TRUST: A true story of women and gangs
Pip Desmond
Random House, $39.99, pbk
Trust is both an inspiring and depressing book.
It is a candid account of the helter-skelter, topsy-turvy lives of young women who belonged to the Aroha Trust, the co-operative work trust set up in Wellington in 1977.
The author, Pip Desmond, who previously had managed a drop-in centre in Dunedin's Octagon and run a house for homeless children, was a dominant force in the trust's establishment.
It organised physical work for Maori girls whose formative years had in the main been blighted by family violence and sexual abuse.
Desmond, by dint of intensive interviewing, has painstakingly documented the life experiences of the young women who belonged to the trust, tracing their experiences in the three years the trust existed and in their later lives.
"Our girls were young girls, defined in relation to the men, particularly Black Power," Desmond writes.
"Living in the shadow. Forever circling them."
Within the trust, rifts never occurred along gang lines.
"That was the thing about it," said Georgie, one of the few women with a non-gang partner.
"A bunch of women who got on so well, and yet each and every one of them went with different members of different gangs . . ."
Desmond, a good writer, and the women whose lives are laid bare, are impressively frank.
"Oppression in the gang scene was blatant: hidings, orders to stay home, cook a feed, keep your mouth shut.
In spite of this - or perhaps because of it - many of the girls were stauncher than most feminists I knew," she says.
In a speech to the National Council of Women, Desmond listed the trust's achievements: work, houses, vans, training courses,a common bank account, sports teams, trips away.
"In other words, we were a group of so-called unemployable, criminal no-hopers living and working together, supporting ourselves and each other."
The accounts of the predatory habits of many members of various gangs do not make for easy reading.
Desmond says that when the trust folded, a few of its members settled down and never offended again.
But many spiralled into lives of crime, violence, abuse, alcohol and drugs.
Those with a strong belief system - taha Maori, religion, politics - seemed to be doing best.
By the time she recorded their stories, they were in their 30s and early 40s.
All had children, ranging from babies to adults.
Lifetime Black Power member Denis O'Reilly last year wrote in his blog on New Zealand Edge: "Aroha Trust was one of the gutsiest, most feisty, courageous and generally unknown expressions of women's liberation that this country has seen.
These were the women who challenged the Black Power over our attitudes to rape and who, at the end of the day, were responsible for a change in gang behaviour, nationally."
Trust includes many colour photographs.
- Clarke Isaacs is a former chief of staff of the Otago Daily Times.
