This month (August 31) marks 50 years since Prime Minister Norman Kirk died, here in the Southern Bays. He died at the Home of Compassion, which at that time offered full hospital services. He was under the specialist care of Professor Thomas V. O’Donnell. Another specialist, Dr Fred Desmond, a pathologist, also attended him.  Kirk was 51 years old. 

According to the diary kept by Margaret Haywood, Kirk’s private secretary, Professor O’Donnell suggested the Home of Compassion for a period of convalescence because he was “very impressed by the standard of nursing care there”. Kirk was suffering from goitre, a clot, a painful liver, an enlarged heart and impaired lung function. 

On August 28 Professor O’Donnell used his own car to drive Kirk to the Home of Compassion where a sister waited for them in a car and led them in an a back route to avoid waiting media. But an Evening Post photographer, Ian Mackley, twigged to this arrangement and was able to take the last photo of the Prime Minister walking, apparently confidently, into the Home. Once admitted, he continued to make some political calls including arranging for the former National Party leader Jack Marshall to be offered a knighthood. He was treated with both morphine and digoxin and reported on the morning of Saturday August 31 that he was feeling less pain, was more relaxed, and that ‘the sisters are lovely’. A few hours later he was dead. 

The diplomat Gerard Hensley, at the request of Mrs Kirk, who was at their Seatoun home, went to the Home of Compassion ‘to make sure Norm is not on his own’. He recalled:

“I assumed that  this meant a visit to the chapel but instead the sister led us down the wide polished corridors of the convent hospital until we came unexpectedly into a small sunlit room largely filled by the bed. Lying on it in his pyjamas, Norm looked like the effigy of some Roman senator carved in marble. From the large and untidily dressed politician of his younger days he had progressed by stages to this final magnificence. I knelt beside the bed. Keeping vigil on the other side was a nun whose brother, Bernard Galvin, was a good friend. In the peaceful silence the soft, spring wind blew the curtains in and out. A paper bag stood in the corner holding the Prime Minister’s last possessions.”

The sister was Sister Anne Galvin (Pictured right) a registered general nurse who in 1960 passed her maternity exams with top marks for the country. She became a registered midwife in 1962 and in 1963 received the Diploma of Nursing Administration at the NZ Post Graduate School. Sr Anne, then known by the name of Moya, grew up in Island Bay close to the Home of Compassion where she would visit her mother’s sister, Sister Zita (Lenihan), regularly.

The Home of Compassion received more than $10,000 in gifts following Kirk’s death. The public was invited to send donations to the home rather than sending flowers to Mr Kirk’s funeral and lying-in-state. Mrs Ruth Kirk thanked donors: “The tremendous response is a moving tribute, and I am thrilled that so many people have contributed towards the wonderful work of the nursing sisters,”  

Island Bay has other links to Norman Kirk, especially through our former Member of Parliament, Arnold Nordmeyer, first elected here in 1954. He was a member of the 1935 Labour government led by Brooklyn seat.  He was a popular local MP and, as a former Presbyterian Minister, active in local Church affairs. Kirk challenged and replaced Nordmeyer in 1965. 

Nordmeyer succeeded Walter Nash as leader after Labour’s defeat in 1960 but he continued to carry the blame for that failure as a result of his so-called ‘black budget’ of 1958 which hugely damaged Labour’s popularity. Kirk’s coup against Nordmeyer was long-planned. He even took to sending birthday and anniversary telegrams to the wives of caucus members in an effort to build his support. “The men I wanted to vote for me  slept with those women and I didn’t want the wives telling them not to vote for me”. Incredibly, Kirk supporter Brian MacDonnell, a parliamentary undersecretary, obtained the dates for these congratulatory telegrams by pretending he was gathering them for an astrologer friend doing horoscopes of MPs. But this was but a sideshow to a methodical scheme. The Federation of Labour President Tom Skinner recalled “the Kirk group plan was to build a majority support secretly and then to surprise Nordmeyer with a caucus vote that would strip him of the leadership”. 

