Eyewitness

November 2016 sees the arrival of an American warship in a New Zealand port; the first for more than thirty years. The visit is stirring up memories of a time when New Zealand's harbours were battle zones and peace activists faced off against nuclear warships. US Navy ships and submarines were frequent visitors here in the 70s and early 80s as part of our commitment to the ANZUS treaty with America and Australia. But as fear of the nuclear threat grew, these visits became scenes of protest and some took to the water to show their opposition. The Peace Squadron, as they were known, were a loose flotilla of motorboats, canoes, surfboards and sailboats and people who were prepared to put their bodies in the way of warships. The protests were organised by Anglican priest George Armstrong who tells Eyewitness producer Justin Gregory that he got the call to act while watching American TV.

In November 2016, an American warship will enter a New Zealand port for the first time in more than 30 years, stirring up memories of a time when New Zealand's harbours were battle zones and peace activists faced off against nuclear warships.

"Turn this bloody thing around!"

US Navy ships and submarines were frequent visitors to New Zealand in the '70s and early '80s as part of our commitment to the ANZUS treaty with America and Australia.

But as fear of the nuclear threat grew, these visits became scenes of protest and some took to the water to show their opposition.

Anglican priest George Amstrong founded the Peace Squadron, a loose flotilla of motorboats, canoes, surfboards and sailboats and people who were prepared to put their bodies in the way of warships.

George led the squadron on three memorable protests in the usually calm waters of Auckland Harbour, and documentary photographer and peace activist Gil Hanly was there to make sure the events were captured on film.

This story was produced by Justin Gregory with additional audio from Nga Taonga Sound and Vision and also the 1995 documentary Nuclear Reaction by George Andrews.

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Contrary to popular belief, All Black Buck Shelford did not lose a testicle while playing against France but Colin "Pinetree" Meads really did play almost an entire game of rugby with a broken arm. This moment of legendary toughness - or madness, take your pick - happened in 1970 when the All Blacks were in South Africa, playing warm-up matches ahead of the Test Series. South African rugby chief Danie Craven had expressed the hope that the provincial teams would "soften up" the All Blacks. The New Zealanders next game was against cellar-dwellers Eastern Transvaal, a team they didn't know much about. But halfback Sid Going tells Eyewitness producer Justin Gregory the All Blacks knew right from the first whistle that they were in for a fight.

All Black legend Colin "Pinetree" Meads once played nearly an entire game of rugby with a badly broken arm. This moment of extraordinary toughness (or madness) happened in 1970 when the New Zealand team were touring South Africa. Three All Blacks who were there that day recall the game for Eyewitness producer Justin Gregory.

"Aw s**t Pinetree, you haven't broken it, have ya?"

All Blacks first five eight Earle Kirton has always blamed himself for the broken arm that Colin (later Sir) "Pinetree" Meads suffered on the 1970 All Blacks tour of South Africa. Just a little bit, anyway.

The injury happened during a tour match against provincial team East Transvaal. The All Blacks had been in South Africa for a few short weeks and had their eyes on the looming first test against the Springboks, South Africa's fearsome national team.

South African rugby boss Dr Danie Craven had expressed the hope that the provincial teams would "soften up" the New Zealanders. The East Transvaal team were up for it.

"We were getting hell knocked out of us."

Kirton, now a dentist in Wellington, recalls the game vividly. "There were boots flying everywhere at the bottom of the rucks. I can remember him  saying to me, 'S**t, it's like duck shooting season down here. They're all over the bloody place.'"

Kirton remembers that All Blacks team as a very close one, with a strong sense of 'one in, all in'. A key ethos was that if the little guys got into trouble doing their job, the big men would be there to help them out.

"There was a pact between the forwards and the backs," says Kirton. "The idea was 'you backs hold onto the ball and we'll get there'."

It was keeping true to this code that would see Meads get injured. An early converted try by All Blacks winger Bryan Williams enraged the East Transvaal team. At just six minutes into the game, Kirton got his hands on a loose ball…

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In 2015 a violent earthquake shook Nepal, killing thousands across the country. In its wake, climbing teams at Mt Everest were hit by a deadly avalanche that destroyed Base Camp and caused the deaths of nearly twenty people. Anthea Fisher was there and recalls the avalanche and the aftermath for Eyewitness producer Justin Gregory.

"You could actually see the avalanche heading towards us. It was like an explosion. I wasn't sure if I would survive" - Anthea Fisher.

The day of 25 April 2015 began early for Everest Base Camp manager Anthea Fisher. Back home in New Zealand it was ANZAC Day, but high in the Himalayas, Anthea was thinking only of her job.

