The Rainbow Warrior bombing back in 1985 is familiar to us here in Aotearoa. There have been TV documentaries and even a feature film telling the tale too. But it's not so well known around the world - until now, perhaps.
A new three-part documentary series called Murder in The Pacific has just screened in the UK on BBC TV.
The reviews are in - and they're good.
TVNZ will broadcast Murder in the Pacific will screen here later this year.
The Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior lying in Auckland harbour after it was bombed in 1985. Photo: AFP / New Zealand Herald (files)
Chloe Campbell and executive producer Caroline Hawkins who pitched it to the BBC, say it was a story that needed to be told.
“I remembered it vividly and sort of assumed that everyone else did as well,” Hawkins told Sunday Morning.
“And when I realised that they didn't, and people would look at me really quickly and say what's the Rainbow Warrior? I thought, crikey, this is a huge story that needs to be told.”
Setting the scene of what life was like in 1980s for New Zealanders and more broadly was an important aspect of making the documentary, Campbell says.
“Like Caroline says this story isn't very well known to our generation. I was a baby when this happened.
“And so getting a sense that we didn't have the internet, we didn't have [cell] phones, we didn't have really advanced technology to help us we didn't have advanced forensics, was something that we wanted to lay the scene of that and create that world for the audience.”
The response of the New Zealand police and public is also brought vividly to life, she says
“It's very well known that your country was hugely underestimated by the European spies that came into it.
“And I think they didn't quite realise what an amazing community of people there were in New Zealand, and how fiercely they were going to defend their people and the activists who were resting in Auckland Harbour.”
One of the leading characters ion the documentary is French journalist Edwy Plenel who at the time of the sinking worked for Le Monde, Plenel joined forces with another reporter Georges Marion to work on the story, Hawkins says.
“The two of them, even though they were kind of rivals or frenemies, banded together, neither of them was actually experienced at the time.
“They were young men, and they both were in slightly different fields in journalism, but it was really a tiny story in France, we try and get that across.
“It was a huge story in in Britain and New Zealand, but when it happened France were taking a holiday, everybody in the cities in France had gone to the countryside, and nobody was paying this any attention.
"And that's why it landed on the desk of these, not very well known at the time, quite young journalists. And that was an exciting part of the story to be able to tell that.”
The documentary has done well with a younger demographic, Hawkins says.
“It seems to have hit home with a younger audience, and when I say younger, I think it's between 25 and 35-year-olds, the BBC were delighted because that's a typically very hard audience to reach. “
Stylistically Murder in the Pacific unfolds like a thriller, Campbell says.
“It was entirely intentional to make it unfold like a thriller and that was part of the what convinced the BBC to let us make it.
“In a very crowded market now with all the streamers and other channels that people can tune into, you need to make something that's going to stand out and be entertaining.”
At the time of the sinking Campbell was 21, and says the outrage she felt then hasn’t faded.
“When I was 21, I had a combat jacket and sewn on that combat jacket was a cloth badge that said, ‘you can't sink a rainbow’.
"And I remember that feeling, really impassioned and really angry about the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior.
“And it was a feeling that stayed with me all the way through my adult life.”
