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I respect your wishes
You gave me such precious hours
What to do? without you?
Squeezed me out of your life;
Down the drain like molten toothpaste
I feel used and spat out.
Poor! Old! Me!

“He’s [expletive deleted] cracked!
- (Attributed to) David Lange at Interim Cabinet, February 29, 1984.

From Gustafson, Barry, Decline and Fall: The Muldoon Years 1981-84. (Christchurch: University of Canterbury Press, 2007). Reproduced under license.

As the dust began to settle across New Zealand and the world, another cloud was forming over the unassuming hamlet and Air Force Base of Ohakea. Divides were already forming in the National Unity Government; control over the South Island was quite theoretical and the debate over whether Members whose constituencies had undergone (to use the gentler bowdlerised term) “population reapportionments” should be allowed to engage in policy decisions given the fact they now technically represented nobody was a shameful example of the political wrangling which both sides engaged in unabashedly over the first week after Black Wednesday…

…Labour’s internal disputes are of little concern here; of considerably more interest to this publication are the rifts emerging in the exhausted National Party. The Prime Minister’s own electorate had been rendered uninhabitable, those of two of his Cabinet colleagues were effectively devoid of life, and even his closest colleagues were questioning his ability to handle the crisis.

Without wishing to get his hands too dirtied in the bitter accusations and counter-accusations of the last twenty-five years which have gone on behind closed doors and in Party offices across the country, the matter of Muldoon’s alcoholism must be at least given passing notice by the author. It is true that by February 1984 he was drinking more heavily than ever before, with his declaration of open support for the United States widely suspected of having been made whilst under the influence. After being evacuated to Ohakea, then, he can scarcely be blamed for using some sort of crutch to get through those awful days – indeed, one of our unexamined national shames is the spate of suicides and extrajudicial “mercy” killings which went on from February through to at least April, and the death of the monarch by her own hand was a tremendous surprise to all – but this does not absolve Muldoon of the fact that before a week had passed his mental state had begun to decline. His speech at Cabinet was frequently slurred, his demeanour wildly changing from melancholy to sanguinity and back again, and his strong style of leadership began to grate even with his Cabinet colleagues. This came to a head with the resignation on February 28th when…


RNZAF Base Ohakea
February 28, 1984

Muldoon had slept six hours in the last two days so it was no surprise that he seemed less involved in the proceedings than he usually would be, and therefore the snap to his current state of alertness was unsettling, to say the least, bloodshot eyes narrowed into a glare which managed to be at once manic and calmly furious.

“What was that you said, George?” he asked of his colleague in a voice bubbling with anger, miles off the croaking drawl he’d slipped into recently.
Across the room, George Gair stood stiffly at the end of the table, an envelope in his hand. He cleared his throat and repeated himself.

“I said, Prime Minister, that I do not feel that I can continue as a member of this Cabinet, or of this Parliament. I am no longer a young man and my –” here, for the first time, his voice caught in his throat “My electorate has been, I am reliably informed, utterly devastated by the events of the past week, so I also fear that I no longer have the constitutional authority to remain a member of Parliament, or your Government – one can hardly carry out a by-election, after all, when there is no electorate left to vote.” George sighed. “I remain loyal to you and your Government, sir, and I will back you to the hilt, but I do not feel comfortable holding several portfolios when I have no legal grounds to do so. While there may be a way to justify my remaining a Member of the House, I doubt the legitimacy of a Cabinet Minister who has no vote, no opinion, no people behind him.”

It didn’t help, a fact which became apparent as Muldoon snorted, lurching slowly forward in his seat with the ominous interminability of a cyclone.

“So, you think anyone whose electorate was in one of the affected areas should be tossed out of the Government altogether, do you? You know Birkenhead and Remuera were ruined as well, don’t you? So d’you reckon we need to toss out Jim McLay and Allan Highet too?”

The question of what that would mean for the sitting member for Tamaki (which was in a state you could optimistically call ‘very bad’), also known as the Prime Minister, went unsaid in words but shouted in body language. Gair shook his head.

“Prime Minister, I cannot speak on what this situation may mean for other Ministers of the Crown, but I am informed that the, the, the bomb went off directly over Devonport Navy Base. If that’s true then my electorate isn’t just damaged, sir, it, it, it no longer exists.” He was beginning to struggle on some words now. It wasn’t sure what was left of the North Shore, but the initial reports (some of which lay buried in the pile on the desk) weren’t promising. Nobody had made it out of the area since February 22nd, anyway.

“So you aren’t trying to roll me as leader again, hey?” It came as an accusation, not a question. “Oh yes, you lot were always thick as thieves with Brian Bloody Talboys. Or are they offering you as bait, make out like the old man’s packed a sad so the older man should take the hint and pack it in too?”

Gair was bewildered. “Sir, I have no idea what you’re talking abou –”

“Oh of course not,” snapped Muldoon, elbows sliding off the desk as his palms gripped the edges and he began leaning over the mounds of paper like a whiskery gargoyle. “They never bloody do. Well, listen up, this is still my government and no treasonous little shit is going to take it away from me, understand? Consider your resignation declined; I expect that report on the Railways by Friday at the latest and less defeatist talk from you and your esteemed bloody colleagues.”

