Flotilla I & II. Memories of the USS Texas Protest, Auckland Harbour, 2 August 1983

The first painting I ever sold through a dealer gallery—this was in November 1983—was a poster-like rendering of an American nuclear-powered cruiser, the USS Texas, steering a course through a flotilla of protest vessels in the waters between Devonport and the rickety, barnacle-encrusted pilings off Okahu Bay…

It had been a choppy morning on Waitemata Harbour. Having just spent the night moored at Cox’s Bay in a small yacht belonging to a friend-of-a-friend, those of us onboard motored under the Harbour Bridge to take up our position off North Head an hour or so before dawn. By sunrise the harbour around us was jammed with other protest yachts and motorboats—and a surprisingly large number of police inflatables and launches. We had been briefed about the use of grapple-hooks and ropes by police to capsize vessels during previous protests. I don’t recall seeing any grapple-hooks thrown during the Texas protest—I suspect the practise might have been deemed too dangerous by then. Most of our boats were smallish, make-shift and crammed with protestors, young and old. Maybe they had realised, belatedly, there were safety implications associated with tipping people into a chaotic melee of yachts, police inflatables and one-metre waves. Not to mention an oncoming 178-metre-long battleship powered by two nuclear reactors.

The protest was a surprisingly upbeat occasion, despite the arrests, the tow-offs and the macho posturing of the wetsuited police. I don’t remember anyone sinking. Alongside jeering and chanting, there were trumpets, bugles, drums, a few rousing choruses of ‘We shall not be moved’ as we bobbed up and down. There were banners, papier-mache heads, colourful hats… There was Pat Hanly! And Gil! In dramatic contrast to this high-spirited motley, a few hundred ratings from the USS Texas stood to attention, evenly spaced, the length of the cruiser’s deck. In their iridescent white uniforms, they looked like teeth in the long grey jaw of a crocodile. Far too high up for any of our make-shift paint-bombs to reach them, and probably out of earshot of all the yelling, the sailors were impervious to what was unfolding below.

As the battleship edged its way forwards, the police inflatables, with their giant Mercury outboards, rammed and boarded and cleared all and sundry from the vessel’s path. Off to one side, there was, as I recall, a slightly more up-market fleet with one or two ‘Welcome to Auckland, American Friends’ banners flapping in the breeze. By 11am it was all over, the USS Texas was tied up, and we were all puttering back to our moorings, unsure if anything had been achieved or not. It was just over a year later that the newly elected Lange Government banned visits by nuclear-capable ships.

My 1983 painting of the USS Texas, painted shortly after I returned home from the protest, was bought from my first exhibition—this was at Gallery Pacific, Endeans Building, downtown Auckland—by the late writer Michael Gifkins and his partner Ann Hatherly. They hung the painting in their Mount Eden home, which was where their friend Jenny Neligan— director of Bowen Galleries—first took an interest in it. A few years passed and Jenny contacted me about exhibiting here in Wellington. So the course of my life was altered in another way by the 1983 painting, which had the prescient title, Sanctuary. I had my first solo exhibition at Bowen 36 years ago—and I would like to acknowledge Jenny, Ann and the late Michael.

I hope these two new paintings capture something of the positive energy and wairua of the anti-nuclear flotilla. I devised the paintings while visiting Japan in April 2024. While in Hiroshima, my memories of the USS Texas protest came vividly back to me. Given recent events in the world, it feels like a good time for us all to be thinking about war and peace, protest and the direction in which we are heading. Gregory O’Brien, January 2026