The Wanaka resident was working for Kiwi mountain guiding company Adventure Consultants and this was her first time on the highest mountain in the world.

The team had been at Base Camp for about three weeks and Anthea had got up that morning, while it was still dark, to see off her climbers as they began their first trek up to Camp 1. With most of her colleagues and clients away, she was enjoying the relative peace and quiet of a nearly empty base camp.

"I was actually having a little late morning nap."

"Just because I could! Because I knew I wouldn't be disturbed by questions or having to organise anything."

"So I was in my tent when the earthquake struck."

The 7.8 magnitude earthquake hit at 11.56am and lasted for 50 seconds. The epicentre was near the Kathmandu valley, just 160kms northwest of Everest.

But while the shaking was over in less than a minute, the real danger to Anthea and others at Base Camp was about to begin. An ice cliff between the Pumori, Lingtren and Khumbutse mountains above them had collapsed, causing huge chunks of ice to fall hundreds of metres to the valley floor below.

"It sounded like the valley was falling down around us."

The force of the ice cliffs collapsing shattered the rocks beneath them. The resulting avalanche was a deadly mix of snow, ice and razor-sharp shards of broken rock - and it hit Base Camp within seconds.

"You could actually see the avalanche heading towards us. It was like an explosion. I wasn't sure if I would survive."

Anthea took shelter in a large nearby tent, but had the presence of mind to stay in the doorway to avoid being suffocated as it collapsed under the pounding of rocks and snow.

"I remember thinking 'I hope this stops soon because I don't know how much longer I can take this for'."

Several large avalanches hit that day. One, in the nearby Langtang Valley, killed more than 300 people. Nepal's capital, Kathmandu, was also hit hard…

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In 1992 a sudden financial crisis forced the Mercury theatre to close in dramatic fashion. Auckland Theatre Company rose from its ashes. Actor/director Simon Prast was there and recalls the upheaval for Eyewitness producer Justin Gregory.

"These men in suits came rushing down the stairs and told us to collect our personal belongings and leave the building"

The curtain has gone up on the $36 million ASB Waterfront Theatre, a 660-seat venue purpose-built for Auckland Theatre Company.

ATC, as it's known, turns 25 next year but until now has had to hire venues to stage its productions. Opening its own theatre is a significant milestone for what has become the largest professional company in our biggest city.

ATC rose out of the ashes of The Mercury Theatre, Auckland's original professional theatre company.

In 1992 a sudden financial crisis forced the Mercury to close in dramatic fashion. Actor Simon Prast was there and he recalls that day for Eyewitness.

The day the doors closed:

"Upstairs in the smaller theatre called The Gods we were doing a play called, rather ominously, Glorious Ruins. Simultaneously, on the main stage, we were doing The Rose Tattoo by Tennessee Williams."

"I was preparing myself for the early show when all these men in suits came running downstairs into the dressing room and they asked us to collect up our personal belongings and leave the building.'

"By the early 1990's Auckland was going through a change. The Aotea Center had just been built and new musicals from overseas were coming through. The Mercury relied upon (its) musicals to subsidise the rest of its programme. If they should not deliver then it really put the whole operation at risk. Once the Board found it was in a certain position, it legally couldn't continue."

"For about seven days we kept on meeting (as a company) until finally word came through that it (The Mercury) was going to be placed into liquidation. I was not at all well prepared for sudden, instant redundancy. It left a lot of people in a very precarious position."

"And of course, it wasn't as if we could just go and work at the next professional theatre company in Auckland - because there wasn't one!"

Endings and new beginnings:

"That night it was like a huge wake where everyone got extremely drunk... singing songs... it's very vivid in my memory.

"Raymond (Hawthorne, ex-Mercury Theatre and Theatre Corporate director) pointed across the room at me and said, 'That man could run a theatre company!'"…

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In August 2013 Labour MP Louisa Wall's Marriage Amendment Act came into effect. Since the passing of this historic law, more than two thousand same sex couples have tied the knot. RNZ's Eyewitness series takes us back to the night of 17 April 2013, to the third and final reading of the bill in Parliament and the vote that meant that marriage equality was now the law in New Zealand.

This historic Bill, granting same sex couples in New Zealand the right to marry, came nearly thirty years after the Homosexual Law Reform Act of 1986, which decriminalised homosexual acts between consenting adults, and just nine years after the passing of the Civil Union Law in 2004. Since the passing of the Bill into law, more than two thousand gay and lesbian couples have since exercised their legal right to marry.

Sitting in the gallery that night were two very special witnesses to this moment of history. For seven years Kapiti Coast couple Jenny Rowan and Jools Joslin had argued in court for the right to marry and had been denied at every turn.

