Nancy Sutherland — formidable battler for rights of children

Press, 10 November 1983, Page 21

Nancy Sutherland — formidable battler for rights of children

By

GARRY ARTHUR

Hurrying footsteps sound in the hall. The door flies open to reveal an apparition — a formidable woman whose head is framed in a spectacular halo of long grey hair, like the mane of a samurai warrior in a Japanese noh play. It is Nancy Sutherland, and she has been surprised brushing her hair. When she reappears after a brief delay it is tidily tamed in a severe no-nonsense style — but the warrior image was not far from the truth.

Nancy Sutherland has been a battler all her life, not so much for herself as for her children, the children she used to teach, and the parents and families whose rights she has never ceased to champion. Now she is leaving the city she has served so long, clearing the decks at her home on Cashmere Hills, selling off whatever cannot

be fitted into her new beach cottage in Auckland’s eastern bays, and taking her best-loved possessions with her. But she is leaving a lot behind. Now 74, she has been an indefatigible fighter for the causes of family health and well-being in Christchurch for nearly half a century. Such advances as the Children’s Bill of Rights proposal passed by the City Council in 1976, the use of specially treated lambskins for babies, and family life education for schoolgirls, owe a great deal to her foresight, drive, and determination. Nancy Sutherland is one of Christchurch’s colourful characters. She has developed a speaking style that is designed to shock. Her choice of words is an attentiongetter and her passion for her causes is unmistakable. “All of my do-gooding work is based on hate,” she says. That seems a paradox to those used to the idea that “do-gooding” is prompted by love of mankind, but she explains that her hate is directed at injustice and at the

harm that some people do to others — particularly to children. Her unceasing campaign against corporal punishment, for instance, is based on hatred of her father, who used to beat her. When her own twins were at Cashmere School she worked through the School Committees Association to seek the abolition of corporal punishment. “It was a belting school,” she recalls. Addington, where she had been a teacher, was a belting school too. “Bloody belting — you heard it all the time. These men don’t know how strong they are; and the children’s bones are still forming. They get green-stick fractures.”

Her 1960 motion to at least limit corporal punishment to the upper school did not succeed because, she says, the meeting which considered it was stacked against her. “They said it should be ignored because of my betrayal of the teaching profession.”

When she was at Addington School the staff sent her to Coventry over the corporal punishment issue. “No-one would speak to me — it was so childish.”

Education Department policy was to have no punishment in the infant school (five to seven years), but she knew the little ones were being strapped. When she had been at the school for her probationary period, the staff told her, only half jokingly, that she now qualified to have a strap of her own, which she could keep in her drawer or hang on the back of the door as a deterrent.

They recommended a shop in Manchester Street where she could buy “every kind of strap, every instrument of torture” — narrow ones with sharp edges which would hurt more if the child was made to wet his hand first, or wide flexible ones that looked frightening. She refused to equip herself with a strap — “In case I lost my temper and used it.” “Of course, this was back years,” she says. “But I think in some forms its still extant.” She was quite a rebel, and soon found herself right off-side with the education authorities, especially headmasters. As a teacher she refused to have an inspector visit her classroom. “It wrecks the dignity of the room,” she "I told them if anyone wants to see if I’m reading a who-dunnit or writiiig a letter to my lover, they can peep through the window over the door.” School hygiene was another worry of hers. Hepatitis was rife at Addington, and when one of her Standard One girls died of it, she could hold her tongue no longer.

She wrote two articles which appeared in the “Star” (after being rejected, she says, by “The Press” on the advice of the Medical Officer of Health who told the editor she was a dangerous woman). In them she expressed her disgust at the unhygienic conditions that led to the spread of hepatitis.

She recommended the provision of soap, hot water, and towels, none of which were provided then, for the children or the staff. “How can you expect them to be hygienic if you don’t make it possible for them?” she asks.

