A retired academic wants an apology for an historic firebombing of his home. Hone Harawira tells him to "get f***ed" A distinguished academic has broken his silence about a firebomb attack on his Auckland home – and wants an apology from Māori nationalists who were active in the 1980s.
Michael Neill, emeritus professor of English at the University of Auckland, writes about the historic incident in an October issue of the London Review of Books. It's an angry, compelling piece of writing, framed by comments on sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, where he (and his brother Sir Sam Neill) were born before arriving in New Zealand. The theme of his article is conflict and resolution. Ireland has achieved unity; New Zealand is slowly getting there; and things would somehow or other move closer in that direction if Neill received acknowledgement and an apology from a Māori activist group who he claims threw a Molotov cocktail into his house in 1986.
I asked Neill whether he regarded the prospect of an apology as a vain hope. He replied, "Yes. Pretty vain. I fear so." He is right to think that. I called Hone Harawira, whose mother Titewhai was a co-founder of the activist group that he mentions, Ahi Kaa. His advice to Neill: "Go and get fucked, you prick. You tell him that if he wants to talk to me, he's more than welcome to. But he's not going to get a fucken apology from me or anybody else."
Neill claims that Ahi Kaa's actual target was the house of his neighbour, historian Judith Binney. She had been told in September 1986 by one of her students at Auckland University that Ahi Kaa "was planning to take action against her" to show their contempt for a Pākehā historian wanting to write about Māori. The issue was a subject of intense debate at that time. Author and historian Michael King wrote in his 1992 memoir Hidden Places, "Whereas formerly Pākehā were accused of not seeking out Māori views of history and social change, now the accusation is that they are doing precisely that, and that they have no right to." He refers to critiques by Syd Jackson in Mana and Sidney Mead in the Listener. King could live with that. It wasn't as though they said he should be put to death.
But the 1986 firebombing that Neill writes about nearly burned down his house. His infant son Tuatora, then two years old, had been asleep on a window cushion just 15 minutes before the flaming petrol bomb smashed through the very same window. Tuataroa, Neil mentions not entirely in passing in his article, is tangata whenua (Ngāpuhi).
Ahi Kaa was a group of high-profile Māori nationalists. Members included Atareta Poananga, famous for describing Pākehā as “the product of the riffraff, the flotsam and jetsam of British culture” who needed to hand the leadership of the country “back to Māori or go back to where they came from”.
The attack on Neill's home took place on September 29, 1986. Judith Binney and her husband, Sebastian Black, had gone out for the evening. Black asked Neill to keep an eye on the house: "It would be terrible if we got firebombed," he told his neighbour. Neill accuses Ahi Kaa as the culprits. The arsonists' aim was terrible but their intent was clear. Neill writes in the London Review of Books, "The man who had helped put out the fire told us that he'd seen the perpetrator – a burly Māori guy, he said. The obvious conclusion was that the firebomb had been intended for our neighbours."
No arrests were made. No one took responsibility. Black swore Neill to silence because the publicity "might damage her [Binney's] relations with Māori". Judith Binney's books include her biography of Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Turuki, Redemption Songs, which won the 1996 Montana New Zealand Book of the Year. Binney died in 2011, Black in 2015.
I phoned Neill to discuss his article. He turned off the loud music playing in the background - "When you're nearly 80, you listen to Leonard Cohen all the time. Late Leonard Cohen only" – and his manner was somewhat really very wary.
I asked him, "This is the first time you've ever said anything about what happened. Why now?"
He said, "Well – I mean – as long as Sebastian and Judith were alive, I certainly couldn’t do it. But then latterly I started to think, well, it’s a small fragment of local history which I wanted on record."
He writes of the couple in the London Review of Books, "They never recognised the affect it had on my family." I asked him to expand on that criticism of his former neighbours.
He said, "Yes, because understandably Judy saw it as an attack on her, and something that constituted a kind of threat to the work that was important to her. And I mean – at the time, I very much wanted to go public with it. But I had an obligation to them."
"It's strange though, isn't it. Your two families lived with a secret for over 30 years."
He said, "Yes. I suppose you could say that."
"Did you discuss what happened with Sebastian and Judith over the years?"
He said, "I don’t think we had a big talk about it. Probably just glancing references to it now and then."
"Was keeping it a secret the right thing to do?"
"Yes, in the sense that I wouldn't have wanted a row with them. Their friendship was too important. And there was no knowing what the consequences might have been. But I was extremely angry about it for some time and the worst thing about anger is if you can't discharge it properly."