In 1995 Jools and Jenny were one of three lesbian couples in New Zealand who each applied for a licence to marry. Their applications were denied. They challenged that decision in the High Court and then again in the Court of Appeal. They lost, both times, in what became known as the Quilter case. In 1998 Jools and Jenny sued New Zealand before the United Nations Human Rights Committee on the grounds of discrimination but again lost.

The couple had celebrated an unofficial wedding in 1996 and were later legally wed in Canada but by the early 2000s, had largely given up the struggle to gain the right to marry in their own country.

Archival audio courtesy of Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision

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Ella Henry is a respected broadcaster and academic but in 1970 she was a lost and restless teenager, on the verge of getting into serious trouble. A chance encounter with a famous literary figure helped her see there was more to life than she imagined. She tells Justin Gregory the adventure began for her one famous summer.

As told to Justin Gregory.

Living at Jerusalem

I think I was sixteen the first time I went to Jerusalem.

There was a whole bunch of people just like me. Race wasn't an issue, culture wasn't an issue... a lot of us were broken in different ways. But we all had this incredible sense of camaraderie and of sharing a journey together.

So long as you meant no harm to people you could pretty much do what you liked. You could wander around without clothes on, you could go down to river and hallucinate; you could do anything.

There was a kind of omnivorous quality to all of us. Things would turn up and people would take it. Nobody sat there and said "ooh, I'm smoking marijuana" or "ooh, what's that pill?" Every day was a new experience; everything you encountered was visceral, whether it was alcohol, or nicotine or new food I'd never tried.

Life with Baxter

Something about him felt like home. He had kind eyes and was always ready to smile. I always felt really comfortable in his company.

I knew he was an important man, I knew he had enormous charisma but I had no idea he was a famous poet. I had no idea he was acknowledged in literary circles. None of that was part of our relationship with him. He didn't sit and write stuff, but he would certainly speak in a very poetic way and I'm sure at times he was reciting poems.

Walking with him is something I remember. He'd ask "So what are you doing, where are you going, what are you going to do next?" but not in an inquisitive way, just in an interested way. And of course the presence of books all around all of the houses we were in, and he'd say "Ooh, are you reading that? "Yeah, it's really interesting!"

I never felt ever in my dealings with Hemi that he judged us in any way. And that was a very freeing relationship. To find an adult who was interested in talking to me as a person, as a fellow, equally sentient being, was quite a new thing and I really enjoyed it. And I think that helped me to expand my horizons and to want to look at different things and experience different things. I think that there was a period there when I could see the sunlight.

Leaving Jerusalem…

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Aung San Suu Kyi's recent historic democratic victory in the Myanmar elections seems to have brought positive change for the country but for a whole generation of former child refugees, life was conflict ridden. Burmese born Ngelay Aung Soe fled Myanmar as a child with his family to find a better life here. Lynda Chanwai-Earle is in Auckland to hear how Aung and his family survived years of separation and turmoil to turn their lives around, with help from some dedicated community leaders and an Outward Bound course.

By Lynda Chanwai-Earle

He was only three years of age when his mother May Lay first left their home in Nay Pyi Taw the capital of Myanmar. It was 1999, she was forced to run because of her family's outspoken political allegiance with Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese opposition politician and chairperson of the National League for Democracy in Burma. May Lay's mother and aunties were all imprisoned. May Lay would have been next.

Aung San Suu Kyi's recent historic democratic victory in the Myanmar elections seems to have brought positive change for the country but for a whole generation of former child refugees, life was conflict ridden. Burmese born Ngelay Aung Thu Soe fled Myanmar as a child with his family to find a better life here.

I'm in South Auckland at the family home where Aung, his older brother Si Thu Myo Myat, May Lay and husband Hla Soe describe how Aung and his family survived years of separation and turmoil to turn their lives around, with help from some dedicated community leaders and an Outward Bound course.

May Lay struggles with English so Aung helps with translations. She tells me she escaped Myanmar to work as an illegal immigrant in Malaysia. She was arrested and imprisoned several times while there, once serving 4 months inside a Malaysian jail.

Each time she was released and sent back across the border, she would try to rescue her children and sneak them out of Myanmar without success. The lengthy separation from her children and repeated imprisonment caused May Lay to suffer serious bouts of depression, bought on by post-traumatic stress.

May Lay tells me various people including and extended family, members of the Burmese community and UNHCR staff supported her through these dark times but it was her children she desperately wanted to be reunited with, in a safe country. She would scavenge for work and send money back home to the family. She would try to make monthly telephone calls but these were sporadic…

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The city of Auckland was founded in 1840 in a mix of hope and compromise and the occasion was marked with a suitably pompous ceremony. Just one eyewitness account remains from that day, and it was written by the only Pakeha woman present.

