MEMORIES
TRIBUTES FOR OWEN WILKES AT HAMILTON

Some of the tributes for Owen Wilkes at his funeral at the Hamilton Gardens Pavilion, Tuesday, 17 May 2005.

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TIRELESS WORKER FOR GLOBAL PEACE DIES
'Exceptional New Zealander' faced jail in Scandinavia on espionage charges
http://www.asiapac.org.fj/cafepacific/resources/aspac05/140505owenwilkes.html

Gordon Campbell obituary in the NZ Listener
http://www.asiapac.org.fj/cafepacific/resources/aspac05/140505owenwilkes_3.html

Peace Movement Aotearoa tributes page for Owen Wilkes
http://www.converge.org.nz/pma/owen.htm

Flashback: David Robie talks to Owen Wilkes about the NZ Peace Movement - 'Challenging Goliath', New Internationalist, September 1986.
http://nuclearfree.lynx.co.nz/goliath.htm

David Robie's tribute
http://www.asiapac.org.fj/cafepacific/resources/aspac05/140505owenwilkes_2.html#ROBIE

Alan Robson's tribute from Thailand
http://www.asiapac.org.fj/cafepacific/resources/aspac05/140505owenwilkes_2.html#ROBSON

Neville Ritchie's tribute from the Department of Conservation
http://www.asiapac.org.fj/cafepacific/resources/aspac05/140505owenwilkes_2.html#RITCHIE

Owen Ronald Wilkes: Global peace activist, military researcher, archaeologist, writer, dear friend and mentor - 19 April 1940-12 May 2005

THE LEGACY WILL LIVE ON

From DAVID ROBIE
HAMILTON: Owen Wilkes was a truly brilliant researcher and original critical thinker. He was a down-to-earth Kiwi and no-nonsense innovator who had no time for the rampant political correctness engulfing us today. But he was also a very warm-hearted, amusing and generous friend.

I personally found him an inspiration and he was a vital source of encouragement, especially when working in the tough environment of freelance journalism in the 1980s.
Pictured: Above: Owen Wilkes looking out on his beloved Kawhia Harbour. Below: Crossing the mud flats at Kawhia Harbour.

He was enormously respected throughout the peace and progressive movements and in the media. This respect continued even when he spurned peace activism and moved to Hamilton to share his life with May Bass away from the political limelight.

I sometimes felt the respect was even greater abroad. In the Philippines, activists and journalists described him in awe as the "walking encyclopaedia". In the Pacific, his word on military and strategic issues was gospel.

At New Year last year, Del and I enjoyed a wonderful, but brief, sailing trip at Kawhia. When we heard of Owen’s sudden death, we rummaged through our archives, looking for the photos of this trip and other mementos and papers relating to Owen. We found two photos, in particular, that were rather iconic:

ONE WAS Owen’s famous flame-throwing party trick with his mouth. It was very spectacular. Napalm had nothing on it.

This represented his remarkably independent streak and wicked sense of fun.

ANOTHER PHOTO pictured four dudes sitting in Murray Horton’s lounge after having devoured a Sunday roast dinner cooked by Owen. The quartet had much more of a spring chicken look about them then, and they were in a relaxed plotting mood in the late 1980s. Don, Owen, Warren and Murray were pictured as the "bearded patriarchs" and I was taking the photo.

This picture reminded me of a little present Owen once gave me after he had bowed out of the Peace Movement – a booklet entitled "You know you’re an old fart when …"

There were many examples of this, such as "You know you’re an old fart when…. Presidential or prime ministerial candidates look young to you" or
"You know you’re an old fart when you cannot follow the hip-hop lyrics anymore"

So, from then on, we were part of the "old farts" club. But behind the joke and laughs I already had a sense of him not feeling appreciated.

A THIRD photo was one that I clearly remember but now cannot find. It was an image used with the first article that I ever wrote relating to Owen and it was published in the now defunct New Zealand Times. It was a cover photo of a Swedish newsmagazine featuring Owen as the dreaded "bicycle spy"!

This article was published at the time of his troubles with Swedish authorities that had accused him of improperly gathering classified information on Swedish defence. He was working for the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) at the time.

He was given a six month jail sentence. But he appealed and his sentence was commuted to deportation and a 10-year ban on him returning to Sweden.

One of the support witnesses in his appeal was 1974 Nobel Prize winner professor Gunnar Myerdal. And Owen’s international research on peace and disarmament was later recognised when he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by a Canterbury University academic, sociology professor Wilmott.

At the time of the Swedish spy saga, I was fascinated by Owen’s courage in challenging the system and got in touch with him in Stockholm during 1982. A friendship developed from there and this was cemented on his return to New Zealand.

While most activists and the media focused on conventional military bases, Owen was busy exposing the worldwide network of American surveillance and communication bases.

