Rainbows and rangatiratanga

Moana Maniapoto was on board the Rainbow Warrior III last week to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the bombing of the first Rainbow Warrior by French secret agents.

It’s a piece of history that still evokes disbelief, as Moana writes here — and a timely reminder, too, of why an independent and united Pacific remains vitally important.

 

Surreal.

It’s the word that came to mind as I stood on the deck of Rainbow Warrior III for the dawn ceremony commemorating the bombing of the original ship 40 years ago.

It’s a sturdy boat. There was barely any movement on that chilly morning, bar the gentle fluttering of the Dutch flag on the stern (the ship’s home port is Amsterdam). Soon, the Warrior will be sailing off to Brazil for a climate meeting.

I listened to karakia, waiata, speeches and caught up with mates, activists and MPs. There seemed to be a moment in every conversation where we would stare at each other in disbelief, and say: “Can you believe this actually happened?”

Surreal.

The attack, which killed Fernando Pereira, a photojournalist and father of two, was an act of international sabotage. It reverberated around the globe. But for Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei, it landed, literally and emotionally, on their doorstep.

Greenpeace had always had a warm relationship with Ngāti Whātua, which was why, 40 years ago, Joe and Rene Hawke were invited on board the Rainbow Warrior to celebrate its arrival.

Their daughter Sharon knew they’d been invited but wasn’t sure which night they were going. So when she heard the boat had been bombed, she panicked. “I was really scared,” she told me. It turned out they’d visited the night before the bombing.

Images taken on that night by photographer John Miller show Matiu Rata and Nick Tangaroa with glasses in hand, and Joe Hawke speaking to the gathering, with Titewhai Harawira and Hilda Halkyard-Harawira looking on.

As Alec Hawke, Joe’s brother, explains, there was a special connection between the Rainbow Warrior and Ngāti Whātua. “There was this link — a link between Ngāti Whātua, a link between Joannee, and a link between us and our whānau that always supported Greenpeace.”

Joannee was Alec’s five-year-old daughter, who died in a fire during the 1970s occupation of Takaparawhau. Weeks after the bombing, he took a call from Greenpeace. At Joe’s suggestion, Alec invited Greenpeace and the Rainbow Warrior crew to plant a tree next to Joannee’s memorial to honour Fernando Pereira. He described the ceremony, presided over by Takutai Doc Wikiriwhi, as “solemn”.

I spoke to Alec near the memorial garden at Takaparawhau, where an image of Joe and Rene is on display. Both are now buried on the land. It’s a moving reminder of the love the couple had, not only for each other but for the whenua.

A spy in the whare

I wondered whether a younger generation knew about the 1985 bombing of the Rainbow Warrior. When I asked our crew of 30-somethings in Te Ao with Moana’s office, they looked at me and Cameron Bennett (our executive producer) blankly. My son, who started googling when told about it, was gobsmacked.

Not expecting much, I asked his 16-year-old sister the same question.

“Yes,” said Manawanui. “We learned about it at school.”

Ka pai, I thought. The curriculum must have changed in the 18 years between my two kids.

“Oh, Māmā,” she casually added. “Did you know one of the spies was flatting with Whaea Jane?”

What the . . . ?!

Jane Cooper is well known to whānau whose children attended Westmere Primary. Now retired from teaching, she was the former paeārahi of Ngā Uri o Ngā Iwi, the bilingual unit. She’s awesome, and we’ve stayed in touch over the years.

It turned out that Jane is fluent not only in Māori but also in French. During the 1980s, Jane used her linguistic skills at Greenpeace as a co-ordinator with a specific focus on the anti-nuclear campaign in French Polynesia. She found herself pulled into the bombing’s aftermath in ways she never expected.

At the request of Greenpeace, Jane had offered a young French volunteer a room in her Ponsonby flat, unaware that the woman was an undercover agent for the DGSE, the French secret service.

The woman’s apparent mission was to find the Rainbow Warrior’s itinerary, the first step in the plot to sabotage it. She introduced herself as Frederique Bonlieu, a keen, left-leaning “greenie” who seemed a natural fit for Greenpeace.

