Peace Researcher 32 – March 2006
ABC has been holding protests at the Waihopai
spybase since 1988 and we’re not about to stop doing so, despite the usual
taunts of “You’ll never close it down” and pointed references to clichés
involving barn doors and bolted horses. Precisely the same sort of reactions
have been hurled at every movement for social change in New Zealand’s history –
“women will never get the vote…this country will never go nuclear-free …you’ll
never get smoking out of pubs”, etc, etc. We’ll keep doing it for as long as it
takes, and the fact remains that ABC is the only group to organise protests at
Waihopai. If we didn’t do it, then it wouldn’t get done. Despite recent media
claims to the contrary, it is not an annual protest. In the early days we went
there several times a year; by contrast, in the late 90s, there was a period of
several years when we didn’t go there at all. We were last there in 2004 (see
PR 29, June 2004; “Waihopai 2004: The Protests Continue, With Some New Twists”,
Bob Leonard. It can be read online at http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr29-97.html).
In 2005, we had a change of tactic and targeted both Wellington and the
Government Communications Security Bureau’s (GCSB) other spybase, namely
Tangimoana (for details, see the Wellington & Tangimoana Spybase Protest
subsection of my Organiser’s Report, elsewhere in this issue). Following our
assessment of that at the ABC committee’s annual strategy meeting, we decided
to return to Waihopai in January 2006.
Ever since we deliberately changed our tactics
away from confrontation and mass arrests (1997 was the last time anyone was
arrested at a Waihopai protest), our activities in Blenheim itself and at the
base have been very similar from one year to the next – a rally in Seymour
Square in central Blenheim, with speakers from ABC, leading Green MPs and
representatives from other parties and organisations; followed by a march
through town (almost always on the footpath as opposed to the street); a
sausage sizzle open to the public back at Seymour Square; then out to the base
where Bob Leonard metamorphoses into the highly photogenic Uncle Sam in order
to inspect everyone’s Undemocratic Republic of UKUSA passports as they cross
the border onto foreign territory at the base; concluding with a march up to
the heavily fortified inner gates and more speeches. There have been some
variations – some years have featured a Best Dressed Spy Contest and/or a Spies
Picnic at Seymour Square; we have also had video evenings and public meetings
in Blenheim, with local, national and international speakers (we’ve had guests
from both Australia and Britain over the years). To us, it sometimes feels very
much like the same old same old but people never fail to respond positively to
it. In short, it may be a formula, but it’s one that’s tried and proven. It
works. In the years of mass arrests and confrontations out at the base, we
tended to ignore Blenheim, and generated hostility as a result. Now our
relationship with the local people and media is very positive.
With the notable exception of January 2003 –
when John Craighead, a Marlborough District Councillor and prominent local
Green really got stuck in to mobilising locals to come out and oppose the
imminent invasion of Iraq, leading the Marlborough Express to call the
resulting march by 250 people the biggest protest that the town had seen since
the 1981 Springbok Tour – our activities have attracted around 50 or so people.
We had no reason to believe that January 2006 would be any different. One
completely unforeseen and tragic event changed that, namely the November 2005
death of Green Co-Leader, Rod Donald (see my obituary of him elsewhere in this
issue).
