“Tree let your arms fall:
raise them not sharply in supplication
to the bright enhaloed cloud...”
“I guess Dad wrote himself into the nuclear-free Aotearoa movement,” says Rob Tuwhare as he reads out the poem No Ordinary Sun from his father Hone Tuwhare’s collection.
“He was in Japan in 1945-46 and saw first-hand the destruction of Hiroshima,” he says. The passage through Hiroshima on the way from southern Honshu to the Yamaguchi prefecture, and the sight of the destruction that the atomic bomb had inspired his father to write the poem, he says, adding that the poem in turn had inspired generations of artists after him.
“It’s a powerful poem. It’s been picked up by the anti-nuclear movement, and symbolises Aotearoa’s staunch stand against nuclear energy,” he says.
Incumbent on the arts
Artist Chris McBride has been a vocal opponent of the nuclear arms race. He says the anti-nuclear movement has been important to him from a very young age. “I saw the red glow from the nuclear bomb testing in 1962,” he says, referring to the USA’s largest atmospheric test over Johnston Atoll between Hawaiʻi and the Marshall Islands.
“It’s incumbent on artists to engage with this issue. When we have got art that people can walk by and understand what is going on, when they can listen to music and get knowledge, then we are really addressing things right,” he says.
Artists in New Zealand have taken up the cause, says McBride, referencing works of art from the VAANA mural (on Auckland’s Karangahape Road) to the “Letter to America from the citizens of New Zealand,” - a front-page advertisement on the Washington Post opposing nuclear proliferation. And bands like Herbs were instrumental in spreading the message about nuclear disarmament, he says.
French Letter
“We didn’t like nuclear testing in the South Pacific, and that’s all of us - New Zealand, Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, the Cook Islands,” Herbs band member Tama Lundon says. The reggae band made its anti-nuclear stand with songs like French Letter (1982) which became a protest anthem, and Nuclear Waste.
French Letter was the mother song really,” says Lundon, adding that a lot of resistance to the testing by France came from smaller island nations in the Pacific that served as the site for tests.
“The Marshall Islands and Bikini Atoll bore the brunt of it, along with Moruroa,” McBride says. The United States detonated 67 nuclear devices over the Marshall Islands, including Bikini Atoll, and France conducted an estimated 175 explosions at Moruroa, the last one being in December 1995.
McBride says the nuclear race in the Pacific is ongoing and close to home. “Our neighbour Australia has joined in with the US and the UK to form AUKUS, and are in the process of purchasing nuclear-powered submarines.”
“Here in the Pacific, we need to address this nuclear colonialism, because that is what it is,” he says.