And so, in 1965, it was done and the leadership went to a vote in caucus. “As chairman [Nordmeyer] called for nominations, but there was no response until his third call. Fox then nominated Kirk. Again Nordmeyer called three times for further nominations. Mick Connelly finally stood up and nominated Nordmeyer. The General Secretary of the party was present at the meeting and collected and counted the ballot papers. Then ‘he asked if members wished to be told the voting figures or if the ballot figures should be destroyed without disclosing them. Still smiling, Nordmeyer said he thought the figures should be known. Then the thunderbolt struck: Kirk had won 25-10.’

“Nordmeyer was utterly shocked. It was a terrible and unexpected blow. The lobbying had been ruthless and successful. The knife, which was to haunt Kirk for the next seven years…had been wielded skilfully. Afterwards Nordmeyer faced the press with the news. Emotion showing on his face he told reporters: There are some members of the party who believe the public will never forgive or forget the budget of 1958. They also believe that its author would be better relegated to political oblivion. Asked if he was disappointed he said, ‘Very early in my political life I made up my mind that I could not expect any gratitude. I have not been disappointed’. Then he added that in Mr Kirk the party had a man that could lead it to victory.”

Nordmeyer’s loss was portrayed by some as resulting from a desire for a younger leader. He was to outlive Kirk by 15 years.

Arnold Nordmeyer’s successor as Island Bay MP, Gerald O’Brien was a supporter of Kirk. In 1975, after Kirk’s death, the Truth newspaper reported he was a member of a ‘think-tank’ set up by Kirk to help with economic advice, and included Dr Bill Sutch,  (who was that year acquitted of espionage charges) former PSA leader and departmental head Jack Lewin, the president of the Federation of Labour Tom Skinner, and business leader Sir Henry Kelliher. Nothing of substance has ever emerged about the ‘think-tank’, and it may never have existed, although O’Brien told the Security Intelligence Service that Kirk ‘wanted him to find out why Labour’s economic policies had not been implemented…and that [Kirk] was unhappy that some of his Ministers, including Bill Rowling [who succeeded Kirk], were too close to Treasury thinking when [Kirk] wanted a fresh approach’. Kirk’s private Secretary, Margaret Haywood thought it ‘extremely unlikely’ that Kirk would have selected O’Brien to head a secret policy-making group.  

As Labour Party vice president Gerald O’Brien ensured the selection of John Kirk, Norman’s son, to succeed his father as member for Sydenham.. When O’Brien was not selected for Labour in Island Bay in 1978 Norman Kirk’s widow, by then knighted as Dame Ruth Kirk, supported his standing as an independent against the official Labour candidate, Frank O’Flynn. O’Flynn, who represented Island Bay from 1978 to 1987, later became the Chair of the Norman Kirk Memorial Trust.  

The British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, asked about the greatest challenge politicians face is said to have replied: ‘Events, dear boy, events’. The event of Kirk’s death changed New Zealand’s politics. It is arguable that the impact continues to affect all of us. Without Kirk, the National Party may never have opted for the pugnacious Rob Muldoon as leader. Without Muldoon we may never have had the Springbok Tour of 1981; (Kirk had famously cancelled such a tour) never had the Bastion Point, evictions; and never had the economic policies that led to the actions of the Lange-Douglas governments: privatisation, a floating dollar and an end to subsidies. And so on. Bill Rowling might not have succeeded as Labour leader; Ruth Richardson may never have been a Minister of Finance. David Lange may have remained a hard-working criminal lawyer in south Auckland. And policies for reproductive rights, homosexual rights and abortion may have been liberalised much later, or with more acrimony, given Kirk’s social conservatism. 

This sort of thinking is called ‘counterfactual history’ and is merely speculation on what might have happened. It’s a form of fiction on the one hand but on the other produces insights into the importance of events. Kirk’s death and its significance is in some ways made clearer by the consideration of what might have been rather than what actually was. 

Norman Kirk’s association with Island Bay was more tenuous than that of three other leaders – the first parliamentary leader, Alfred Hindmarsh, who lived in Derwent St, Arnold Nordmeyer, and, most recently, Andrew Little. But for a moment, in the reporting of his death half a century ago, Kirk’s name, and ours, were linked together in the public mind. And something that changed New Zealand forever happened here.