From the time he entered Parliament as an Alliance MP in Opposition Rod plunged into the campaign against the Waihopai spybase. He was elected in 1996; he paid his first visit to Waihopai during ABC’s January 1997 protest. Indeed he later appeared as a defence witness during the Blenheim court case of the 20 people arrested but got short shrift from the reactionary local judge who wasn’t going to have his courtroom turned into a “circus”. Once the Greens stood on their own two feet in Parliament, and Keith Locke was elected (both happened in 1999), Rod and Keith became a standard feature of all subsequent Waihopai protest camps. In January 2000, the newly-elected Greens were flavour of the month and the media poured across from Wellington to cover it. The last Waihopai protest attended by both was in January 2004. And they didn’t just parachute in either. Both spent the weekend in a tent like the rest of us, using Portaloos and doing their share of the food preparation. Rod was invaluable for his ability to attract the media to events like that, he really did have them wrapped around his little finger. And he was an excellent liaison man with the publicity shy base commanders, to get us legal access to the inner gate of the heavily fortified spybase. He plunged into all our activities – I remember him as compere for the Best Dressed Spy contest, held in Blenheim’s central Seymour Square. He loaned us his family tent, he drove people around in his van (quite often having specially driven it from his family’s annual holiday in Golden Bay) and he led the trips to the swimming hole further up the Waihopai Valley. He was disappointed that we didn’t go to Waihopai in 2005 but he and Keith played a leading role at our activities that year in Wellington and at Tangimoana (Rod told me that it was his only ever visit to that spybase).
Rod never missed a chance to put Waihopai in
the spotlight – in August 2005, as part of its election campaign, the Greens
toured Andrew Wilkie, an Australian former Intelligence analyst turned Iraq War
whistleblower, author and Australian Green candidate (see Bob Leonard’s review
of Wilkie’s book, “Axis Of Deceit”, elsewhere in this issue). Rod accompanied
him through the country, including to the inner gate of Waihopai (where he
managed to wrangle a couple of muffins out of the base commander, having chided
him about the lack of hospitality to an MP on previous visits). Indeed,
Wilkie’s tour was the reason for my only ever visit to Rod’s home, to meet him,
and we spent a very pleasant evening, viewing old tapes about Waihopai, among
other things. At Wilkie’s well attended
Christchurch public meeting, Rod kept plugging the ABC and invited me to speak.
He had every intention of coming to the January 2006 Waihopai protest. Days
after his death I was asked to come into his Christchurch office, where his
shellshocked secretary handed me the e-mail I’d sent inviting him to join us
again. On it he’d written, “yes”. And to my rather tongue in cheek query as to
whether he would have come if he had been a Cabinet Minister (which was quite
on the cards until Labour rejected the Greens and went with United Future and
New Zealand First instead), he’d emphatically written “I sure as Hell would
have come!”. That would have been an interesting situation that sure as Hell
would have infuriated Helen Clark and fascinated the media.
In gratitude to his years of work on the
Waihopai campaign, ABC dedicated the January 2006 protest to Rod’s memory. As
master of ceremonies (MC) in Blenheim’s Seymour Square, I started the
proceedings with a minute’s silence for him. In all our publicity in the final
few months before the protest, we urged Green Party members, and all the other
people who took part in the outpouring of grief after his death, to come to
Waihopai as a practical way to honour his memory and continue his work. The
Greens mounted a major publicity effort among their members and particular
thanks are due to Rod’s former Parliamentary Executive Secretary, Bronwen
Summers (who has since resigned and left Wellington) and Rod’s longtime friend
and Banks Peninsula campaign manager, Christine Dann. The result was a
significant increase of people at this year’s protest, boosted by many Greens
coming for the first time, including Party Leader, Jeanette Fitzsimons. Keith
Locke MP came again, as he always has done since entering Parliament.
The local (Kaikoura) Greens, headed by their
2005 election candidate and ABC activist, Steffan Browning, organised a
memorial planting of native trees at our campsite (they are also dedicated to
Owen Wilkes, at ABC’s request).The Party took it further and made a full
weekend out of it by deciding to hold its annual Picnic for the Planet at our
campsite, on the Sunday of the protest weekend, complete with bands, and
Jeanette Fitzsimons delivered her annual State of the Planet Address there.
This whole extravaganza was organised by Steffan Browning and Christine Dann
(sadly, neither she nor her younger sister, ABC Treasurer, Robyn Dann, were
able to attend any of the weekend’s activities due to the sudden death of their
mother only days beforehand).
