Two Tickets to Barbarism

2019 Rona Bailey lecture.

For the 2019 Rona Bailey lecture, Dean Parker will talk about growing up in Napier, what he learnt in London from Trotskyists and Irish republicans, joining the Socialist Unity Party back in New Zealand, the formation of the NZ Writers’ Guild and its affiliation to the Federation of Labour, and then the politics of writing and the writing of politics.

The biennial Rona Bailey Memorial Lecture commemorates activist Rona Bailey (1914-2005) whose papers are now held in the Alexander Turnbull Library.

Labour History Project
The Labour History Project (formerly the Trade Union History Project) is an organisation dedicated to researching, recording, preserving and promoting working-class history.

Formed in 1987 and made up of individual and institutional members, the Labour History Project organises seminars and conferences, publishes the LHP Bulletin, maintains the Bert Roth Award for Labour History, and supports a wide range of related projects (books, research, exhibitions, documentary films, archive projects and oral histories).

The committee of the Labour History Project is based in Wellington.

About the speaker
Dean Parker is a New Zealand screenwriter, playwright, journalist and political commentator based in Auckland. Dean has worked as a writer for much of his life and been prominent in his union, the NZ Writer's Guild.

His plays include ‘The Man That Lovelock Couldn’t Beat’, ‘Baghdad, Baby!’ and an adaptation of Nicky Hager's expose ‘The Hollow Men’. Amongst his screenwork, he has won awards in New Zealand for tele-play ‘Share the Dream’ (starring Joel Tobeck), and co-writing successful big-screen comedy Came a ‘Hot Friday’. adapted from the novel by Ronald Hugh Morrieson.

Parker also wrote Federation of Labour play ‘The Feds’ (with Rena Owen as Jock Barnes) and co-directed the documentary ‘Shattered Dreams’, alongside journalist Francis Wevers. The film examined industrial conflict in New Zealand in the years before the 1951 waterfront lockout.

‘Johnson’, Dean Parker’s first novel, was published in 2017. In this book Parker imagines the future of the protagonist of John Mulgan’s classic novel ‘Man Alone’. In October 2013 Parker was presented with a prestigious Laureate Award from the Arts Foundation.