The death of an Anarchist

A Gelly party at Wanganui

On November 18 1982 at 12.35am Neil Roberts, a 22 year old punk anarchist, walked up to the entrance of the building which housed the Wanganui Police computer. Two security guards in the building saw Roberts approach with a carrybag on his shoulder. As the guard reached to activate a remote speaker in the foyer and ask him what he wanted, Roberts bent over and there was a flash and a huge explosion. The explosion could be felt for miles, and buildings were rocked up to 400m away.

Roberts was killed instantly when the gelignite bomb he was carrying exploded. Pieces of his body were found up to 65m away. Nobody else was hurt and damage was confined to mangling the armoured-glass main doors and the foyer of the building. The building was designed to survive such a blast and survive it did. Before he died in a public toilet near the computer centre Roberts had spraypainted ?we have maintained a silence closely resembling stupidity? followed by the anarchy is order sign (A circled by an O) and the words ?anarchy peace thinking.?

Shock! Horror! Anarchy!

There was an atmosphere of complete shock throughout NZ after the death of Roberts. This type of thing occurred overseas, not here in little old conservative NZ. Newspapers could not understand why Roberts had managed to blow himself into pieces. They called it a ?bizarre act of self-destruction.? There was a fear that there was an ?anarchist conspiracy? to blow government buildings up throughout NZ. In fact, this is what Prime-Minister Muldoon suggested on TV. Security was stepped outside key government buildings. But it was soon found out that no such ?conspiracy? existed as Roberts had acted alone.

Letters flowed into the press. To some, it confirmed the stereotype that anarchism means bombs and pure negativity and destruction. *The Christchurch Press* claimed that Roberts was "the misfit son of a rich Auckland family" and that anarchism was a ?sad, flippant kind of nihilism.? Many letters defended Roberts and anarchism: ?anarchism is...based on the belief that humans can live with one another without coercion...The young man was sad and undoubtedly despairing, but hardly flippant. Surely we should consider why he and so many other young people are in such angry despair, rather than trivialise and discount his action as that of a ?misfit.' When we see the number of people on the dole, the preparations for nuclear war, and other evidence of our rulers' crazy incompetence and our own apathy, is it really so hard to understand why young people shout in our faces, ?we have maintained a silence closely resembling stupidity'??

The accidental death of an Anarchist?

There is some debate as to whether Roberts attempted to kill himself or accidentally blew himself up. It is certain that the bombing was planned by Roberts well in advance. Roberts had visited Wanganui two weeks before the bombing with a friend, getting themselves noticed by people because they were wearing safety pins and razors in their ears. The day he left for Wanganui, he told friends ?I am going to Wanganui to do something frightful. If I should blow up the Wanganui computer, the cops will be around.?

The government in an inquest came to the conclusion that Roberts was a suicide bomber. It suited them to call it a suicide to trivialise the incident, to make Roberts seem like a sorry misfit rather than consider why he actually targeted the Police computer. It seems the main evidence for this was a tattoo on Roberts chest ?this punk won't see 23. No future.? The inquest was conducted without any evidence from fellow anarchist punk rockers. One Aucklander who knew Roberts claimed that he wanted to die for his anarchist beliefs, and talked of suicide, and taking either the computer centre or Beehive with him. Another friend claimed that Roberts had ?talked of suicide for three years and he had every intention of doing it [a suicide bombing]. It was not an act of cowardice...it was making a statement with his life.? The amount of gelignite Roberts had was many, many times over the amount needed to blow himself up. It is possible that Roberts intended to blow up the Wanganui police computer, and by mistake, through inexperience with explosives, could have set off the bomb accidentally. Whether it was a suicide or accident, it will never be known for sure.

reeping Fascism: Muldoon and his police state

Its important to put Roberts act in context. By 1982 there was a real climate of fear of a police state in NZ developing under PM Robert ?Piggy? Muldoon. Muldoon was a complete authoritarian, a proto-fascist, a more rabid version of the ultra-conservative post-war generation that ruled NZ politics in the 1960s. Muldoon was our equivalent of Nixon in the USA. What was scary is that he was popular with a large chunk of the population. Many people seemed to lap up his left-bashing, union bashing, sexist, racist, law and order policies. Muldoon did things like dawn raids on Pacific Islanders and allowed the 1981 Springbok Tour by the apartheid South African Rugby team to go ahead. The Tour - as it was known - was very brutal. Tens of thousands of people got out on streets and tried to stop the thugby games from going ahead, and the police beat them up in a massive operation.

In 1982, one year after the Springbok Tour and the climate of fear and polarisation that the tour had created, Roberts obviously targeted the Wanganui police computer because it held all the national police records: it was a symbol of the creeping fascism of Muldoon and sections of NZ society at the time. In 1978 there were massive protests against an attempt by Muldoon to increase the power of the secret police, the SIS. The computer had become a symbol of Muldoonist authoritarianism since it was first installed in the mid 1970s (protest groups like the PYM organised a campaign against it).

Roberts was part of the anarchist punk rock scene at the time, which was then in its infancy. A very loose community of anarchist punks was being formed throughout NZ by the early 1980s, a community which was to flourish by the mid to late 1980s. Punk is normally dismissed as negative & nihilistic, but it in the early 80s it was a child of its time, not only a protest against the stifling & boring cultural conformity in NZ, but also an understandably pessimistic reaction to the state of NZ society at the time. The recession in the economy from the 1970s created a new political mood that things in NZ were getting worse and worse. NZ slipped from being one of the richest countries in the world in the 1960s to one with unemployment and a recession and a severe authoritarian law'n'order government under Muldoon to boot. So Roberts' action is more understandable in this context. But should Roberts be considered a martyr? Did the bombing really achieve any constructive resistance to the system? Does an individual action against a symbol of authority like the Wanganui computer lead to real, collective resistance against the system?