This led to us hosting more than 50 people at
our camp on the two nights we stayed there (usually we’d be lucky if we got 20
or 30). They came from as far north as Hokianga and as far south as Otago, plus
quite a lot of foreigners temporarily resident in NZ. We had nearly 100 on the
march through Blenheim and at the base. Apart from that wonderful 2003 turnout
(the vast majority of whom were locals that we’ve never seen before or since),
this was the biggest Waihopai protest crowd in many, many years. That could all
be attributed to one thing – the Rod Factor. As an inveterate publicist and
seizer of opportunities par excellence, he would have mightily approved. We
know that he was with us in spirit.
There were some other changes this year too.
For the first time this century we had to find a new place to camp, as our
previous host, Olly Oliver (a sympathetic vineyard owner and producer of Big
Balls, that strictly limited line of red wine inspired by the two spybase domes
that dominate the outlook from his former Waihopai Valley home) had been
defeated by years of consecutive frosts buggering his harvest and had sold up
and gone. As there is no ABC in Blenheim (or anywhere other than Christchurch
for that matter), we have to organise all logistics from afar. And finding a
new campsite proved to be a difficult and time consuming exercise that took
months. There proved to be some interesting politics involved. For example, the
Waihopai Valley residents’ association declined our request to camp on land
adjacent to their community hall because they decided to put their relationship
with the base first, particularly as it had put in some money for the hall’s
restoration in the past. A Blenheim church which had hosted our public meeting
in the recent past declined our request to camp there marae style because “your
reputation has preceded you, you have a reputation for publicity-seeking
stunts” (that’s the whole point actually).
Eventually, we settled on staying in a
Department of Conservation camp (at Onamalutu) for the first time ever, which meant
that, also for the first time ever, we had to pay to camp. Even though DOC
camps are considerably cheaper than commercial camping grounds, the nearly $600
that we paid DOC to camp there for two nights constituted a significant
percentage of our expenses and definitely contributed towards ABC incurring a
small loss from the weekend’s activities. That said, it is an absolutely
beautiful spot, surrounded by magnificent native forest, with some lovely
walks. The only downsides that I personally encountered were that, while it was
very hot and sunny by day it proved to be extremely cold at night (I’d hate to
camp there in winter) and it came complete with a nest of annoyingly persistent
wasps. There is a great irony in it being the site of a grove of memorial
native trees for Rod Donald, that most addicted of cellphone addicts – there is
no cellphone coverage. This so alarmed some of the other addicts present that
they drove to the closest place where they could use their mobiles. The much
larger number of people camping with us brought with it the problem of feeding
so many people with our usual limited resources. Particular thanks are due to
ABC’s youngest committee members, Frances Mountier and Lynda Boyd, who took on
numerous practical tasks at very late notice when Robyn Dann had to withdraw
due to the death of her mother just days beforehand. They mobilised a willing
crew of volunteers from among the campers. And although there is no Blenheim
ABC, none of this would have been possible without the very hands-on
involvement over many months by both Steffan Browning and Phil Hunnisett, who
undertook a multiplicity of tasks in their capacity as ABC’s men in Blenheim.
Heartfelt thanks to both of them (and to those who helped them).
Taking a longer term perspective, there has
been a change in emphasis. When we started out and throughout the 90s, the
emphasis of the protests was that “Big Brother Is Watching Us” i.e. the threat
posed to civil liberties by Waihopai and the GCSB. There was also emphasis on
Waihopai’s role in spying on our Asia/Pacific neighbours, such as those waging
the life or death struggle for independence in East Timor against the genocidal
Indonesian occupiers. Once George Bush became US President and went to war in
Afghanistan, Iraq and anywhere else that took his fancy, the emphasis of the
protests changed to being explicitly anti-war, stressing that Waihopai is New
Zealand’s main contribution to any and all US wars, present and future. It is a
US spybase in all but name, and its 24/7 role in gathering intelligence for the
US is much more important than any token commitment of NZ military forces to
Afghanistan, Iraq, the Persian Gulf, etc. Waihopai compromises our hard won
position of having broken the nuclear and military ties with the US; it is part
of a half century old covert Intelligence-gathering network (the top secret
UKUSA Agreement) which is a central player in the US war machine and which
means that New Zealanders, knowingly or not, have the blood on our hands of the
innocent victims of those wars, many of them victims of “faulty intelligence”.
