A new biography of Jeanette Fitzsimons
An extract from A Gentle Radical: The life of Jeanette Fitzsimons, by Gareth Hughes: At 6am on Sunday morning Jeanette’s phone rang, waking her and Harry. It was Nicola, Rod’s partner. Jeanette held her breath. "As soon as Nicola said who she was I knew what she was going to say." Nicola told her that Rod had died at home just after midnight.
Jeanette was shattered. She could not believe it. In her numbed state she had the grim duty to call her colleagues with the terrible news. At 8.30am she rang Sue Bradford, who was working in her parliamentary office, and asked her to head down to the Courtenay Place headquarters to let everyone else know. Catherine Delahunty remembers walking up to the office to see Sue Bradford standing outside. People were crying. Inside the meeting was like a wake. Delahunty facilitated a speaking round so people could talk about what they were going through.
Jeanette travelled down from Pakaraka to join them. She had expected to be announcing her retirement; instead, she went to grieve the death of her friend and colleague. For a decade they had led together, fought together and lived together, and she could hardly fathom the loss.
That night Jeanette went back to the flat she had shared with Rod. She wanted to go home to Harry but she was needed now in Wellington. Delahunty joined her so she would not be by herself. In the coming days Jeanette was under the public eye, her emotions intensely scrutinised and reported as news. She would present a sad, stoic face in public, but at night in the Green House she could just be human. That night she cried. Delahunty got into bed with her and wrapped her arms around her, holding her as she wept.
She awoke the next morning wet-eyed and empty. It was not just a terrible dream. Today was the swearing-in ceremony for MPs and parliament does not prorogue for grief. Jeanette knew she had to hold it together for the team. Her comportment over the coming days — and months — would become the rock from which the party would rebuild. The magnolia showed its steel when fronting parliament and the media, hiding the numbing grief. She could not afford to break down in public — but neither could she hide away.
On the opening day of parliament, when Rod should have been sworn in for his fourth term, his possum-skin-covered seat in the chamber remained empty. A framed photograph and a red candle sat on his desk. As parliament convened, Jeanette looked bereft but in control. As the roll was called, missing his name, she reached over and stroked his empty seat. MPs from all parties gathered around and hugged her. The pile of bright orange flowers on Rod’s desk grew.
Rod Donald had been only 48, and fit and healthy. The media reported that he drank in moderation, did not smoke, and cycled everywhere. People assumed it was the heartbreak of being locked out of government. Initially it was suspected to be a heart attack, but in fact Rod died from a rare impact on his heart from campylobacter food poisoning.
His funeral was held in Christchurch Cathedral. A thousand people came to farewell the man who had worked so hard to better the world. Jeanette put her hand on his coffin and was heard to say in a quiet voice, "Shine on, you crazy diamond."
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A review by Steve Braunias of A Gentle Radical: The first thing to say about Gareth Hughes as the political biographer of his friend and colleague Jeanette Fitzsimons is that he's obviously and uniformly the wrong man for the job, precisely because he was a friend and colleague; there's no distance in this warm assessment, no criticism in this shining portrait; the core of the book is a void, a meaninglessness, because Hughes is unable to function as any kind of objective witness. You simply can't trust him. He's biographer as fanboy, and it's biography as cooing devotional by a party hack. He's too close to the subject. But closeness has its virtues, as the excerpt (above) shows; Hughes tells the death of Rod Donald with a quiet power, and it's this kind of intimacy which gives his book a warmth and, better yet, an understanding.
Generations of journalists have misread the Greens as sandal-wearing naifs. Winston Peters built much of his late career on it. Hughes was a Green MP for 10 years, and regarded Fitzsimons as a mentor. Yes, too close, but he gets the subject, or subjects: Fitzsimons, and what she was fighting for.
The book provides a fascinating record of nascent green politics in New Zealand, as Hughes traces the rise and fall of the Values Party and its difficult evolution into the Green Party (which itself had a difficult evolution, with its numerous incredible factions such as the Green Centre Party, the Progressive Greens, and the Green Society), and he offers a valuable insider's account of the Greens' even more difficult evolutions within parliament. Peters is not the biggest scoundrel in A Gentle Radical. That distinction belongs to Helen Clark. We talk of dirty politics as the exclusive (Brethren) property of the National Party but the book reminds us that Clark's spiteful attacks on Fitzsimons and the Greens were vital to her need to cling to power as a three-term Prime Minister. After Labour lost in 2008, Fitzsimons met with John Key and Bill English at Bowen House, and said, "I couldn't believe it – John Key opened a delightful bottle of pinot noir." Hughes: "In all of her meetings with Helen Clark she had never been offered so much as a cup of tea."
Fitzsimons always was a strange rooster. Those posh enunciated Eggs vowels (she was a sixth and seventh form boarder at Epsom Girls), that sense she loathed parliament and would much rather be at the end of a spade; power gives many MPs a certain glow, or actually a happiness, but A Gentle Radical is a portrait of a political leader who was reluctant to lead, and regarded party-building as a duty, not a pleasure or as a single-minded pursuit - as Key did with wonderful success, and as Judith Collins failed, inevitably, because politics is an unforgiving test of a stable personality.