His exposés about Tangimoana and Waihopai are well known, but in 1989 he also exposed a little known Bukidnon spy base in the Philippines more significant in realpolitik terms than the Subic Bay and Clark military bases.

Invited to address the Peace Brigade in Manila, he was unable to go and Maire Leadbeater presented their joint paper instead. His revelations about this nuclear war "scorekeeper" spy base in a Del Monte pineapple plantation made the authorities very defensive.

Owen, you were a man ahead of your time.

I personally found Owen an inspiration and we collaborated on several projects. This culminated in a jointly contributed article for one of my books written by him and Steve Ratuva, then president of the Fiji Anti-Nuclear Group (FANG) and now with the University of the South Pacific.

The essay that Owen and Steve wrote was called "Militarism in the Pacific and the case of Fiji" and was published in the book Tu Galala: Social Change in the Pacific, a progressive look at the political and social forces at work in the region.

Just a few months later Owen seemed to become disillusioned with the peace movement and activism. In a long letter to me on 9 October 1992, he said:

"I think I am finished with the Peace Movement. I feel very ill at ease … I figure the Peace Movement has become obsessed with such peripheral issues, and then it has marginalised itself by the sorts of positions it has taken on these issues… I just can’t be bothered monitoring militarisation of the Pacific any more."

Three months later, I took up a position at the University of Papua New Guinea and unfortunately we saw little of Owen and May over the next few years while we lived in the Pacific.

When we returned after the start of the millennium, we had a reunion with May and Owen at River Road. By then Owen had been long established with his archaeological work with the Department of Conservation and he became a vital part of the Kawhia Harbour Protection Society.

Owen has a special place in our hearts because it was while we were staying with him in his Mount Victoria home in Wellington – the one that had "levitating" carpets when south-westerlies blew - that Del's and my relationship blossomed, eventually becoming our marriage.

May … those evenings by the log fire in River Road have been very special. You have been a wonderful partner for Owen. You have stood by him through many good and difficult times and our heart goes out to you.

I conclude with the words of Steve Ratuva who sent a message from Fiji that speaks for many in the Pacific – and for many of us here today:

"Rest in peace Owen. You have left behind a legacy of peace research for the advancement of humanity."

And I would add you were shining example of how an "ordinary Kiwi joker" can challenge the superpowers and establishments – and triumph.

Owen, farewell dear friend and your legacy will live on.

LEGENDARY FIGURE

From ALAN ROBSON in Thailand:
CHIANG MAI: I first met Owen during the Mount John demonstration against Canterbury University's renting of tracking facilities to the US military. The university denied it was doing this, but as usual, Owen's relentless research exposed the lie.

Although this was more than thirty years ago, Owen was already a legendary figure to me and many others because of his success in exposing the military nature of a marine tracking system the US wanted to install in New Zealand.

As these cases illustrate, Owen was both a peace activist and a communitarian nationalist. He saw New Zealand as a country still small enough to be a society which could be appealed to directly. This suited Owen's common-sense individualism.

In these terms, he was a remarkably lucid thinker. He could cut through cant and hypocrisy to illuminate special interests and then mobilise public opinion with good reasoning. In this way he was an apostle of liberalism.

He had a liberal's ironic humor and was amused at the Swedish government's ham-fisted prosecution of him for espionage when he was working as a peace researcher at Upsala in the 1980s.

In Sweden too, he could appeal to long-standing liberal traditions and common-sense to convert the prosecution into a Pyhrric victory for the authorities. Back home in New Zealand he continued deflating the pretensions of political power.

The smallness of New Zealand society still allowed him to integrate his private life with his public persona in this quest. Thus he turned the demolition of his house by a rule-bound local council into a political campaign against the pettiness that undermines community.

In his public activism, he maintained total intellectual and moral integrity and would never cut corners or adjust evidence to suit outcomes he preferred.

This honesty could be inconvenient for less scrupulous NGOs seeking his support. In later life he continued his life-long environmental activism and joined the campaign against the rising tide of foreign ownership which threatens both the environment and local control of resources.

However New Zealand's integration with new global political and economic power structures was gaining momentum.

By the time I met him again in the late 1990s, Owen was aware that New Zealand was being absorbed into a wider populist world on terms which threatened his core value of rational individualism and eroded the local community solidarity in which it could be successfully expressed.

Perhaps this underlying perception contributed to his decision to assert the former over the latter.

I mourn Owen as a clear thinker and as a liberal nationalist.

HE ENRICHED SO MANY LIVES

From NEVILLE RITCHIE:
HAMILTON: Last Thursday night I was shell-shocked to learn of Owen’s passing and the manner in which it occurred from his long time partner May. At the time I could barely string a few words together in the way of solace and commiseration. Like the previous speakers, our most heartfelt sympathies extend to May –who has lost a friend, companion and soul mate.

