Something to watch tonight: Friday 14 November

Helen Kelly - Together (Sutorius, 2020)

If you are one of those viewers who have been moved by the Pike River feature film — and there are many of you, it’s still number one at the New Zealand box office — you really ought to seek out Tony Sutorius’ documentary about the trade unionist and campaigner, Helen Kelly (played in the film by Lucy Lawless).

This is the documentary that the Tony character in the film (Jordan Mooney) is making when he follows Kelly, Anna Osborne and Sonya Rockhouse to the Wellington High Court and beyond. The original release of the film was stymied by Covid and other challenges, and I wasn’t aware until yesterday that it was available on DocPlay.

If, like me, you wished that Pike River had been more political, Helen Kelly - Together is an excellent companion piece. Indeed, if we were still in the days of putting tether decent packages for DVD and Blu-ray release, this would be one of the special features on Pike River. It fills in plenty of gaps about the accident itself, the lives of the men and, especially, the shocking state of workplace safety in New Zealand at the time of the disaster. It was an accident but, at the same time, it was not an accident, if you know what I mean.

Kelly came from a union family. Her father Pat was a staunch trade unionist and communist and her mother, Cath, was anti-Vietnam War activist and helped run a kind of housewives union, the Campaign Against Rising Prices (or CARP) which I’d never heard of before.

The film doesn’t dwell on the past, although it makes clear that the 1984 Trades Hall bombing in Wellington, that killed caretaker Ernie Abott, was a radicalising moment for some, just at the time the rest of New Zealand was hurtling towards neoliberalism.

By 2015, Kelly has realised that the best way to achieve any growth for the union movement was to focus on health and safety and try and — not only — get justice for workers and families whose lives were being destroyed by Aotearoa’s scandalous attitude to workplace safety, but achieve the kind of systemic change that is at this very moment being — equally systematically — being rolled back.

Twenty forestry workers a year were dying on the job and the industries with the worst records were, not un-coincidentally, the least unionised. She knew that the fight for better pay and conditions was less likely to be supported by middle New Zealand — the demonising of unions had been an ongoing project since the 1970s — but workers coming home alive would be.

If I have a quibble about the film, it’s that the historical context around that fight is skated over too quickly. The attacks on working people and the growth of the economic right wing are dealt with in a short montage and I fear that if you weren’t already aware of the ‘Dancing Cossacks’ propaganda and Rob Muldoon’s authoritarianist inclinations, you won’t learn it here. Incidentally, Cath (Helen Kelly’s mum) gets a caption but Pat does not. Oversight? Or an assumption that New Zealand viewers would already know who he was because of his notoriety at the time?

Kelly was only 52 when she died (lung cancer despite never being a smoker) and New Zealand was robbed of a generational political talent. I was reminded of another Mt. Victoria resident who was taken from us too soon, also memorialised posthumously in a documentary. Celia Lashlie was only 61 when she passed in 2015 and Amanda Millar’s film about her is also available on DocPlay and is also essential viewing.

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Where to watch Helen Kelly - Together