A Striking History

Abstract

Cybèle Locke
Comrade: Bill Andersen—A Communist, Working-Class Life
Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2022, 412pp

It was with a mix of excitement and trepidation that I started reading Cybèle Locke’s Comrade soon after its publication
in late 2022. Excitement because Locke’s reputation as a rigorous historical researcher precedes her and this had been a long, heartfelt project on her part; trepidation because Bill Andersen had been a difficult character to deal with through much of my earlier political life. From my earliest activist days in the Progressive Youth Movement and Resistance Bookshop, through to the Springbok Tour, and then the fraught divisions within the unemployed workers’ movement of the 1980s, Andersen had been on the opposite side of
many of the debates and struggles in which I was involved. As well as ideological factors, his position as a dominant and dominating male union leader was alienating in the extreme to those of us on the feminist and socialist Left looking for new ways to organise, ones which didn’t tug the forelock at all times to older white men.