Owen entered my life in 1995, when, after some 25 years of peace and environmental activism, he walked into my office and said words to the effect that "all the main objectives of the peace movement had been achieved", he was bowing out, and would like to get back into one of his old loves – archaeology, particularly archaeological survey - i.e. the systematic recording of archaeological sites.

He asked me if there was any area that I thought needed survey and he would be in to it. I told him that the last real gap in the archaeological survey coverage of the NZ coastline was the tiger country south of Kawhia to Awakino. Within a few weeks Owen had organised his partner May and friend Alan Leadley and they began a ten-day trek down the coast recording some 200 Maori sites.

Finding more sites than they could handle Owen repeated the exercise alone a few months later, going from south to north this time and added another 250 sites to the record.

About a year later DoC Waikato received funding to establish a _ time DoC archaeologist position to work with me. Owen applied for it and gained the job based on a 40 year track record of research, fieldwork and the production of some 400 papers & articles, which is mind-boggling in its depth and diversity.

Among his major achievements while working with DoC were the production of definitive histories of Cuvier Island, and the Pureora Forest. These span from the earliest Maori settlement, through European exploration and activities through to the modern conservation period. He also completed an inventory of the 750 odd archaeological sites on lands administered by the Conservancy; assisted with the restoration of the radar buildings, light station & tramway on Cuvier Island, worked on the restoration of the Xmas Creek and Dancing Camp kauri dams, and the Kakepuku and Te Toto Gorge historic walk projects.

But the job that has had most impact nationally was the last one he tackled before retiring - a major study, in conjunction with FRI, of the efficiency or otherwise of different timber preservatives used by DoC on historic timber structures nationwide. This project will be continued over the next few years but Owen's research findings and recommendations have already led to major improvements in the way we will do timber preservation work in future.

As other speakers have indicated, Owen crammed more into any one of his six and a half decades than most people do in a lifetime.

Owen was a rare and extremely independent individual - like no one I have met or am likely to meet again. He had a unique world view and held to uncompromising principles. I never gave it any thought previously but it looks like those uncompromising principles extended even to deciding where and when to quit his life, possibly because he foresaw that his mobility and mental capacity might be less than what he considered satisfactory.

With his strong convictions Owen tended to see things very much in black and white – seldom in shades of grey. There was a right way to do things (usually Owen’s way) and he would strongly argue in support of his stance. And he wasn’t always right, the reason we are here today being a case in point – he had a lot more to offer even if he didn’t think so.

Owen described himself as a ‘principled opportunist’, i.e. he would get involved in things (paid or unpaid) that involved travel, fieldwork or research possibilities, so long as it was good for the planet – hence his many years in the Peace Movement and on many research projects.

I sometimes wondered if he had a bit of Amish blood because he liked doing things the hard way, and often with more than a little element of contrariness, but it made working with him interesting to say the least.

He used to accuse me of introducing him to and getting him hooked on power tools during our work together on Cuvier Island (Owen championed the use of hand tools), yet on the other hand he saw the advantages of laptop computers. He wore out several laptops in the course of his research and writing. Mind you they were all loaded with ancient programmes that went out with the ark which he dutifully transferred from one machine to another.

Owen was the classic ‘jack of all trades’. He could turn his hand to hand to just about anything and if he didn’t know something he soon researched it.

I recall one time when he had to document a historic steam engine and log hauler down at Pureora. He admitted to me that he didn’t know much about steam engines. A couple of days later he came into the office and said "I’m an expert on steam engines now. Ask me any question you like about them".

I tried and couldn’t fault him. He had spent the previous two days in the library absorbing everything there was to know about steam engine technology. He was a great researcher, honed through years of research for the Peace Movement, and had an incredible memory for detail. So much knowledge has gone with his passing.

He also had a curmudgeonly side (frugal). He could live on the smell of an oily rag and kind of expected others to do so.

Although he made many great contributions to DoC’s endeavours he more than once expressed reservations to me about working with a government department and having to do some tasks that he just didn’t want to do or thought were low priority. It eventually led to his decision to retire three years ago. But he came back and did much of his former DoC work (the stuff he enjoyed) for free.

To conclude I greatly enjoyed the times we worked together on historic projects, and his intellectual inputs into them. I'll miss our debates (and they really were debates) on many issues. He used to get really worked up about pervasive social diseases such as political correctness and the virtual outlawing of common sense with regard to risk management these days (both of which Owen felt this country had lost the plot on).

As the recent TV and newspaper stories have highlighted, Owen will be remembered as a tireless worker for global peace - but he will be remembered locally for the output and friendships he made from his rediscovered passion for archaeology (particularly Waikato Maori archaeology and history)

Farewell friend. You have made a mark on New Zealand’s social history. You made a difference and in the process enriched so many lives.