Gair opened his mouth as if to say something, before appearing to think better of it. Instead, he managed a choked “Yes, Prime Minister” and left with all the dignity he could.

In his office, Muldoon poured himself another drink and brooded over his reports, eyes glazing over again as possibilities seared their way through his mind. He would remain so for quite some time.


I’m fed up with crying
My despair is dying,
Turning into rage
Day by day


The Huey buzzed its lonely way southwards through the empty, cloudless skies and over empty, carless streets, the Pilot marvelling at the lack of wind as they headed in to land at the deserted airport. Wellington was usually an absolute bitch even on a nice day, but at the moment a high pressure system was draped languidly across the country and even the windy city was barely breezy.

Well, “marvelling” was perhaps too strong a word. A lack of wind was surprising, certainly, but the real marvel lay to the southwest, Pilot and Co-pilot unable to resist looking across the valleys and harbour to the blackened, twisted ruin of the capital. Recon flights had already confirmed that the major firestorms had burnt themselves out here and in Auckland, but blazes remained in the western hills in the sunny weather, a rough semicircle of smoke radiating outwards towards the sea where helicopters with monsoon buckets were yet being directed in a desperate attempt to keep the bushfires away from the Cook Strait cable terminus and keep the lights on across the North Island.

And there was just so damn much of that destruction. The Pilot was from New Plymouth originally but familiar with flying into Wellington so he could at least pick out the landmarks – or rather the lack thereof. For one, he was quite sure that there was meant to be a Beehive-shaped building amidst all that rubble in the northern area, from which only the toothy skeletons of high-rises loomed out of the devastation. Jesus, there was just so damn much –
He was brought out of his reverie by the Co-pilot, who asked him something innocuous about landing and went into a thoughtful silence again afterwards, before adding his two cents.

“Fuck of a mess, in’t it?”

“Yeah, yeah. Wonder what we’ll find down around the airport, eh?”

“Reckon we’ll find out, or that lot in the back will, anyway.”

His spectacularly dismissive “that lot” took in a section of soldiers from one of the platoons stationed out in Trentham, where the Defence Force was currently overseeing the tentative expeditions into Wellington (they’ve been pretty damn tentative, alright, thought the Pilot since the first bunch of jokers and cops and Territorials to wander in there didn’t fucking well come out).

For their part the soldiers were mostly silent; not being preoccupied with keeping Flight Endeavour Alpha aloft they had much more time on their hands to gawp with terror at the ruined city. As they headed down Evans Bay towards the runway, the tail of a stricken airplane jabbing out of the harbour gave them all the more reason to gawp, as that and other features became starkly apparent to the Lance-Corporal gazing unblinkingly at the scene. Here, a car lay half-submerged where it had run through the barrier on the road around the bays. There, a blanket with the word “HELP” stencilled on it was draped across the front of a pretty hillside villa. Regarding the plane over which they were passing, one of his section-mates nodded absent-mindedly and turned to the others.

“Bloody women drivers, eh?” he quipped, face contorted into a half-hysterical parody of a grin. It convinced nobody.

The strip of road in between the airport and the bay was deserted, just like all the roads hereabouts. On the runway itself, planes were parked up neatly where they’d been left before the Exchange, adding to the illusion that here, over the hills and a million miles away from the horrors which no doubt lurked in the city centre, everything was as it had always been.

That illusion was shattered pretty quickly once they landed. No ground crew rushed out to greet them, no noise but the steady breeze and the whine of the motors as they powered down and the clicking of the Geiger counter as the Lance-Corporal waved it about in the warm sunny air.

“We’re looking alright,” he said hoarsely “what next?”

To cut a long story short, the soldiers found themselves asking the growing crowd of locals just who had been running civil defence and administration since what they tactfully referred to as “the Incident.” The citizens – who had grown to a fair couple hundred in number by the time Endeavour Alpha and Bravo got a grasp of the situation – pointed them in the direction of the high school which sat pretty much right across from the airport, where they were received by a local somebody who’d aged a decade in the last two months, and a century in the last week. A brief discussion between the Captain and him about the situation made it apparent why.

When the missile struck home, there had been somewhere in the order of fifteen to twenty thousand people living east of Mount Victoria; nobody was sure how many were left alive, but looting had been a severe problem since law and order more or less evaporated outside the belt from the Kilbirnie shopping area (where the few remaining policemen had secured the supplies at the end of a gun) to Seatoun (where the locals were far enough away to scarcely notice what had happened, and a minor sealift had taken place on a harbour ferry before fuel had run out on the way back over and the passengers had had to swim for it before the ferry drifted into the same reefs on which the Wahine had floundered a quarter-century earlier. It did not bear thinking about as to how much of the radioactive material dumped in the harbour had ebbed out there with the tide).

