1955: Tails On Rails
September 21, 2021
By AHNZ
Today in history, 21 September, 1955, a group of Victimhood Culture women tried to save the Nelson-Glenhope railway. Their method was to sit in the path of the demolition work on the tracks.
This, the Nelson Section, government controlled, of course, had been let go after once upon a time being useful. It was an isolated section that never joined the rest of New Zealand’s rail network and never would be. Road transport had taken over. However, there was a joke/crime/farce in 1960 of Walter Nash promising to connect the line to Blenheim in1960 but this turned out to be a “bluff.”
“Successive governments had promised the people of Nelson that their railway would be extended until it linked with the West Coast, thus ending the province’s isolation. However, Nelson’s railway stock was old and increasingly run down, and the line was losing money to improved road transport networks. Both road and rail supporters lobbied vigorously for resources. On 2 September 1955 Sidney Holland’s National government reaffirmed its earlier decision to close and demolish the railway, prompting angry gatherings in Nelson. On 23 September Ruth Page and four other women drove over 40 miles to the small station at Kiwi, where they sat in the goods shed and on the railway lines for a week to block the demolition. It was a dignified, sustained yet sensational protest, and it attracted worldwide media attention…
..Some of those involved, notably Sonja Davies (who became a prominent union leader and politician), used the protest as a springboard into public life.” – Ruth Page, Dictionary of New Zealand Biography (2000); Te Ara
“We women want to be arrested”
As the demolition crews started being deployed the protests grew and became taken over by groups of women sitting on the rails at Kiwi Station goods shed. For reasons not entirely clear, ex-school teacher Ruth Page placed an advertisement in Nelson Evening Mail (21/Sep) calling on all women of courage and determination to become activists. On 22 September, the sit-in at Kiwi began and lasted a week before the women were arrested by the police.
Why did women take over this doomed protest? Ruth Page (50) and Sonja Davies (32) (to name two leaders) attracted massive media attention locally and internationally. It must have been out of cultural reasons because it certainly wasn’t practical or rational…
How silly to think logistical antiques can be made economical again because women are given free rides and catering for sitting on their tails on rails! Antique transport systems don’t become economically efficient because Victimhood Culture women throw tantrums on their asses. It’s ridiculous. But very interesting history.
…They’re going to make such a towering economic decision just because a few women get brought lammingtons for sitting on picnic blankets at the railway station? Or 12,000 people sign a petition?
It was bonkers from the get-go. My guess is that Nelson had become too invested in the Labour Party so that, when National 1.0 came in 1949 their long spell of pork-barrel politicians ran dry they could have kept Keith Holyoake for a loyal MP but instead drove him out to another electorate in far away Pahiatua.
Protesting a National 1.0 decision made up part of a Labourite tails on rails decision. Another part to it was that ambitions that Nelson had had for its entire provincial life had been snuffed out. Both Page and Davies had grown up during a World War and it must have resonated with them, and the 12,000 petition signatories, that Nelson was due some pay-back for its sacrifices. “A land fit for heroes.” Peace, for Nelson, meant that it would be self-determining after these many years of crisis rather than relegated to a fiefdom of Wellington Central Government. The truth was that Nelson, with the other provinces, had been politically fettered as early as 1876 with the rest of the provinces. They just hadn’t culturally adjusted to that reality quite yet.
The realisation that a new government that they didn’t really like and didn’t really like them could scrap the railway project of generations with the stroke of a pen really hurt and became a symbol of all the things going wrong about Nelson that Nelsonians couldn’t articulate. So, they symbolically railed against that symbol with their own symbol.
In the end it gained Nelson nothing to have this railway protest. It did cost £ 90 in fines and gave 9 women 9 sore arses for a week. The next chapters of Nelson’s history would be written by the Boomers (Hey, maybe they’ll sort things out in the 1960s and 70s?1)
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