So, in 2006, our visual props dramatically
symbolised death – we had 30 adults and kids in white face masks (representing
the civilian dead of those wars), some crosses with “Iraq” and “Afghanistan”
painted on them (thanks to the Christchurch Catholic Worker group) and some
coffins (courtesy of Christchurch Save Animals From Exploitation). The leaflet
we handed out to the Blenheim public was illustrated by a photo (which also
features on our permanent Waihopai display) of Afghani villagers mourning their
children killed by a US air strike arising from just such “faulty
intelligence”. All the speakers in Blenheim and at the base hammered this point
– indeed, one of the strongest speeches was a spontaneous one made by one of
the masked “dead” at the base gates, speaking on behalf of the innumerable all
too real dead of those US wars. We also had a couple of new visual props this
year, the brain child of Bob Leonard, namely a couple of large white balloons
complete with red flashing lights on top (to represent the two huge white domes
of the spybase with their aircraft warning lights on top). Unlike the real
domes, these ones had “Close Waihopai Spy Base” emblazoned on them. And, also unlike the real domes
(unfortunately) one of them disintegrated all by itself.
There was another factor which led to the 2006
protest having an even higher profile than usual and that was the fortuitous
coincidence of the Sunday Star-Times splashing some of the late David Lange’s
papers across its front pages the Sunday beforehand, including the
inadvertently released GCSB’s 1965-86 Annual Report. For details of this, see
the subsections headed “Historic Lange Papers Reveal Who GCSB Was Spying on 20
Years Ago” and “Spying On The UN” in my article entitled “Illegal NSA Spying On
Americans Exposed”, elsewhere in this issue). That sensational revelation is still
having major repercussions – for example, it has led to the GCSB Director,
Warren Tucker, making the first ever lengthy public defence of his agency’s
work and denying claims arising from the Sunday Star-Times expose (basically
amounting to “I can’t tell you anything about what we do but trust me, it’s all
for your own good”). Tucker’s statement, plus news stories and editorials about
it, appeared in several papers on January 31st (my reply to it, on behalf of
ABC, “Spy Alliance Must End”, was published in the Press of February 9th and
generated a lot of positive response from throughout NZ and overseas). The
Sunday Star-Times story was basically too late to drum up any more participants
for the protest but it certainly put the issue of GCSB spying smack into the
public consciousness just days before Waihopai (ironic really, as that 20 year
old report was detailing who was being spied on from the GCSB’s other, older
Tangimoana spybase, which has a different function and uses a different method
of spying. The report pre-dates Waihopai’s existence or even the announcement
that it was going to exist).
And the Sunday Star-Times story had political
consequences: while the Government scrambled to find out if former Prime
Minister Lange’s papers contained any more secrets that he shouldn’t have had,
two of the smaller parties – the Greens and the Maori Party – called for an
inquiry into what it had revealed and for the closure of Waihopai. Nothing new
about this for the Greens, who have campaigned against Waihopai for nearly as
long as ABC has. They have contributed two MPs, including one Leader, to every
protest for many years. This year it was Jeanette and Keith instead of Rod and
Keith. But the Maori Party is the new kid
in Parliament, and is still feeling its feet on all sorts of issues that fall
outside its core concerns. So it was gratifying to see that party, in the
person of Hone Harawira MP, come out so strongly in the days before the
protest. ABC invited him to join us and although he couldn’t make the Saturday
activities in Blenheim and at the base (he had a prior commitment to a hui in
Wellington), he came to the Onamalutu camp for the Sunday activities. He told
us that’d always wanted to join us but, living in Kaitaia, he hadn’t been able
to afford it in the past. The free domestic air travel that MPs get solved that
problem this year, so we were very pleased to welcome him.
