What a year - 1970

A brief glimpse into who we once were.

The 1970’s were a time of major social change and upheaval. Looking back from here, there were things that were going on that seem utterly alien to us in 2024, but in other respects there was an energy in society that we can rightly mourn the lack of now.

Let’s have a look.

1970 was an interesting time for the New Zealand national religion – rugby.

Until 1970, Maori were excluded from All Black teams travelling to South Africa and to our significant shame, we just went along with it. But, in 1960 a petition was raised with a whopping 150,000 signatures opposing tours that were race excluding. This culminated in the 1970 All Black touring team including Maori players. In a move that probably made all decent thinking Kiwis stomachs churn, the Maori players were accepted by South Africa but had the status of “honorary whites”. To this day I can’t believe the craven surrender to the evils of apartheid, but as always, “things were different back then” and it could be argued that this was a small step forward. You be the judge.

Sometimes history throws up some interesting anomalies. The government had plans to turn Lake Manapouri in Fiordland into a hydro-electric generating asset, mostly to power the Tiwai Point aluminium smelter.

In May of 1970, the largest petition ever conducted to that date was adamantly opposed to destroying this natural taonga in this way, with 260,000 signatures which amounted to 10% of the total population. In 1972, an incoming reformist Labour Government passed a law protecting the lake at it’s natural level.

It’s hard to remember now, but in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s New Zealand were red hot in one of the world’s most prestigious sporting events – Formula 1 Racing.

At the front of the pack was Bruce McLaren who won won four races outright and was on the podium for another 27. He was an inspiration and a brilliant analyst of the very technical sport and his legacy endures even now with the McLaren Racing Team still competitive all these years later.

He died in 1970 on the Goodwood circuit in England during testing, but the team went on to have legends like Alain Proust and Ayrton Senna as premiere drivers.

Also in 1970, US Vice-President Spiro Agnew who later turned out to be an even bigger crook that his boss Richard Nixon visited New Zealand and probably wished he hadn’t. This was the height of Vietnam War protest and the police treated the protesters with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. It was an early sign of some deep anti-establishment thinking and behaviour in NZ which would become more and more evident as time went by.

The Kaimai rail tunnel was under construction and the western end partially collapsed, killing three and it took another three days to rescue the seven survivors.

1970 was the infamous year when farmers Jeannette & Harvey Crewe were murdered in their home at Pukekawa in the Waikato. Through some of the most appallingly corrupt policing ever seen (till then) in New Zealand history, local farmer Arthur Allan Thomas was convicted of their murders. The detective who set him up was never held to account, but after three trials, each leading to a guilty verdict, Thomas was finally exonerated after spending over a decade in prison and was awarded $1m compensation. A dark day for law enforcement.

Only people over 60 might remember this, but in this year, in this strangely conservative society, SPUC was “birthed”. SPUC stood for Society For the Protection of Unborn Children by a foetal surgeon William Lilley. In 2004 it changed its name to Voice For Life and continues to try and tell women what to do with their bodies.

In lighter news, John Rowles pounded out the absolute banger “Cheryl Moana Marie”, a song about his sister. It was number 1 in NZ and sold an astonishing 1m copies worldwide. Open neck shirts, gold medallions and coke bottle down the pants crooning was never the same.

Back then, New Zealand had a fab music awards show called The Loxene Golden Disc Awards and it was won by Craig Scott singing “Let’s get a little sentimental” and equal first was Hogsnort Rupert with “Pretty Girl”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfPi9w1rf3A&ab_channel=CraigScott-Topic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tb4ZavuJeGg&ab_channel=carybaxter

The early days of Maori protest in the modern era saw Nga Tamatoa (The Young Warriors) formed by students at Auckland University and they asked some tough questions about racial equality in a society that thought it didn’t have any racial issues to worry about. Eh?

My very beloved institution from the 1970’s, Radio Hauraki final got a broadcasting license after many years as a pirate station broadcasting from just outside NZ territorial waters and ended up in a studio on the top floor of Caltex House in Fanshawe St where one of my best mates and I managed to get let upstairs and smoked a joint in the studio with Barry Jenkin “Dr. Rock” one evening which made a couple of teenaged boys very, very happy. RIP, Dr. Rock. That was in the late 70’s but it was still in that golden age of possibility when dreams came true.

So that was 1970. A time when everything was changing.