I Writing about John Mulgan in 1979, C. K. Stead looked back to the 1951 Waterfront Dispute, which he perceived as playing the same role in his own life as the 1932 Queen Street Riots had in Mulgan's, a formative experience in which they were 'involved on the perimeter of violent political action' in such a way that it 'influenced [their] political thinking'. In a footnote in that essay he bracketed himself with Maurice Shadbolt as being 'involved on the side of the unions' in the Dispute. (1) A year later, Shadbolt published a letter saying that any involvement by Stead in 1951 came as 'a congenial surprise' to him, but that perhaps Stead was rewriting 'history as it should have been'. He went on to state that 'already 1951 is less convincing as history than as legend'. (2) Shadbolt had already used both the history and the legend in his Strangers and Journeys (1972), and Stead, perhaps moved by this argument about the past, was about to do so in his All Visitors Ashore (published in 1984, but with a narrative present of 1981).