The weekend’s events themselves went very
smoothly. On Saturday January 21st we started with a rally, in the blazing heat
in Blenheim’s Seymour Square. I was the MC and first speaker. I started
proceedings with a minute’s silence for Rod and, I must admit, it gave me
goosebumps as I remembered his role as MC at the Best Dressed Spy contest at that
very spot several years earlier. The crowd of nearly 100 then formed up,
complete with banners, placards, masks, crosses, coffins and balloons, and set
off on a footpath tour of central Blenheim. Our first stop was a little
unusual, namely the Marlborough District Library. The reason was that it had
refused to host our travelling display on the Waihopai spybase (unlike other
public libraries), saying that the spies have no right of reply. For details of
this, read the subsection headed “Waihopai Display” in my Organiser’s Report
elsewhere in this issue. This issue had generated media coverage of its own. As
soon as the Library opened on the Saturday morning, ABC committee members, Bob
Leonard and Yani Johanson, had set up the display outside it, so that Blenheim
people could see for themselves what the fuss was about. We had hired a small
truck (fortunately Phil Hunnisett has the necessary licence) to drive on ahead
of our march and be used as a speaking platform at our various stops. So,
outside the Library, I clambered aboard and used a megaphone to tell the
marchers, library users, staff and the public about the censorship which
prevented them from finding out what the sinister blot on their landscape
actually does (at the conclusion of the weekend, the display was set up in a
central Blenheim shop). We marched on, stopping at two other central Blenheim
venues on a very busy summer’s morning, where I spoke to the public. It became
apparent that one thing that ABC had overlooked was chants – some hasty improvisation
by our young firebrands, Frances Mountier and Lynda Boyd rectified that,
revealing Francie to have a most impressive vocal stamina. We returned to
Seymour Square where our two other speakers were Green MP, Keith Locke and John
Minto of Global Peace and Justice Auckland. Bob Leonard had transformed into
Uncle Sam (mystifying one participant, who thought that he was Colonel Sanders)
and received a rowdy reception (someone actually threw something at him, I hope
that it wasn’t a fried chicken) when he made his standard speech telling us to
bugger off.
After our well received sausage sizzle (which
always features a choice of vegetarian sausages), we drove in convoy out to the
base. Usually Uncle Sam welcomes us onto his territory (as mere mortal Bob Leonard,
he had negotiated our access right onto base property, for one hour) but the
current base commander wasn’t going to be upstaged, and made a speech to all of
us (a first) welcoming us on and telling us to behave. That’s where the
hospitality stopped – unlike Rod’s last visit, there were no muffins. Everyone
had their Undemocratic Republic of UKUSA passports inspected by Uncle Sam and
stamped as we crossed the border, then we all formed up and marched down the
road to the forbiddingly locked inner gates. It made for a striking sight in
that sunscorched, bleak setting – the banners, placards, masks, coffins and
crosses. Outside the gate I was again MC and opening speaker. The Green Leader,
Jeanette Fitzsimons was the featured speaker. John Minto spoke again, and
Steffan Browning spoke on behalf of Marlborough people opposed to the base.
