Departure and Return 2006

Twenty years on, the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior is commemorated at Matauri Bay. Claudia Pond Eyley frames her history of the ship with the ceremony and relates the story through the testimony of women associated with its campaigns – against whaling in the North Atlantic, against the dumping of nuclear waste in the Bay of Biscay and against nuclear testing in the Pacific. If their tales of courage and principle have a glow of romance about them – for several of them adventure on the high seas clearly came with true love attached – their recollections are bracingly without nostalgia. Remembering the evacuation of the Marshall Islanders from their radioactive atoll, Hanne Sorenson quails at the gravity of the offence against humanity as though the wound were inflicted afresh in the recollection. Likewise, Jane Cooper shakes her head in disbelief that the saboteuse Christine Marchand was her housemate. The evidence that these women have not been deflected from their ideals makes this remembrance of the French outrage an uncommonly calm and hopeful one. — BG