Palmerston North — the city that keeps coming up smelling of roses

• Published date: 23 June 2022

Conflict over the need for a new Fitzherbert bridge; outrage at Massey students’ Chaff newspaper and its four-page supplement on growing and processing cannabis; gripes about the mayoral honorarium, bus drivers who played their radios too loud, and inadequate hems on pyjama pockets

The first issues of the Guardian in mid-1972 provide an insight into what exercised Palmerstonians at the time. At least one correspondent thought the city an “overgrown cow town”. Others, like About People columnist Delia Taylor, celebrated its growing cosmopolitanism, exemplified by the cross-section of people she observed enjoying a glass of wine and good food (possibly even a Hawaiian steak!) at the Steeple.

The Guardian was itself a marker of change. Its directors promoted it as a fresh voice, filling a lamentable gap in a restricted field, especially since the demise of the Manawatū Times in April 1962. The Guardian was to be “frank, outspoken, fearless and sincere in presenting readers with opinions normally frowned upon by many newspapers with strict (and restrictive) editorial practices”. There was an implicit criticism of the Manawatū Standard here.

Palmerston North had just celebrated its centennial. At the end of this year-long extravaganza, Mayor Des Black deemed the city to be moving from adolescence to maturity, and into a second phase of city planning and acceptance of culture. The dirty, smelly, dangerous railway line through the middle of the city had gone. Massey as a full university had well and truly arrived, its staff and students increasingly visible, its building programme an important boost to the economy.

Changing of the guardThere was a shift in the power structures of the city. In 1972 an old elite was waning, and the city had elected its first Māori councillor (Sam Mīhaere) and its first female councillor (Julia Wallace) in the 1960s. But in 1972 Joyce Dunmore was a solitary female voice on the city council. The Guardian chronicled her struggles, and in a July issue a letter noted how she was passed over for appointment as council representative on the local catchment board.

Mrs Dunmore would have welcomed the council’s current gender balance with seven of 16 positions now held by women. Vivienne Broughton (Porzsolt), the 1972 spokesperson for Palmerston North Women’s Liberation, might have pointed out that women are still less than half the council’s membership.

What further changes did the Guardian stand watch over during the 50 years from its...