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September 28, 2025
I am generally sceptical of the biography as a literary and historical form. It seems predisposed to the kind of scholarship I dislike and to undermining the very basis of social history as a rebuttal of the ‘great man school’, accounting for change and practice in the actions of heroic individuals who by force of will or social position bring about the events and circumstances in question. I’m more sceptical of the ‘authorised’ biography, which seem to me to risk smoothing out the wrinkles and obscuring the problems in a life, if not becoming or verging on the hagiographic. I’ll admit that part of this scepticism comes from my focus on histories of sport where biographies do these things as a matter of course, with a tendency to the Whiggish, and are all too often little more than marketing tools for a professional career.
This is by way of saying, the biography is not a place I am all that comfortable, especially the linear birth to death biography (which this is). That said, I know Cybéle Locke’s work and really liked her previous book Workers on the Margins while also counting her as a friend, both in the smallish field of New Zealand history, and as part of shared social and political circles. So I came to this expecting a critical eye and a social history of one strand of New Zealand’s post war Left and trade union movement. What’s more, I’d cut my political teeth in that broadly left environment from the later 1970s, and being in and around trade union work in the 1980s, albeit in Wellington so distant from Andersen’s world in Auckland, mean I know the issues and many of the people who populate the book and Andersen’s working life.
For much of the 1970s and ‘80s Bill Andersen was perhaps New Zealand’s most high profile and public face of a particular strand of left politics, Soviet aligned communism. His leading role in trade union activism made him a bête noire for many conservative politicians’ and media voices, while his leading role in one of the country’s Marxist groups, the Soviet-aligned Socialist Unity Party, gave those voices an extra reason to make him their whipping boy. For a biographer this kind of specific profile is a challenge in that here is a persona and dominant public aspect of their subject that can risk dominating the story, and in a sense needing to be explained. It is to her credit as a social historian that Locke avoids this trap, it seems to me by doing two things. First, the linear narrative means that this profile comes at the mid-point of the book, well after we’ve met the man, the rugby league fan, his family, and his work as a sea-farer, watersider, Party member, unionist building a participatory, delegate-based democratic trade union, and aware that Andersen’s trade union and Party work ran in parallel, linked but with a large degree of independence. Second, the range of archival and oral sources mean that this persona is historicised and contextualised in ways that make clear that the ‘red-baiting’ was a form of class-based rhetoric at odds with circumstances on the ground.
It is this second aspect that makes this more than a biography but an important exploration of one aspect of New Zealand’s late 20th century Left. Locke maintains a running dialogue between the specifics of Andersen’s life and work as trade unionist, as Marxist, as working class son, as a Party leader, and the social, political, economic, and ideological world in which he lived and worked. His life story, told here with integrity as a life story, is also one of a person who was intimately involved in many of the key struggles and issues of the era – sometimes victoriously, but more often less successfully, meaning that the traps of ‘great man’ narratives are avoided while the wider story and circumstances are unpacked and explored.
By putting trade union work and Marxist activism at the centre of Andersen’s life story, Locke has also produced a historical narrative that undercuts the dominant story of the era, weakening the one at centres on the state and on parliamentary politics. While these are, without a doubt, important, Andersen’s life story also allows her to highlight struggles within the trade union movement, anti-colonial politics, the shifting influence of tendencies and factions, as well as the shifting alignments of New Zealand’s small Marxist and communist tendencies. There is, in those areas, an intriguing, hinted at but underexplored question of the personal losses involved in those factional disputes and the ways those shared histories interacted in struggle through shared outlooks in everyday activism and trade union work (although this would be a different book and with the passing of all of the figures involved in the factional splits in New Zealand communism nearly impossible to get at).