Sarah Mathew was born in London in 1805, and for ten years worked as a governess. In her late 20's Sarah agreed to marry her cousin Felton Mathew and follow him out to Australia where he had obtained a position as a surveyor. He left for Sydney in 1829 and two years later, Sarah followed - the first of a remarkable six journeys she made between Britain and the southern hemisphere, all the more impressive when you learn that she suffered terribly from sea sickness. She arrived in Sydney in January 1832, married Felton and then almost immediately went with him on his long surveying trips into the bush.

Author Tessa Duder has written a biography of Sarah, drawing upon the journals and diaries she wrote during her long life in the colonies and back home in England. She believes Sarah would have assisted Felton with the hard physical work of surveying and shared his hardships under canvas in the baking New South Wales sun.

'The extraordinary thing is, she kept the diaries. She wrote the books day in and day out.'

Sarah and Felton suffered two stillbirths while in Sydney and in her journals there are hints of other misfortunes.  This was the start of a run of mixed luck for the couple. Felton lost his job in 1839 due to disagreements between Sydney and London over which had the power to make civic appointments. He was quickly shoulder-tapped by William Hobson to help found the planned colony of New Zealand and to advise on the location of a capital city.

Felton sailed to the Bay of Islands in January 1840 and was present at the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi. Sarah arrived three months later.

I expect we shall very shortly be sent off again to survey and lay out another town in which the seat of government will be fixed. Felton has selected a very favourable situation for the purpose. It is to be called Auckland.

For two months on a tiny boat, Sarah and Felton sailed and surveyed from Northland to Thames, climbing seemingly every mountain and exploring rivers, streams and harbours. Despite some initial misgivings on Felton's behalf, a site on the Waitemata harbour was chosen and on September 18 1840 a ceremony was held to mark the founding of the nation's new capital. Sarah was the only Pakeha woman present on shore and typically, she wrote it all down…

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Imagine having to beg for your child's life with nothing but a couple of cigarettes as a bribe. Thirty years after their trauma, a group of 10 Cambodian New Zealand women are only now able to tell their stories. Participating in an oral history project that began as part of the 1993 Women's Suffrage Centenary, these survivors of Pol Pot's genocide finally published their harrowing experiences in a book titled I Tried Not To Cry, launched at Parliament. Some of these extraordinary survivors are talking to Lynda Chanwai-Earle with the help of translator and Cambodian community leader Niborom Young.

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A day of terror on the London Underground. The bombs go off 12 years ago.

"There were people there we couldn't help. The dead were all around us."

- Former Paramedic Sandie Davis Roberts.

It is twelve years ago on Tuesday 7th July since suicide bombers set off explosions in the London underground and on a London bus, killing dozens and injuring hundreds.

A former English paramedic now living in Auckland spent hours helping the injured in one wrecked carriage. Sandie Davis Roberts recalls it was a scene of complete carnage.

8.49am, Thursday morning rush hour on the London Tube; Bombs exploded in three crowded trains, and an hour later a fourth went off in a bus carrying many who'd just been evacuated from the underground.

Fifty two people were killed and 700 hundred injured in Britain's first ever suicide attacks.

The bombings came one day after London had won its bid to host the 2012 Olympic Games with a campaign which had highlighted the city's multi-cultural population. Three of the bombers themselves were British born sons of Pakistani immigrants while the fourth was born in Jamaica.

Amongst the confusion and panic following the attack came dozens of professional emergency teams, among them Sandie Davis Roberts who was a senior paramedic of sixteen years' experience with the East Anglia Ambulance service. It was around noon on the 7th that Sandie in her ambulance was called into London.

"We thought we would take over the regular work of the London teams while they coped with the emergency", Sandie says.

But soon she was ordered to the Aldgate tube station, where she and her colleague had to traipse down immobilised escalators, along the rail tracks to the wrecked train.

"It was all very hazy and smoky, and really quiet, until we came across this scene of carnage". A bit like hell she imagines.

Sandie recalls the smell too; "burnt rubber, hot mechanical smells, and the noise! The sound of cutting machinery; there was surgeon next to me, amputating a leg."

The first person she helped was a woman trapped in a mangled door. She was covered in burns and cuts.

"She was angry", says Sandie "asking what sort of people would do this sort of thing"; only in stronger language. Her name was Felicity. Close by, a young man had a badly lacerated leg.

"He was praying."

Then she helped a surgeon who was trying to stitch together the badly damaged face of a well-dressed business woman. Sandie doubts she survived…

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