Improvements were made, although she notes that there is still no hot water in school washrooms. She has never let the matter rest. Even today, says Nancy Sutherland, Christchurch is the dirtiest city in the country in terms of personal hygiene, judged on its hepatitis record. Another of her early interests was the plight of children in hospitals. She championed visiting and rooming rights for parents as early as the 19405. She has been the driving force behind a lot of Parents Centre innovations, and inaugurated the Babycare lambskin project from which the Parents Centre gets a percentage of the profits. Children, and all who care for them, owe Nancy Sutherland a lot. She came from a big family, and had five children herself, including two sets of twins — (“I had litters instead of individual children”) — and her knowledge of the plight of mothers and children came from personal experience. “Women’s lib to me would be payment to be with my children,” she says. “The dignity of a job. It’s the hardest, most relentless, searching job; a devastating job, and we expect women to do it without any training in schools, only superficial training when they’re pregnant and it’s too late.” Considering Nancy Sutherland’s almost missionary zeal for the health and welfare of women, and her background as an athlete and physical educator, the cigarette that dangles constantly from her lips seems a contradiction. She defends her smoking half-heart-edly. “When you reach three score and 10 you can bloody well do what you like,” she says. “It’s a dummy, a comfort. It stops me talking too much.” How she would manage to talk any more, even without cigarettes is impossible to imagine. She has a steam-rolling declamatory style that brooks no argument, leavened with flashes of wit and good humour. Her speech is larded with mild but effective expletives, and she pulls no. punches;

But she insists: “I don’t damage anyone’s reputation — except mine, and I’m beyond recall. I don’t give a bugger. “I’d say in my life I’ve had more defeats than gains, more failures than accepted successes. I’ve learned, as a result, to make my demands more outrageous so that my defeats still have some of my aims invested in them.” Nancy Sutherland’s coarse language belies her genteel upbringing in Australia. She was sent to the Clarendon Methodist Ladies’ College in an effort to disguise her rebellious nature with a veneer bf culture. “You’d need it all to make a lady of me,” she snorts. “I have to redress the balance by lurid language, but at least those school fees gave, me some pure vowels to counteract the Strine.” One of her most spectacular successes was the Christchurch City Council’s adoption in 1977 of a report on the need for a Bill of Rights for New Zealand children. A Labour councillor, she was the main force behind the report, which asked the Government to set up a permanent Ministry for Children, with its own Minister, and to

define the rights of the child and pass an Act giving them statutory protection. Although none of that has come to pass, the report was taken to the United Nations by the Mayoress, Lady Hay, and was one of the documents that led to the 1979 United Nations Year of the Child.

A typical out-of-Christchurch comment at the time was that of the Mayor of Auckland, Sir DoveMyer Robinson, who huffed that a Children’s Bill of Rights would help make children more defiant than they are already. Nancy Sutherland thinks that attitude still prevails. “Most parents are soaked in the values of the Victorian age,” she says. “They’ll never do it (introduce her bill) in this parliament. They’ll see it as setting a child against its parents; it smacks of Hitler getting young children to inform on their parents — setting up the young to inform on families.” Her attitude is that if the benefits are obvious in the child, that is the important thing. “It’s not the benefit of the parents, the community, God, or any sect,” she says. “The child is the only hope of the world. Not Christ with his lamp, a la Millais, or whoever. “If there was a God, he wouldn’t

allow people to multilate their children so that they have to be admitted to a hospital ward. The well-being of children comes first.”

Much remains to be done in the causes that Nancy Sutherland has taken up. Most of all she wants to see a genuine Bill of Rights passed which requires a state-paid advocate for children in all situations affecting them, not just in court. One prerequisite for the bill of rights is a payment for parents as an optional job choice “so that a woman has some sense of worth in a world where worth is always measured in terms of rnoney.” Another is at least 51 per cent “consumer” representation on all decision-making bodies affecting young children. A third prerequisite is specialised family life education for girls, a subject in which she has taken a special interest through the Family Life Education Council — another of her ideas.

Now she is off to Waiake Bay in Auckland to be near her son, Dr Oliver Sutherland, and her grandchildren. She plans to swim every day from the beach at the bottom of her garden. “I can’t die out, of sight of the sea,” she says. “I’m fed up with the plains.”