This list of interviewees shows this diversity of insight, including family members, co-workers, fellow party members, and figures from other Leftist tendencies whose work world interacted with Andersen’s producing a richly rounded figure of the man – getting well beyond the image of the bête noire of the 70s and 80s – while allowing critique, evaluation, and assessment of a complex figure whose trade union and Party work, as well as a commitment to working class democratic institutions, were at vital times in tension if not conflict. This then is not just a biography of a Marxist trade unionist, but of an organic working class intellectual balancing contending obligations to political demands and expectations that, at times, could not be reconciled. Locke’s ability to get to this tension is impressive, and in part it seems a product of the rich archival and oral material she has to work with, but also her ability to get inside the era and unpack the tensions woven into these heightened times and forms of struggle.
As with many contemporary historians Locke also finds herself part of the narrative when in reflecting on emerging issues in activist politics and shifts around industrial and social unionism and wider ways of doing things she begins to deal with issues she was involved in. Here she writes herself in, explicitly, identifying her routes into the struggles she is dealing with, and where her reflexive engagement means she is able to unpick distinctive differences in a way that then allows her to consider the sorts of ways of working Andersen was also grappling with in an era where trade unions were in decline in terms of membership while having to do more with less, and with an increasingly fractured and pessimistic Left. She therefore presents the more recent narrative of working class organisation as one of both decline and reorganisation, as unions in particular find new ways of advocacy and struggle.
As with all good contemporary history, then, she leaves the narrative open, offering it up both as a biography of a vital figure in post war New Zealand politics and as an opening up of an era for further inquiry. As befits a subject grounded in his Marxism, Andersen, his comrades – both in the Party and the trade union movement – and others who have contributed material do not shy away from (self)criticism, and it is refreshing to see an author who engages with that and her own critique in the comradely manner much of that criticism is intended, including that across former deep ideological divides.
The image of Andersen I leave with is very different to the dominant image of him from the 1980’s – he was a man of and committed to the working class and heavily involved in struggles against colonialism and empire, but beyond this image of the Marxist, the revolutionary, he was a man close to his community, active in its sporting world as a club administrator and organiser, and committed to that community’s well-being. As the sectarian divides of the era fade I’m encouraged to rethink the times, the struggles, and the decisions taken. But more importantly, I’m struck by the power of this biography by a committed scholar, who brings the conventions and insights of her discipline and her experience to produce and insightful, vital challenge to dominant views of the time. This is history at its best; thinking and rethinking our past without falling into the trap of making it all about explaining the now.
This is by way of saying, the biography is not a place I am all that comfortable, especially the linear birth to death biography (which this is). That said, I know Cybéle Locke’s work and really liked her previous book Workers on the Margins while also counting her as a friend, both in the smallish field of New Zealand history, and as part of shared social and political circles. So I came to this expecting a critical eye and a social history of one strand of New Zealand’s post war Left and trade union movement. What’s more, I’d cut my political teeth in that broadly left environment from the later 1970s, and being in and around trade union work in the 1980s, albeit in Wellington so distant from Andersen’s world in Auckland, mean I know the issues and many of the people who populate the book and Andersen’s working life.
For much of the 1970s and ‘80s Bill Andersen was perhaps New Zealand’s most high profile and public face of a particular strand of left politics, Soviet aligned communism. His leading role in trade union activism made him a bête noire for many conservative politicians’ and media voices, while his leading role in one of the country’s Marxist groups, the Soviet-aligned Socialist Unity Party, gave those voices an extra reason to make him their whipping boy. For a biographer this kind of specific profile is a challenge in that here is a persona and dominant public aspect of their subject that can risk dominating the story, and in a sense needing to be explained. It is to her credit as a social historian that Locke avoids this trap, it seems to me by doing two things. First, the linear narrative means that this profile comes at the mid-point of the book, well after we’ve met the man, the rugby league fan, his family, and his work as a sea-farer, watersider, Party member, unionist building a participatory, delegate-based democratic trade union, and aware that Andersen’s trade union and Party work ran in parallel, linked but with a large degree of independence. Second, the range of archival and oral sources mean that this persona is historicised and contextualised in ways that make clear that the ‘red-baiting’ was a form of class-based rhetoric at odds with circumstances on the ground.