Although aloof (at Eggs, she described herself as "absolutely painfully shy"), and a bit of a bore, Fitzsimons was diligent and honest. Rod Donald called her "a steel magnolia". Hughes now and then brings back personal revelations, and has conducted an especially open interview with Bevin Fitzsimons. When he proposed to her, she replied: "That's very interesting." They married, and separated, slowly. Bevin Fitzsimons told Hughes, "Jeanette wanted an open marriage but I didn't." She played the fiddle. She liked John Lennon's lyric, "Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans." Hughes likes it, too: he quotes it three times.
The prose is readable and efficient. There is occasional gibberish: "We do not know whether Jeanette saw the Beatles when they toured New Zealand in 1964, but Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler and Shostakovich were Jeanette's 'fab four'." What? Fitzsimons was born in 1945; Hughes finds this Very Important: "It was if 1945 was a hinge: from that point on, everything changed…Global population, greenhouse and ozone gases, deforestation and ocean acidification – it all takes off from there." One can say with some certainty that 1945 was a hinge between war and peace but Hughes' long bow is a stretch too far. His notion makes no historical sense. What about the dark and smoking satanic mills of the Industrial Revolution? And was the "global population" conceived in 1945? Let's all go back to 1944! They were the good old days.
Hughes is on surer ground with political intrigue and is particularly attentive to key moments in modern Green Party history – the walk-out on the Alliance (David Grant's forthcoming biography of that crazy diamond, Alliance leader Jim Anderton, is something to be relished), the elevation of co-leaders Rod Donald and then Russell Norman, the hot and cold running waters of Helen Clark. I loved the dialogue between Fitzsimons and Donald, when she phoned him with the amazing news that special votes had put the Greens into parliament in 1999. Fitzsimons: "Rod, are you sitting down?" His reply, "Yes. I'm on my bicycle."
One of the biggest challenges faced by Values and then the Greens was the peculiar notion shared by both parties that there was no need for a leader. God almighty. Hughes, quite rightly, plays those years in A Gentle Radical as a gentle comedy. There's also a terrific LOL moment when he writes of a Values conference held at Rathkeale College in the Wairarapa at Easter 1979. One of the speakers had laryngitis. But she really needed to get her message across because it was Very Important, probably. Hughes: "She whispered into the microphone."
Nothing dates as fast as politics. We hear of names from the distant past of a few years ago. Good old Nandor Tanczos. Party strategist Matt McCarten, once of brilliant mind and purpose, now wasting whatever is left of his considerable talents on Leo Molloy's campaign. "Many listeners felt that Jeanette was unfairly and aggressively attacked in a radio interview by journalist Sean Plunket." (That's on page 313. The index states page 310. How reliable are the rest of the entries? Hughes's book insists on footnotes, which gives the book an academic respectability, but that increases the need for accurate scholarship.)
Meanwhile, the oceans rise, and the planet burns, including fish in the sea (RNZ story, last week: "The country's largest salmon producer says it is being forced to close farms due to warmer water temperatures brought on by climate change...Trucks from Havelock and Piston have made 160 trips to the Blenheim landfill, dumping 1269 tonnes of dead fish.") All Green stories are stories of urgency. A Gentle Radical provides a neat history of the first urgent alarms of the energy crisis and the progress made to do something about it during Fitzsimons' career. But not a word is heard against her or the way she went about things in Hughes' admiring testimonial. It's not a robust book in that sense. What were her failings, her bunglings, her mistakes? Nothing to see here, Hughes smiles and waves. Move along.
Still, it's reasonable to agree with Hughes's hagiographic conviction that Fitzsimons had a goodness about her. It's a thrill to read the way that being made intellectually aware gave her the purpose of mind to see the future and try to change it. Hughes traces things back to 1972, when she read books such as the Rachel Carson classic Silent Spring, and The Limits to Growth, by a team from MIT. "Jeanette labelled it one of the most important books ever written, crediting it for driving her political work for the next 40 years."
It led to her joining the Values Party, then the Greens; before that, though, it led her to set up New Zealand's first recycling scheme, through the Devonport Borough Council (as detailed on page 75, not 120, according to the perplexed index). Hughes writes, "The four-month effort substantiated Jeanette's belief that it was possible to build community support, protect the environment, grow jobs and make a profit." All of which sounds like the absolute blueprint for why the Greens exist. This is where it begins: not in a policy room, but on the pavements, collecting bottles, paper, plastics, finding a commercial use for the waste of the world that will otherwise crush it. Life is what happens when you're busy doing something worthwhile to stop it from ending.
A Gentle Radical: The life of Jeanette Fitzsimons by Gareth Hughes (Allen & Unwin NZ, $39.99) is available in bookstores nationwide.