However, since people had more or less stocked up for at least three days the hunger problem hadn’t become acute just yet; radiation remained the key issue, an all the more severe one given the lack of familiarity with it. A cursory wave of the Geiger counter over the dried black spots atop cars and the roof of a utility shed backed up the report of a downpour of black rain not too long after the Incident. Ambient radiation was scarcely one to two rads per hour; given that it had been at least 160 hours, the prevalence of radiation sickness even amongst the healthy and hale was making itself felt. Closer towards the central city, the council warned, they couldn’t vouch for survival – the black rain had fallen thicker and for longer there, and nobody had come or gone from anywhere further than Hataitai since the evening of the 22nd.
Which brought them to the humanitarian effort: with at least five thousand having made the journey across the hills from the central area (or turning around after they realised the airport was not, in fact, the target – when they were still able to see, that was) and becoming heavily irradiated in the process, the mortality rate had already been considerable. By this stage, most of the worst cases had already died as those who had been lucky in the short term began to enter their long, slow decline. Against his instincts, the Captain asked where they were dealing with the ill. And so they were shown to the school hall.

Itcan’thappenhereitwon’thappenherethisisn’thappeningherethiswon’t -

A door creaking open and a rush of warm air. Behind the Lance-Corporal, one of the soldiers lurched to a drain grate and was sick. The inside of the building was mercifully too dark to see much from out here – the power having gone out not long after the explosion – but the atmosphere was choking, the heat of midsummer and several hundred people only exacerbating the palpable odour.

OhGodnoGodnoGodnothereisnoGodnoGodohfuck

They made it inside five paces before they were stopped in their tracks by a closer look at some of the (for want of a better term) patients, most of whom were too far gone to realise, let alone respond to, their presence. As the Lance-Corporal looked to the Captain to ask what they were meant to do with this, a woman walked over towards them (a welcome distraction for the Captain, who had no idea how to deal with this nightmare). Possibly she’d once been quite pretty; either way the sunken eyes were those of a human being who had in the last week gone through the very mouth of Hell and was still wading through the Stygian depths of suffering. None of the soldiers had any kind of chance to respond before she made her way to the Captain and, after taking a moment to regard him and his underlings as if to make sure they weren’t some sort of hallucination, exploded in a hoarse and hateful outburst.

“You bastards. You useless, fucking, bastards. Where were you?” She kept repeating the words over and over, punching the soldier feebly in the chest before an internal dam broke and she burst into hysterical tears. Another worn-looking doctor came over (in a coat covered in stains which redoubled the gratitude the Lance-Corporal felt towards the impenetrable half-light) and escorted them out with some similarly exhausted-sounding apologies, but the point had been made. Neither Lance-Corporal nor Captain would be able to find any good answer to her question.


I was blue
When you let me down
Black and blue!


The Leader of the Opposition slammed a pudgy fist down on the cracked surface of the sun-bleached Formica table, rattling a pencil-holder and more than a few spines around it. From behind one of his three remaining pairs of glasses David Lange stared at the meeting room with a focused fury, and when he spoke it was with no effort whatsoever made to conceal it.
“I tell you, the man’s gone bloody barmy!”

“Now, steady on, David,” interjected John Falloon, “this is the Prime Minister of New Zealand you’re –”

“He’ll be the Prime Minister of a graveyard if he goes on like this!” bellowed Lange. “And anyone who can’t see that is just handing him the shovel. No we’ve got to do something about this. Accusing me of treason is one thing, but when he starts pointing fingers at his own Cabinet ministers he’s going off the deep end.” At the other end of the room, George Gair cast his eyes downwards.

“So what are you suggesting, a coup or something?”

Lange blinked at Jim McLay, letting that one hang in the air for an uncomfortably long time before he gave a slow no, reaffirming it with an emphatic shake of the head.

“This is New Zealand,” he said as he stared at the table, talking in an attempt to convince himself as well as the others. “If we go down that road we’ll end up scattered and broken. No, we just need to convince the Prime Minister that this is beyond party politics or personal egos; this is a matter of national survival. That it no longer serves the country’s best interests for him to be running things the way he has been. That we have been.” He looked up and out at the scared men who were the future of this country’s survival, continuing in a pensive voice. “Because if we allow the Prime Minister to keep killing himself in an attempt to fix a situation which none of us have faith in him to approach realistically, we will be as much willing accomplices in the death of our country as the man who pressed the button that set the world on fire.”

Nobody on either side had any kind of response to that. David didn’t expect they would, and let them stew uncomfortably in the silence. As he opened his mouth to speak once more, he was interrupted by someone clearing their throat. And unless Roger Douglas’ voice had suddenly gone up a few octaves and it had stopped having to negotiate with his nose and teeth to obscure intelligibility, that was young Marilyn Waring speaking up from behind him.

“So what do you think we should do?”

Lange looked out at the room and spoke, the barest hint of something faintly sinster at the fringes of his voice.

“I think it’s about time somebody had a word with him; didn’t you?”


…I see red, I see red, I see red!
I see red, I see red, I see red!
I see red, I see red, I see red!
I see red, I see red, I see red!
I see red, I see red, red, I see red, red, red, red…