It is this second aspect that makes this more than a biography but an important exploration of one aspect of New Zealand’s late 20th century Left. Locke maintains a running dialogue between the specifics of Andersen’s life and work as trade unionist, as Marxist, as working class son, as a Party leader, and the social, political, economic, and ideological world in which he lived and worked. His life story, told here with integrity as a life story, is also one of a person who was intimately involved in many of the key struggles and issues of the era – sometimes victoriously, but more often less successfully, meaning that the traps of ‘great man’ narratives are avoided while the wider story and circumstances are unpacked and explored.
By putting trade union work and Marxist activism at the centre of Andersen’s life story, Locke has also produced a historical narrative that undercuts the dominant story of the era, weakening the one at centres on the state and on parliamentary politics. While these are, without a doubt, important, Andersen’s life story also allows her to highlight struggles within the trade union movement, anti-colonial politics, the shifting influence of tendencies and factions, as well as the shifting alignments of New Zealand’s small Marxist and communist tendencies. There is, in those areas, an intriguing, hinted at but underexplored question of the personal losses involved in those factional disputes and the ways those shared histories interacted in struggle through shared outlooks in everyday activism and trade union work (although this would be a different book and with the passing of all of the figures involved in the factional splits in New Zealand communism nearly impossible to get at).
This list of interviewees shows this diversity of insight, including family members, co-workers, fellow party members, and figures from other Leftist tendencies whose work world interacted with Andersen’s producing a richly rounded figure of the man – getting well beyond the image of the bête noire of the 70s and 80s – while allowing critique, evaluation, and assessment of a complex figure whose trade union and Party work, as well as a commitment to working class democratic institutions, were at vital times in tension if not conflict. This then is not just a biography of a Marxist trade unionist, but of an organic working class intellectual balancing contending obligations to political demands and expectations that, at times, could not be reconciled. Locke’s ability to get to this tension is impressive, and in part it seems a product of the rich archival and oral material she has to work with, but also her ability to get inside the era and unpack the tensions woven into these heightened times and forms of struggle.
As with many contemporary historians Locke also finds herself part of the narrative when in reflecting on emerging issues in activist politics and shifts around industrial and social unionism and wider ways of doing things she begins to deal with issues she was involved in. Here she writes herself in, explicitly, identifying her routes into the struggles she is dealing with, and where her reflexive engagement means she is able to unpick distinctive differences in a way that then allows her to consider the sorts of ways of working Andersen was also grappling with in an era where trade unions were in decline in terms of membership while having to do more with less, and with an increasingly fractured and pessimistic Left. She therefore presents the more recent narrative of working class organisation as one of both decline and reorganisation, as unions in particular find new ways of advocacy and struggle.
As with all good contemporary history, then, she leaves the narrative open, offering it up both as a biography of a vital figure in post war New Zealand politics and as an opening up of an era for further inquiry. As befits a subject grounded in his Marxism, Andersen, his comrades – both in the Party and the trade union movement – and others who have contributed material do not shy away from (self)criticism, and it is refreshing to see an author who engages with that and her own critique in the comradely manner much of that criticism is intended, including that across former deep ideological divides.
The image of Andersen I leave with is very different to the dominant image of him from the 1980’s – he was a man of and committed to the working class and heavily involved in struggles against colonialism and empire, but beyond this image of the Marxist, the revolutionary, he was a man close to his community, active in its sporting world as a club administrator and organiser, and committed to that community’s well-being. As the sectarian divides of the era fade I’m encouraged to rethink the times, the struggles, and the decisions taken. But more importantly, I’m struck by the power of this biography by a committed scholar, who brings the conventions and insights of her discipline and her experience to produce and insightful, vital challenge to dominant views of the time. This is history at its best; thinking and rethinking our past without falling into the trap of making it all about explaining the now.
Displaying 1 of 1 review