“From our flat,” Jane told me as we stood on the wharf next to the Rainbow Warrior III, “she’d be ringing offices every night in Paris that were, of course, the Ministry of Defence. It turned out that she was actually Lieutenant Christine Cabon of the DGSE.”

Back then, Jane had asked her flattie about those nighttime calls from the house. (There were no mobile or cell phones back then. Everyone in the whare shared the one clunky device plugged into a wall.)

“Frederique” told Jane that she was organising “an eco-tour for her mates” — one that involved a campervan. The real story only came out after New Zealand detectives searched the Ouvéa, the yacht used by the agents.

“They found a map of Auckland,” said Jane, “and on it was a handwritten address for a studio in Ponsonby. And this was the studio of my flatmate who was an artist, and we’d written the address on it . . . It didn’t take long for them to visit our flat.”

Jane’s spy flatmate left the country before the bombing, but the police were able to trace those phone calls, and letters that the French woman had written to Jane from Israel were also passed on to Interpol.

It was all a bit of a shock, said Jane. “New Zealanders were so trusting,” she recalls.

But looking back, Jane believes France underestimated the people of Aotearoa.

“I think they did think that we were a bit of a parochial backwater and that they wouldn’t get caught,” she said. “So I feel very happy to have been one of many ordinary New Zealanders who actually humiliated the French secret service, and did catch them because they made mistakes.”

Towards a nuclear-free Pacific

The bombing occurred during an international campaign to stop French nuclear testing in the Pacific. Just weeks earlier, at the request of tangata whenua, the Rainbow Warrior had helped evacuate 320 people from their island home of Rongelap, which had been contaminated by radioactive fallout from US nuclear testing.

A moving firsthand account of the exodus by journalist David Robie, who was also on the Rainbow Warrior for the dawn ceremony, can be found on E-Tangata. His new book Eyes of Fire: The Last Voyage and Legacy of the Rainbow Warrior was released last week.

It’s a shocking thought: An entire population forced to leave their beloved ancestral land, never to return. Hard not to think of the million-plus Palestinians being brutally forced out of their home.

“Indigenous people were being affected by the British, the French, the Americans testing in the Pacific,” Sharon Hawke recalls. “And so all the Indigenous cultures of the Pacific rallied and said: We want an independent nuclear-free Pacific.”

That was the clear message from the Pacific People’s Anti-Nuclear Action Committee, as Jane Cooper recalls. It was all about decolonisation.

“And so it was a challenge to Pākehā in New Zealand too: ‘Look at your own backyard.’”

From the Marshall Islands to Tahiti to Aotearoa, babies were born deformed, islands were obliterated, and whenua rendered uninhabitable. It’s hard to believe now, but between 1946 and 1996, 325 nuclear warheads were detonated in the Pacific. And out of that devastation came a fierce resistance that was Indigenous-led and unrelenting.

Kotahitanga: The myth

For the executive director of Greenpeace Aotearoa, Russel Norman, the bombing helped crystallise the country’s nuclear-free stance. But he cautions against romanticising the past.

“If you think about Jacinda Ardern’s recent book,” says Russel, “one of the things she said was she was very pleased that she removed the politics from climate change, right? That’s not really true.

“You can’t take the politics from climate change because there are these vested interests who are determined to push fossil fuels. They make money out of it. It was the same back then. Remember that the National Party voted against a nuclear-free New Zealand. There was no happy past where ‘we were all in this together’, right? We’ve kind of developed this national myth now that we were all nuclear-free. But Don Brash promised to get rid of the nuclear-free policy as late as 2005.”

Kotahitanga? There’s a myth that all New Zealanders were part of the anti-apartheid movement, too. Yeah, nah. And when it came to the protests at Bastion Point, as David Williams recalls, not everyone was on the same page then either.

“That’s the case today with climate change, just as it was the case with achieving a nuclear-free New Zealand 40 years ago. This moment in time, we have dinosaurs like Shane Jones who are doing everything they possibly can to stop action on climate change.”