Then we had an open mike and several people spoke, either to the crowd or
directly into the base (one, with a most impressive theatrical voice, exhorted
them to abandon their jobs and march out, leaving the gates open). Speaker
after speaker told of how Waihopai is part of the American killing machine and
spies on our near neighbours – for example, veteran Auckland peace and justice
activist, Maire Leadbeater, talked about the current dire situation in West
Papua (Indonesia’s “new” East Timor) and how Waihopai and the other stations in
the network will be spying on independence activists there. As already
mentioned, the most moving speech was made by one of the masked ”dead”. In
2004, it was at this point that a group of young Wellington anti-war activists
had stripped naked and formed a peace sign on the boiling hot asphalt of the
road. There was no such excitement this time, to the disappointment of at least
one network TV cameraman who, upon arrival, asked me if there would be any
naked women this year (I told him he’d have to make do with the male
participant who spent the entire weekend naked for reasons known only to
himself and who attracted a number of complaints and an order from the Police
to cover up in Blenheim, which he did, to the bare minimum. His bare arse
formed the backdrop to a national TV interview with Keith Locke). Of course,
Uncle Sam spoke again as well, telling us to bugger off (basically that’s all he
ever says when he speaks at Waihopai).
Our Waihopai protests always get excellent
local and national media coverage and this year was even better than most.
There are a number of reasons for that – the issue is a major one with
excellent visuals for newspaper photographers and TV cameramen; protests of any
kind are a rarity in conservative, provincial Blenheim (by contrast, ABC’s
Easter 2005 activities in Wellington and at Tangimoana got virtually no
coverage); the time of year – January – is the silly season and we are
realistic enough to know that we get that coverage because there aren’t the
usual competing stories that obsess the media when Parliament and the
Government are in business; the regular involvement of the Green Party, at the
highest level, attracts those in the media who specialise in politics and
Parliament; and the revelation of the GCSB historic spying details in the
Sunday Star-Times days earlier had put the issue to the top of the national
agenda. So, this year, we had two national TV networks – TVNZ and Maori TV (the
latter’s first time at Waihopai, although they couldn’t find anyone to
interview in te reo) – cover the whole range of activities in great detail,
meaning that it merited a lengthy and prominently placed item on TVNZ’s One
News. There was extensive coverage on several radio networks. John Minto has
only just started as a weekly Press columnist (producing apoplexy about
“Communism” from several outraged correspondents to the Letters To The Editor)
and he kicked things off days before the demo with a column headed “Spybase
serves US interests” (16/1/06), which concluded: “Later this week I will be
joining other New Zealanders in a protest at Waihopai to call for the base to
be closed”.
The Marlborough Express ran stories about it
before, during and after the event, including a couple of frontpage leads (they
love running big photos of Uncle Sam). In fact, the Express felt compelled to
“balance” its extensive coverage of the protests by an editorial (23/1/06)
entitled “Spy base here to stay”. The other local paper, the Blenheim Sun, also
ran several stories. The Christchurch Press has its own reporter, Dan
Hutchinson, in Marlborough and he filed several stories. Indeed Steffan
Browning has probably learned the hard way not to give the media any quotes to
take out of context. In his speech at the base gate, Steffan said that he
thought it was a “bit woeful” that more locals hadn’t taken part. The Press
(23/1/06) headlined this as “’Woeful’ turnout in base protest” (it was anything
but woeful, being at least twice the size of the usual turnout). Dan Hutchinson
wrote a feature (Press, 20/1/06; “Their neighbours are spies”; also published
in the same day’s Dominion Post as “Mysterious valley of the golf balls”) which
emphasised that Blenheim and Waihopai locals didn’t know and/or weren’t
bothered about what the spybase does. This rather misses the point that
Waihopai is fundamentally a national, indeed an international, issue, not a
local one. It’s a conservative rural area (it’s been a National stronghold for
many years), so we’re not surprised that we don’t get a large local turnout
(2003 was the wonderful exception to that rule). On the contrary, ABC is
delighted that we get a small but vital band of locals who, year after year,
join with their compatriots from one end of the country to the other in
protesting at the spybase and calling for its closure. And media coverage this
year, which got inextricably mixed in with the revelations arising from the
Lange papers, routinely spelled out what the base does for US Intelligence, and
matter of factly referred to the UKUSA Agreement (whose existence has never
been confirmed by any member government or agency) without prefacing it with
“alleged” or “so-called”. Indeed, in his unprecedented public statement
defending the GCSB its Director, Warren Tucker, confirmed the Agreement in all
but name.
