Ladies a vote
As The Press makes the historic change from a broadsheet newspaper to a compact, Philip Matthews looks back at some of the paper’s more controversial editorial positions.
This may seem hard to believe, but a newspaper can sometimes get it wrong over the course of 157 years and however many thousands of daily editions. But wrong how? Not just the occasional but regrettable typos or even the rare errors of fact, but opinions that might have sounded good at the time but do not necessarily stand up to rigorous historical scrutiny.
In other words, there will always be clangers and duds among the many official opinions and decrees from on high. That is unavoidable.
It could even be said that The Press owes its very existence to such a clanger. Founder James FitzGerald was a strong opponent of plans to build a rail tunnel between Christchurch and Lyttelton and established The Press in part to counter the protunnel argument of his former paper, the Lyttelton Times. Colonial gentry bankrolled his dream and the newspaper was up and running in May 1861.
FitzGerald’s side got stuck into the tunnel lobby, who were led by Superintendent William Moorhouse, in the very first edition of The Press. To ‘‘load the Province with debt,’’ The Press thundered, ‘‘will most seriously and grievously retard the progress of the Colony’’. But despite The Press banging on and on about it, Moorhouse won the day and the tunnel was open six years later. The colony’s progress was not retarded.
What else was happening in the
1860s? Wars raged in the North Island between the Crown and Ma¯ ori. These days, many are sympathetic to the Ma¯ ori side and would probably applaud a rare defeat of the Crown, such as that dished out by ingenious Ma¯ ori at Gate Pa near Tauranga in May
1864. But The Press took the news hard.
‘‘The news from the North today is such as to fill every brave man with grief – grief for our gallant countrymen who have fallen, and grief – grief and shame unspeakable – that Englishmen should be brought into a position in which they are compelled to fight against a foe whom all real soldiers now admit are covering themselves with glory in the defence of the existence of their race.’’
Such drama, such hyperbole: ‘‘We can scarcely call to mind any battle in the annals of war which can compare with that at the Gate pa.’’
But the bad news in Tauranga was countered by good news from Taranaki, where between 30 and 50 Ma¯ ori were killed in an attack on Sentry Hill. ‘‘The Taranaki Natives appear to have acted without either courage or skill,’’ the relieved Press editorial writer observed.
Speaking of Taranaki, events at Parihaka were a national story in
1881. The Crown finally apologised in 2017 for its invasion of land and mass imprisonment of peaceful Ma¯ ori but for The Press, the breaking up of ‘‘a nest of disaffection’’ at Parihaka was good news. And Parihaka’s so-called prophet Te Whiti? ‘‘No miracle has been worked to save them from the power of the Pakeha,’’ The Press wrote, mockingly.
As for the bigger picture, ‘‘the last remaining obstacle to the progress of peaceful settlement in the North Island will be removed’’.
But The Press has probably never been as wrong as it was about women’s suffrage in September 1893. The law had been passed, women could vote and New Zealand led the world but the paper’s editorialists were far from pleased.
Blaming ‘‘noisy agitators’’ and ‘‘the advocates of fads’’, The Press said that ‘‘we believe that a very large number of women do not desire to vote. They shrink from having to go to the polling booths on election days. They would much prefer staying at home and attending to their household duties.’’
Yes, of course they would. Now women would have to follow politics and hurt their brains learning about important, complicated issues, and ‘‘we admit frankly that it is unfair to the great majority of women to force this duty upon them’’. Somehow, women coped. The 19th century became the 20th and it would be unfair to single out The Press for writing jingoistic editorials about World War I, given it was relying on the