OWEN WILKES

OWEN WILKES 1940-2005

Peace activist and fastidious researcher Owen Wilkes was a founder of both CAFCA (Campaign Agaisnt Foregin Control of Aotearoa) and the Anti-Bases Campaign (ABC).
Educated at University of Canterbury (B.Sc), majoring in Geology, Wilkes worked on various Canterbury Museum digs and alongside Tony Fomison (NZ artist), documenting Maori rock art. In 1962 Wilkes worked as a field assistant in Antarctica for the Bishop Museum of Hawaii. He became aware of the military nature of the whole Deep Freeze programme, with Antarctica being used as a gigantic military training ground and later in the summer of 1965-66, again employed by the Bishop Museum, he was consciously looking for evidence of Operation Deep Freeze being a military operation.
In 1966 Wilkes was employed in New Guinea to collect parasites and he discovered that it was part of a US Army germ warfare project, a military project using the Bishop Museum as a front.
In June 1968, working with Phil Howell of the University (of Canterbury) Physics Department, he submitted an article on the proposed US Navy Omega installation at Lake Pearson (near Arthur’s Pass). It was printed in Canta, and published (Editor, Bill Gruar, 72,000 copies) as a “special emergency edition”. The article described the Omega system consisting of eight transmitters around the world, utilizing Very Low Frequency signals (VLF), which travel through water, as a navigational guide for submarines, Omega, the transmitting relay base would have made New Zealand a nuclear target.
In the early 70s he, along with Tim Shadbolt, was one of the editors of the hugely influential New Zealand Whole Earth Catalogue
He lived six years in Sweden, where he worked for the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). Police swooped on Owen as he was returning from a bike trip around the islands between Sweden and Finland and was sentenced to six months in prison.
He played a leading role in exposing several of the US Central Intelligence Agency destabilisation schemes aimed at the 1984-90 Labour government, plots such as the “Maori Loans Affair” and the alleged Soviet submarine spotted in the Cook Islands.
Throughout the 80s he was a major component of the anti-bases movement that formed as The Anti Bases Campaign. The ABC committee became known as The Bearded Patriarchs.
While working with DOC in the 90’s he completed an inventory of the approximately 1000 archaeological sites on land administered by the Conservancy around Kawhia and Awakino. Documenting definitive histories of Cuvier Island and the Pureora Forest from the earliest Maori settlement, through European exploration to the modern conservation period.
It was in this area Owen Wilkes sadly took his own life, succumbing to depression, in 2005.
Owen Wilkes’ contribution to the peace movement in Aotearoa and the historical knowledge of the land and its people is immense. We are indebted to him.

Simon Cuming, July 2007
Tamaki Makau Rau/Auckland
Aotearoa/New Zealand