Serving Us Right

I LIKE TO picture them in walk shorts. Knee-high socks, a white, short-sleeved shirt and tie complete the ensemble. Accessories might include a packet of Rothmans or even a pipe, and a row of pens in the shirt pocket, perhaps reinforced for the purpose by a plastic protector. Heavy-rimmed spectacles are common, haircuts utilitarian.

This could be a description of any male white-collar workers in New Zealand over two or three decades in the second half of last century; school teachers, or bank “officers”, say.

But I’m thinking of civil servants. Those of the post-World War II era, returned servicemen often enough, who as part of a highly interventionist state apparatus oversaw activities such as the mass construction of state housing, planting of vast forests and development of infrastructure, from