Usually the Waihopai protests finish on the Saturday
and all that happens on the Sunday is that we pack up the camp, maybe have a
debriefing and then go our separate ways. Because of the Rod Factor, 2006 was
different. Sunday January 22nd was a day of activities at Onamalutu – the
memorial native tree planting for Rod and Owen Wilkes; music; the Picnic for
the Planet and Jeanette Fitzsimons’ annual State of the Planet Address. These
were very well attended and were also subject to extensive national and local
media coverage. As they were organised by the Greens and not ABC, Peace
Researcher is not the appropriate place in which to report them, the Greens
have their own outlets in which to do that. But there was one activity on the
Sunday morning which was ABC’s doing and that was the memorial treeplanting for
Owen Wilkes (anyone wishing to remind themselves about Owen Wilkes or his
connection to ABC and the national and global peace movements can refresh their
memories by reading PR 31, October 2005, the Special Issue devoted exclusively
to him. This can be read online at
http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/prcont31.html).
The treeplanting was conducted in typical
blazing Marlborough sunshine and a wind strong enough to blow away the
speakers’ gazebo at one point. The treeplanting organiser, Steffan Browning,
had done himself proud and assembled anything up to 20 trees to be planted. It
was started with a Maori blessing, music and featured MPs from two parties
(Greens and Maori). I spoke about Owen and highlighted the reasons why his
memorial should be in Marlborough, namely three former or present bases. I
first met him when the Christchurch Progressive Youth Movement (of which he was
proud to be an honorary member) was planning the January 1971 protest at the
top secret (and long gone) US Air Force Project Longbank at RNZAF Base
Woodbourne/Blenheim Airport. From the early 80s to the mid 90s, he was a
leading figure in the campaign to expose the former US Naval Observatory atop
Black Birch. Indeed I have recently watched a borrowed 1989 TVNZ documentary about
Black Birch, in which Owen figured prominently. And, of course, he was in the
campaign against Waihopai from the outset, in 1987. It is also highly
appropriate that he be permanently memorialised in a DOC reserve, as he spent
years working as a DOC archaeologist (in Waikato) after retiring from the peace
movement.
I had assumed that my brief speech would be it
as far as Owen was concerned, that as it was organised by the Greens, the rest
would be about Rod. I was very pleasantly surprised as speaker after speaker
got up to talk at length about both Owen and Rod – Jeanette Fitzsimons, Bronwen
Summers, Keith Locke, Richard Suggate and Maire Leadbeater among them. They
very much got equal billing. While the musician played on and the sun blazed,
dozens of people pitched in to plant the trees. I found it all very moving. And
it’s a beautiful permanent setting for such an appropriate memorial for these
two Cantabrians who, although they never met and were of different generations,
both lived the green life (in Owen’s case) and the green and Green life (in
Rod’s case). If you’re in Marlborough, visit their trees at Onamalutu.
Unfortunately, DOC won’t agree to a permanent plaque, but you can contact
Steffan Browning at greeny25@xtra.co.nz
or 021 725655 for directions on how to find them.
After listening to Jeanette’s State of the
Planet Address, ABC set out on the long drive home to Christchurch. It had been
an extremely successful protest, one of the best ever, and due to the unique
mix of events (the celebration which arose from the tragedy of Rod’s death) an
unforgettable weekend. Rod certainly would have been right in his element. We
did him proud, and we ensured that the spybase remains firmly fixed in the
national consciousness. The longrunning campaign to have it closed has gained
its second wind, it is more relevant than ever. As we live in ever more
dangerous times (all aboard for the next war on – whom? Iran? Hamas?), this
spybase is more important than ever to the US war machine, it is more
compromising than ever to “nuclear free and independent” New Zealand. Waihopai
is a blot on the national landscape that must be removed. We’ll be back.
|
previous article |
|
|
|