What happened to
pacifists in WWII New Zealand? Why was New Zealand so intolerant of dissent? The Prison Diary of A.C. Barrington: Dissent
and conformity in wartime New Zealand draws on a rare first-hand account of
prison life by one of New Zealand’s leading pacifists, A.C. (Archie)
Barrington. Barrington was a leading figure in the Riverside community in
Motueka.
‘Barrington’s
diary,’ says author Professor John Pratt, ‘gives us insight into a side of New
Zealand during WWII that is largely unknown. Such documents are extremely rare
– nothing similar from this period has been published before.’
While our allies abandoned
the punitive and merciless measures taken against dissenters during WWI, New
Zealand continued with its hard-line approach. In the course of the war about
800 men and one woman were prosecuted.
Incarcerated in
Mount Crawford Prison for his beliefs, Archie Barrington kept an illicit diary
by scrawling daily entries in the margins of books. Years later, while going
through his father’s archive, his son John Barrington discovered the diary.
‘It was very hard in New Zealand at that
time to stand out as being different,’ say John Pratt. ‘Archie Barrington was a
principled and courageous man.’
Barrington
recorded the squalid, rundown conditions, monotonous and exhausting labour, the
intense cold from which there was little protection, and the strategies he and
his fellow pacifists adopted to enable them to cope with prison life.
The Prison Diary of A.C.
Barrington: Dissent and conformity in wartime New Zealand sheds new light on an era
that was dominated by a rigid insistence on conformity. Pratt argues that the
intolerance, suspicion and deep-seated antipathies towards difference cast a
long shadow and can still be seen today in the current penal saturation in this
otherwise friendly and hospitable land.
John
Pratt
has spent most of his academic career at the Institute of Criminology, Victoria
University of Wellington. His research on comparative penology and the
history of
imprisonment has earned him an international reputation.
The Prison Diary of
A.C. Barrington
Dissent and conformity in
Wartime New Zealand
By
John Pratt
Release
Date: February 2016
ISBN 978-1-927322-31-4, $39.95
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