Neill has been in peppery form of late. He was the author of a recent open letter to Creative New Zealand CEO Stephen Wainwright in objection to the Shakespeare funding row. It was published in the Herald alongside a photo of Neill looking very angry. He followed it up with another open letter to Wainwright: "I wrote to you a week ago criticising the justifications given for your board's decision to defund the Sheilah Winn Shakespeare Festival. I note that you have not offered me the bare courtesy of an acknowledgement, let alone a reply… I think that some sort of apology is now due from your board for its ill-informed decision."
Again, with the indignation; again, with the demands for an apology. In his London Review of Books piece, Neill writes that not long after the firebombing, he met professor of Māori studies and Ahi Kaa member Pat Hohepa. "I simply needed someone to face up, to offer some apology. Hohepa insisted he knew nothing about it." The article goes on to reason that Hohepa's decision to accept a knighthood this year means he should do the right thing and apologise. He writes, "I recognise that there are moments in anti-colonial struggle when violence can come to seem unavoidable. I can see that those involved in the firebombing might have believed that such a time had come…What I struggle to accept is their refusal to admit what they did, or to offer any apology. Perhaps it is time we talked."
He repeated the message in our cagey interview. "Pat's knighthood shows that things have changed; maybe he’ll decide he wants to talk to me."
A source advised that Sir Pat Hohepa is unwell, and unable to give interviews. Atareta Poananga from Ahi Kaa died in 2020. And so I called Hone Harawira, as a prominent figure in the past 40, 50 years of Māori protest, and because he's always good for a quote.
He said, "Why on earth does he think it’s Ahi Kaa? He doesn’t have any evidence they said they were going to firebomb Judith Binney's house, so why does he say that?"
I read out the relevant passages from the London Review of Books. He interrupted to say, "Hang on, hang on. That’s a long bow to draw as far as firebombing his house." I resumed my reading out loud. When I finished, he said, "This is fucken bullshit, mate. This is fucken bullshit. Unless he's got evidence – that's just all innuendo."
The problem with conducting an inquiry now is that the attack was 36 years ago. If members of Ahi Kaa were interviewed by police at the time, no charges were laid; and to detective Neill, Hohepa claimed zero knowledge ("he knew nothing about it") of the incident. Certainly it's logical to think that a group such as Ahi Kaa could have been responsible. Who else would have done it? The throwing of Molotov cocktails into houses on suburban streets in Auckland is not exactly a common occurrence; it's an extreme act, something you can easily imagine was ideologically motivated. But it's also very possible that Neill's accusation is founded on a fallacy, a mistaken belief, a baseless rage formed without hard evidence; he may be no more than angrily barking up the wrong tree.
I asked Neill, "Is there any doubt in your mind it was Ahi Kaa?"
He replied, "How could one possibly know? I had no idea of anyone else who would do such a thing, and there was that strange warning given to Judy, and that’s what made me suspect. There will never be any way of proving who was responsible."
But the point of his article is a direct and emphatic accusation. His anger is that someone nearly burned down his house and could have killed everyone in it. Anyone in his position would feel haunted. Neill's account of the fire is terrifying - it was just after midnight, the sitting room was ablaze, foam cushions caught fire and formed "a column of flame and…a cloud of toxic gas". A neighbour, "an anxious-looking Pasifika man", helped put the fire out. "He said he had seen something being thrown at our bay window." He was the one who witnessed the perpetrator ("a burly Māori guy").
Who was it? No one knows. "Stop spreading innuendo, eh," said Harawira. " As far as I'm concerned, he can go and get fucked. It's innuendo. He's got no facts. He's just trying to dredge up a storm of racism about something he has no facts about."
I texted him later to ask whether I could talk to his mum (!) and emphasised once again that Neill lived next door to Binney. I wrote, "It may be a long bow to draw but it's a shorter bow if the Molotov guy threw it at the wrong house by mistake."
Harawira replied, "Nah…The world is changing and our future has a deeper and healthier tan than the pallid whiteness of his colonial dreams."
There was something reminiscent about Harawira's eloquent text. It was a reminder of the stirring end to Michael Neill's Diary in the London Review of Books. He wrote, "Aotearoa/ New Zealand is slowly becoming a place of kotahitanga (togetherness) whose people remember the dark past of colonialism, but are learning to escape its shadow." Ancient grievances, dating back to September 1986, evidently cast a long and consuming shadow.
