The cook who survived the Rainbow Warrior bombing

Newsroom

09-07-2025

Halfway through the winter of 1985 I was asked if I would volunteer as relief cook on the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior. I was unemployed at the time and cooking on a ship would be a new experience. 'Sure,' I said. 'What have I got to lose?'
I took the workers' boat from Waiheke and joined the ship at Marsden Wharf on July 8. I was greeted with such warmth that I was blown away. I had been told that the ship was vegetarian but while I was still finding my way around the galley, Davey Edward introduced himself to me as the chief engineer and asked me if I cooked meat.
When I said that I did, he pushed some money into my hands and said 'Really good steak and onions and tomatoes for four, please. For lunch?'
When I explained that it would be hard to buy and cook by lunchtime, he said that 2pm would do.
The next person who appeared was David Robie, a journalist who had been on board throughout the last campaign and filmed the operation. He was moving out of his cabin and I was to have it. He told me his two young sons were to have stayed on the ship for the night and they were wildly excited but unfortunately his ex had vetoed it.
After I had dropped my stuff in my new cabin, David told me the lights weren't working and to see Lloyd, the radio officer. I asked David if he had a car. He did. I hadn't had time to stock-take and didn't have a proper list so I went to delicatessens along Karangahape Road and bought five steaks.
Everything seemed very disorganised. People who weren't crew were dropping in for meals and I learned that they worked in the office. They seemed to have the right to eat on the ship, and I realised that without set times and numbers, the catering was going to be a bit difficult. But whenever I was faced with a mountain of dishes someone would appear to help. It was like magic.
By the morning of the second day I knew every member of the crew. That night was 'open night', a sort of unofficial party. It was by invitation, and Members of Parliament of a liberal bent and lots of well-known Greenie-leftie-hippy yachtsmen passed through, no one staying long. I was able to meet a lot of prominent people I had admired from a distance.
On the third night Steve Sawyer, with his partner Kelly, who had arrived from New York, was to have a meeting with everyone connected with the Moruroa campaign. As well as the Rainbow Warrior, several yachts from the local Peace Fleet were also taking part. It also happened to be Steve's birthday.
He had dinner in the city with a few friends and when he came back on board for the meeting I greeted him with a very large chocolate cake decorated with a rainbow made of jelly beans. Those present washed it down with some of the wine left over from the night before. After the meeting was over Steve and several others were to go to a bach at Piha where they could have further meetings and get some rest and recreation away from the crowds.
Elaine Shaw from the Auckland Greenpeace office was to drive them to Piha. Aware of Steve's jetlag and exhaustion, she suggested finishing the meeting early, especially as she had to drive home to Titirangi after dropping them off.
I went to my cabin and worked on the third act of a play that I was writing. I finished it, turned the light out and went straight into a dreamless sleep.
Suddenly I woke, and my light wouldn't turn on. I pulled on my track suit but couldn't find my glasses, so I blindly groped my way to the door, opened it, and there stood Andy, the ship's doctor.
He grabbed my arm and said, 'Come on, we've got to get off.'
I protested, 'Hold on, I've got to find my glasses.'
More forcefully, he said, 'Forget your glasses, the ship's sinking.'
I became aware that there was a lot of water where there shouldn't be any, so I went with him. We were met by Lloyd who grabbed my other arm. As we stepped onto the wharf, there was a huge explosion and the masts tipped towards the wharf. Pete, the skipper, was standing on the wharf talking to two policemen. He was tastefully clad in his birthday suit.
After the explosion, we were herded along to the Wharf Police Station where we had to sit on the floor.
Two people were missing: Hanne and Fernando. After a while, to our relief, Hanne walked in. She had been for a walk and come back to find the wharf swarming with police and the ship sunk.
She was escorted back to the police station and put in with the rest of us. We asked for a cup of tea and were refused. One of the crew asked where the toilet was. She was told there were no facilities for females. We banded together and stormed into the mens.
Then we received the dreadful news that police divers had found Fernando's body. The police were blunt, and everyone was shocked by their lack of sympathy. We were all numb.
The men (and only the men) were taken one by one into a cell, and asked to explain what they had been doing before the explosions. They had all been to the meeting, and were all in the mess having a nightcap and the last of the cake before going to bed.
About four in the morning, Greenpeace supporters were permitted to bring us some fresh warm sticky buns with pink icing, and we were told we could go, but we were not to leave Auckland.
Fortunately my mother was living in Auckland. It was hard to get her to understand what I was doing on the ship in the first place but of course I could have a bed and tell her about it when I got there.
Apart from a short sleep between 10.30 and 11.45, I had been awake for nearly 24 hours, so she had to wait until midday when I woke up.
She'd had time to ring everyone in the family and most of her friends so I got up to a lunch party. I was famous, I was on the front page of the New Zealand Herald. At first she was indignant when I wasn't identified by name. She became even more outraged, later, when I was named, but described as 'elderly'. I was 55.
Margaret on the front page of the Herald (30 cents!), July 11, 1985.
Mum refused to accept the fact that I wasn't a heroine. But I hadn't done anything, I had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I was grateful to accept her hospitality and I appreciated the kindness of her old friend Cliff whom she had known in Ōhura. She and my father had been great friends of Cliff and his wife, Betty. Cliff's daughter, another Margaret, was about my size and she presented me with a parcel containing socks, pyjamas, knickers and a voucher for some shoes.