In his jaw-dropping Michael King Memorial Lecture in 2023, Nicky Hager revealed the secret series of events at play when the nuclear-free policy was first announced by David Lange.

“I realised that the greatest opponents of the nuclear-free policy were not the National Party, or some pro-military groups, or even the US government. Our greatest opponents were the New Zealand officials. They were also the greatest opponents of the government they were supposed to serve, a government that had campaigned and been elected on the promise of a nuclear ban, and which was then trying to fulfil its promise.“

The wero continues

From opposing seabed mining in the Pacific to backing iwi-led campaigns in Taranaki, Greenpeace’s work continues.

Seabed mining campaigner Juressa Lee (Te Rarawa, Ngāpuhi, Rarotonga) is focused on ensuring that Greenpeace remains in true “allyship”.

“It’s my job to listen to local iwi and hapū and local communities that are organising in Taranaki,” she said. “I have a role to ensure that Greenpeace continues that allyship and that advocacy for Indigenous communities and frontline communities.”

Nuclear testing in the Pacific has stopped. Russel counts that as a big win. However, the former Green Party co-leader rattles off a series of crises that the world is facing as he describes the focus of Greenpeace in 2025.

How depressing, I may have mumbled to my guest.

“Oh, hang on,” he twigged. “I want to finish off on a positive note.”

That would be helpful, I thought.

“We have to remember there were heaps of people arrested trying to stop nuclear tests. There were protests in France, in Belgium, in Germany, the United States. So there are people like us all around the world who fought these battles [to be] nuclear free. And, we have to do the same now around issues like climate change, biodiversity and Treaty rights — and basic democracy, which is, in fact, on the table.

“We’ve achieved great things before by acting together, and we can do it again.”

I asked Juressa if she felt younger generations were aware of the Rainbow Warrior and the Indigenous struggle against nuclear testing. She said that while there are many gaps in the generations after her, young people must be given credit because “they’re very aware of what’s happening now”.

Images come to mind of students marching for the climate, against the genocide in Gaza, and for Te Tiriti.

Maranga Ake Ai

The 1980s were a time of relentless activism against apartheid and for Te Tiriti. Our people were just cracking into the kōhanga reo movement while Raukawa were hosting their total immersion wānanga in Ōtaki. Then there was the push for homosexual law reform, and against privatisation.

Māori were on the move, and music became a soundtrack to the movement.

I remember hearing “Maranga Ake Ai” by the Māori band Aotearoa for the very first time in my flat in Waterview. It blew my mind. I recall the excitement of running down the road from Auckland University to hear Herbs play “French Letter” live in Aotea Square.

“French Letter” and “Nuclear Waste” gave voice to the anti-nuclear movement.

“It was an exciting time,” said Alec Hawke, with a big smile on his face. “Through music and protest, we were telling our story.”

The story and the activism continue.

Four decades after the first Te Hui Oranga o Te Moana nui a Kiwa, where Māori and Pacific peoples joined in solidarity to fight for a nuclear-free and independent Pacific, they met again to discuss the most pressing issues and pass the baton on to a younger generation.

Groups like Aotearoa Peace Movement are across social media, reminding us that in 1945, the US detonated its first atomic bomb on stolen Native American lands. One month later, it dropped bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing more than 100,000 people instantly, with thousands more dying over the years following.

As the sun started to peek out from behind clouds, I watched the beautiful wreath of flowers drift on the water beside the Rainbow Warrior III and then disappear.

When the Rainbow Warrior III leaves the waters of Aotearoa this week, it will carry more than activists. It will carry memory and hope.

“Our children need to see this vessel,” said Sharon Hawke, sitting up on the hill at Takaparawhau, overlooking the beautiful harbour. “They need to ask the question: Why is there a rainbow on that boat?”

Ka haere tonu te moemoeā.

 

You can watch the full episode of  Te Ao with Moana’s coverage here on Māori+. Funded by Whakaata Māori and Te Māngai Pāho, Te Ao with Moana screens on Whakaata Māori, Mondays at 8pm.

Today (July 20) is Greenpeace Aotearoa’s final open day on the Rainbow Warrior III. 

E-Tangata, 2025