Thank you, Northern Ireland - Linda McDougall, Waitangi Day speaker
/“Thank you for the amazing positive influence people from Ulster have had, and continue to have, on the development of New Zealand as a liberal democracy. A new nation that led the way on votes for both genders, all races, creeds and cultures” said Linda McDougall in a remarkable Waitangi Day address at the Ulster New Zealand Centre, Glenavy, Lisburn.
The award-winning TV producer/ presenter, and political biographer, born in Dunedin, South Island in 1941, was the daughter of a policeman and a shop worker whose high-quality education in Invercargill and Wellington ensured that her ability and ambition were rewarded with a distinguished career in television and publication. Linda, who first came to Northern Ireland in the late 1960s working for the BBC as ‘the troubles’ unfolded, expressed her delight at returning after so many years to be the Ulster New Zealand Trust’s special Waitangi Day guest.
During her first week at Uni joining the drama club proved the doorway to a remarkable career for she won an NZ government bursary to attend Speech and Drama School in London. Arriving there in 1961 she was entranced watching television for the first time and on return to NZ three years later became a recruit to the just formed NZBC tv station. Through this she met and became the partner of the Bradford born academic Austin Mitchell an amusing, much admired NZ television presenter who later published an affectionate, popular book about 1960s NZ entitled The Half Gallon, Quarter Acre, Pavlova Paradise, a term adopted by NZ vernacular and entered in the dictionary of NZ English.
On returning to the UK both Linda and Austin enjoyed successful careers in television. She was a producer/director covering current affairs with Granada Television’s ‘World in Action’ when Austin, elected Labour MP for Grimsby in 1976, caused her reluctant sacrifice of this position by promising to live in the constituency. Linda nonetheless founded a small independent production company and told her enthralled Ballance House audience about one of her Royal Television Society Journalism Awards for ‘Euro frauds’ a Thames Tv programme covering scandalous farm animal smuggling across the Irish border.
In a wide-ranging eloquent address to the Waitangi Day audience, Linda looked back to 1840 when the foundation treaty, now celebrated as NZ’s national day, was signed by Māori and British leaders, to imagine how a one-year-old John Ballance was learning to walk in the very place where she was now speaking. A boy who later as NZ Premier with his second wife, the equally remarkable Ellen, encouraging him, ensured that New Zealand women of all ages and backgrounds were the first in the world to cast a vote.
For that alone New Zealanders can say a big thank you to Ulster people, Linda added, as she was invited to greet Mrs Samelia Ballance, widow of Jack Ballance, great grandnephew of John Ballance who lives on the family-owned farm where the historic Ballance farmhouse is now the Ulster New Zealand Centre.
In closing Linda McDougall noted that the isolation of NZ frustrated many young Kiwis anxious to see the world, including herself in the 1960s. But the upside of this remote isolation was that it allowed this young Pacific nation to engage in social experiment without the inequality of class. It was a place where progressive leaders such as John and Ellen Ballance could promote the building of an egalitarian society that was admired throughout the world.
