplification and repetition to informed local readers. Engagement with historiography may not appeal to those wanting an uncomplicated story. Biography is a genre which has most successfully bridged such divides, and it is no coincidence that New Zealand non-fiction book awards have often been won by such works. |
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Nolan's Kin is a collective biography, certainly not the first of its kind, but a successful and engaging one. It attempts to 'put a single case [of a family] into conversation with the social majority'. In doing so, it focuses upon variation within the working class. A very real strength of the book is a strong engagement with the historiographies not only of class and labour, but also of ethnicity, gender and religion. This engagement is not of a tendentious and self-consciously revisionist kind: rather, it involves a lively engagement with the literature and does not prevent the book from being a 'good read' for the non-academic. |
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Nolan came to the study of the McCullough family through her 1985 MA thesis on Jack McCullough, a prominent labour activist, pacifist and, subsequently, member of New Zealand's Legislative Council. Kin is testimony to the value of a mature reflection on earlier work, and the rewards of a multi-faceted lens directed at a family cluster. Nolan returns to Jack, but here examines also his bothers and sisters, chapter titles signalling that these individuals are seen as representative of wider forces: 'The Jacks and their international socialist vision'; 'The Margarets: The working class and the "other world"' (of religion, temperance and charity); 'The Jims: Municipal labour and the local option'; 'The Sarahs: A domestic, religious, patriotic culture'; 'The Franks: The rise of the middle class and a managerial vision'. This technique takes labour history out of the workplace and into the wider arenas of the home, the church and the voluntary association, as well as municipal politics and white-collar work. It suggests multiple (and co-existing) ways of 'being working class', through individuals who could still talk to each other, celebrate and share. |
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Kin highlights the multiple identities of working people within the same family, as well as some of the contradictions within individual lives. The book is especially interesting where it considers the role of women and religion. Margaret McCullough (later Norrie) was an 'antipodean evangelical Christian', immersed in Presbyterianism and active in the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and the Women's Missionary Union. Hers was a female world of public activity under the umbrella of voluntarism. There is a fascinating, and important, account of the Missionary Union's work, and a local perspective on the WCTU which suggests a labour aspect to its membership and work in Timaru. Nolan notes (p. 111) that in New Zealand, 'almost to a woman labour activists before World War I had a religious background'. |
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In the chapter on Sarah McCullough (Kennedy), Nolan picks up Stevan Eldred-Grigg's earlier emphasis on the 'working-class kitchen' as a core element in the elaboration of working-class culture. The material on the 'more thoroughly domestic' Sarah is thinner than for Margaret Norrie and her brothers, but the chapter raises questions about members of the working class who were not only religious, but, like Sarah, royalist and patriotic. In Sarah's case, this involved the consumption of popular culture and participation in it (as a contralto singer in wartime patriotic concerts, for example). In considering Sarah Kennedy's life, Nolan raises more questions than she answers, especially with regard to the links between leisure activities and working-class consciousness. |
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Nolan's conclusions about a variety of working-class experiences, as exemplified by this single family, are not especially new. Nor is her emphasis upon the respectable working class. She does challenge, very effectively, the primacy of politics in the working-class experience, suggesting the importance of voluntary organisations, friendly societies, the church and the home in the elaboration of working-class identities. She does this with reference to an impressive archival base, which ranges from the records of individual churches, schools, charities, friendly societies, patriotic organisations, to those of businesses and unions. The intelligently-captioned illustrations to the book represent in themselves a vast amount of research, and they contribute enormously to the volume. |
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I did wonder, however, about this excellent book's final statement: that we know 'much more about social movements and social networks than we do about families' and 'It is time that changed'. This statement may be relatively true of working-class families. It is less true of other time periods and social strata – such laudable studies as Frances Porter's work on the nineteenth-century Richmond-Atkinson 'clan' contradict Nolan here. |
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| Massey University |
MARGARET TENNANT | |
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