Derek Bunn died in Christchurch, in September 2017, aged 61. I didn’t find this out until January 2018 in the course of dinner table conversation with friends. That’s not surprising, as I had neither seen nor had any contact with Derek for many decades. But, first things first. Who was Derek Bunn? He was a reminder that, long before there was an Anti-Bases Campaign (ABC), there was a thriving anti-bases campaign (if you get my drift). The anti-bases protests of the late 1960s and early 70s were bigger and more militant than anything that ABC has held in its 30+ years of existence. And those protests were key stepping stones in the formation of what is now CAFCA. We were born in the mid-1970s.

The only difference was that those earlier protests were organised on a one-off basis, by ad hoc committees, not by an earlier equivalent of ABC. The most succinct summary of these historic protests is in Maire Leadbeater’s article in Watchdog 135, April 2014, “Our History As An Anti-Bases Campaign: From CAFMANZ To CAFCINZ To CAFCA (& Then To ABC)”, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/35/09.html (CAFMANZ = Campaign Against Foreign Military Activities in New Zealand. CAFCINZ = Campaign Against Foreign Control In New Zealand).

The Battle Of Mount John

Maire lists the protests: Omega (1968); Woodbourne (1971); Mount John (1972) and Harewood (1973). She also lists the various 1980s’ Black Birch protests, which were organised by, first, CAFCINZ and, then, CAFCA. Mount John is the relevant one here. “The 1972 national anti-base demonstration was dubbed ‘The Battle of Mt John’. Some 250 activists travelled to the Mt John observatory near Tekapo to protest at a US Air Force satellite tracking station built on land leased from the University of Canterbury”.

“Policing was very aggressive and two demonstrators were seriously injured – a schoolboy suffered a fractured jaw after he was kicked in the face by a dog handler and two others were bitten by Police dogs, one of them on the penis. At the end of the weekend feelings were running high. ‘Somebody vented their frustration by placing a large boulder on the Mount John access road and triggered off a glorious episode of mass vandalism. At least 90% of the 300 or so people present were soon straining and sweating to move every available boulder’*. The road was rendered completely impassable, littered with hundreds of tons of rocks”.

*The quote is from Owen Wilkes’ 1973 booklet "Protest: Demonstrations Against The American Military Presence In New Zealand. Omega 1968, Woodbourne 1971, Mount John 1972, Harewood/Weedons 1973". My obituary of Owen is in Watchdog 109, August 2005, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/09/09.htm.  MH.

Derek Bunn was the schoolboy whose jaw was fractured by the boot of a Police dog handler. A detailed, contemporary description of the protest can be read online in the Victoria University student paper (Salient, Vol 35, No. 3, 15/3/72, “Unjustifiable Violence At Mount John”, George Rosenberg, http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-Salient35031972-t1-body-d1.html).

The article reported that Bunn lost a couple of teeth as a result of his injury, was taken to a doctor at Fairlie and then into Christchurch Hospital, where he had to spend several weeks (CAFCA founder and life member, Bill Rosenberg, was the person who drove Derek to Christchurch Hospital. He later covered Derek’s Timaru civil damages court case against the Crown for Canta, the University of Canterbury student paper. The 1972 Mount John campaign was where Bill and I first met. MH). The Police story was that Derek Bunn suffered his injury by falling face first onto a rock or by being hit by a rock thrown by his fellow protesters.

Both he and Richard Suggate, the protestor bitten on the penis by a Police dog, filed damages claims against the Attorney-General on behalf of the Crown. Later in 1972, the National government’s Minister of Police had to apologise to Richard on national TV for saying that Richard had been throwing rocks at the cops (there was only one TV network in those days, which everyone watched at the same time. So, that official apology was a big deal).

In 1974 the case was settled out of court. “I had a look through my Mt John file. Much fascinating stuff in there, which I have not looked at for years. I was awarded $500 damages and $100 costs. Legal fees were deducted and I was left with $365. Of that I made a $40 donation to CAFCINZ and a $40 donation to Derek Bunn's legal fund” (Richard Suggate, e-mail to me, 27/5/18. To put that into perspective, my weekly rent in those days was $9 for half a house).

Received Nothing Due To Technicality

Derek Bunn had no such happy ending. At the time he was injured he was legally a minor, so required parental consent to initiate legal action. This was withheld for a long time. Finally, it was granted and the case was heard in Timaru. The judge held that Derek had indeed been kicked by a cop (as opposed to accidentally injuring himself or being hit by a rock thrown by a fellow protester) and said he would have awarded him a sizeably larger amount of damages than Richard Suggate received.

But – the Crown prevailed because it pointed out to the judge that legal action against the Crown had to be commenced within 12 months of the incident. And, because Derek’s family had withheld the necessary consent, he was too late to seek legal redress. He received nothing. And as this was in the days before ACC, he got no financial support as a result of being injured (in those days you had to sue and prove liability. Derek did and his account was found to be true but he received nothing because of a legal technicality).

The University of Canterbury terminated its Mount John lease to the US Air Force and the land reverted to the Crown; the Labour government promptly leased it to a US transnational corporation, which ran the military observatory on behalf of the USAF until the whole thing became obsolete in the mid 1980s when it was closed, dismantled and flown back to the US. That prompted me to issue the shortest press release I’ve ever done: “Good riddance to bad rubbish”. A point worth noting is that, after Mount John, the cops have never used dogs again at a protest.

Of the US military facilities enumerated by Maire Leadbeater above: Omega was stopped before it ever set up here, Project Longbank (at RNZAF Woodbourne, Blenheim), Mount John and Black Birch (Marlborough) are all gone. Only Harewood (Christchurch Airport) remains, and it’s been there since 1955. Derek Bunn reminds us (brutally, with a literal kick in the face) that NZ has a long and honourable history of confronting the US military and its local protectors. In the case of Mount John, they literally were the running dogs of US imperialism.