I received an astonishingly quick replacement for my glasses. The young man who prescribed them charged me for the actual glasses, minus his fee. The whole attitude of Aucklanders had changed. Even if we were horrible green left-wing extremists, we were their horrible green left-wing extremists, victims of the abominable French who had dared to sink a ship in our very own harbour. Nasty foreigners shouldn't treat people like that, especially foreigners who wanted to let off atom bombs in our own backyard and all.
Once we were allowed out of Auckland and I was able to go home for weekends, I took members of the crew home with me, and told them they could make it their getaway place when they needed a break from the city. When they went to the local shop, and asked to buy a single carrot or one potato, Kevin the shopkeeper refused to charge them.
I was still staying with Mum as I couldn't afford the boat fare to and from Waiheke every day. Besides, there was still a lot more I could do to be useful. Now that the flow of clothing had become manageable,
I have the greatest admiration for the two women who worked for incredibly long hours in that tiny stuffy Greenpeace office, holding the fort. Elaine Shaw and Carol Stewart were still dealing with intense media interest, locally and overseas. There were calls coming from Europe through the night, and those two women coordinated everything, not just the press but the people who needed meetings organised and people who wanted to be picked up from the airport and have their accommodation arranged.
The headquarters of Greenpeace is in Amsterdam, and there were visitors from there to be housed, and also from Greenpeace Canada. Slowly things quietened down and I could go back home to my horse, my house and my hills. Crew members kept coming to stay and I would pick them up on my little motorbike which struggled up the hill with its double load. Several of them liked Waiheke so much they still live here.
We had to go up to the main police station to make a statement. I went with Rainbow Warrior crew members Andy and Lloyd, and we were taken into separate rooms for interviews. The young constable who was unlucky enough to get me didn't know the difference between an interview and a cross-examination. He began by trying to intimidate me, and when that failed he tried to put words into my mouth. I told him that I was perfectly able to form my own sentences. If he gave me a piece of paper I would write out my own statement.
He refused, and told he would do the writing, because it had to be an interview. When we finished he told me to wait with the others while he went and got it typed up. When I had signed it, I could go home. I refused to sign mine, as it ended with an affirmation that it was all my own words — and it certainly was not. I could not put my signature to a legal document which was untrue. I told him, 'Run along and get a senior officer.'
When a sergeant arrived with the aggrieved constable in tow, he wanted to know what was wrong with the statement and I explained that many of the 'facts' had been distorted, some of the things I was supposed to have seen, I hadn't. Worst of all, the statement, as written, was full of the most appalling grammar and spelling mistakes. It was not 'in my own words' so I would not sign it. The sergeant blustered a bit and started to do another interview. I suggested that it would save us both a lot of time if he let me type it out myself unless he could guarantee he wouldn't make any grammar or spelling mistakes.
He looked at me for a moment, then burst out laughing and sent the boy for a typewriter. Lloyd relaxed and shook his head. I asked the sergeant if he would like to join us for a drink but he said he had a story he just had to tell his shift.
There was only one other thing I wrote at that time. David was organising a show and had asked all for contributions. I had no stories and went to bed mulling over what I could do. When I woke up in the morning the following poem wrote itself.
I didn't know him; but know too well
the space he left among his friends.
I met him on the ship and talked of bread.
The bread he liked was brown, close textured, soft of crust.
I searched the city, found his bread.
He ate it with the soup, said it was good.
The loaf was never finished.
No martyr he, seeking death between the narrow walls
of man-made faith.
He gave his work and enjoyed the giving.
He should be famed not for dying but for living —
for how he used his life and for caring.
He did not give his life,
They took it.
He left a memory of life and laughter.
I'm glad he liked the bread.
There were many books and films published about the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior. Most of the books collected opinions, but hadn't actually interviewed anyone to verify their facts. I read all the books and watched all the films, one of which was so over-dramatised that it sent the crew into stitches.
One book, however, had everything right: Eyes of Fire by David Robie, a freelance journalist who had been sailing on the Warrior for five months to film and write about the Rongelap campaign. He had become close personal friends with seemingly everyone.
The cabin I inherited from him was the same cabin hit by the second bomb, minutes after I left it on the night of 10 July, 1985.
A mildly abbreviated chapter taken from the newly published and wildly entertaining memoir Anecdotage: The first 95 years (Pukerakau Press, $39.99) by Margaret Mills, available from Paperplus at Waiheke Island and the Waiheke Art Gallery, or direct from the publisher. It's her second book. Her debut, written at 91, was the bestselling historical novel Nine Lives of Kitty K. She was born in 1929 on the the day of the Wall St crash. Her memoir includes the time she threw snowballs at Sir Ed Hillary, danced in the streets on VJ Day, raised four kids, rode her horse Lucky on a long peace march and sailed to Greenland. She lived in Queenstown for 27 years ('I tried to become a 1950s housewife. I wasn't very good at it'), and moved to Waiheke Island in 1978. She writes in her memoir, 'All my life I have always known when it was time for me to leave either of the two places that I have called home: Waiheke Island and Queenstown. It is an overwhelming instinct on my part and I still love them both. I know for sure that my next move will be out of this world.'