Island murder revealed colonial flaws in Niue
The only New Zealand diplomat to be murdered overseas was slaughtered in his sleep. Gerard Hindmarsh examines why New Zealanders fought to save his killers from the gallows.
Prime Minister Jacinda Adern’s recent trip to Nuie on a Pacific mission was billed as something of a homecoming.
Her father Ross had been our High Commissioner there since
2014, and he was the police commissioner before that.
Niue’s population peaked in
1966 when the island population reached 6000. Today it’s only about
1800, with 23,000 living in New Zealand, their citizenship to this country guaranteed after they became self-ruling in 1974 .
Aid to the tune of $53.7 million made it to Niue since 2015. That is about 4 per cent of our total aid budget.
Ross Ardern’s tenure as commissioner has gone remarkably well, but our relationship with Niue has certainly had its moments.
One definitive event was the killing of Cecil Hector Larsen, our resident commissioner there in
1953. He remains the only New Zealand diplomat ever to be murdered overseas.
Attacked with big bush knives
(21-inch machetes) by three young men as he slept, Larsen managed to live for an hour before he succumbed to his wounds.
The three perpetrators whose names were Tamaeli, Latoatama and Folitahu absconded into the Niuean wilderness but gave themselves up after a few days.
In a three-day trial in the High Court of Niue the defendants all admitted the fact of killing Larsen but gave detailed accounts of how he roughed them up on a daily basis. Dick Scott’s definitive 1993 book about the event, Would a
Good Man Die?, outlines how the men truly believed they were ridding Niue of a tyrant.
Larsen may have been popular with other palangi on the island and colleagues in the island territories department, but Scott details how he was incredibly authoritarian with the islanders.
Niueans petitioned the New Zealand government three times after Larsen was appointed in 1943, each time protesting his heavyhandedness. Each time they were ignored.
In January 1953, Larsen and his wife, Jessie, and two children moved into a new eight-room concrete block house two kilometres out of Alofi.
It was closer to the prison which contained scores of inmates whom Larsen had sentenced to jail for so-called crimes that included drinking, adultery and gambling. Even holding hands without being married would get you a hefty fine.
The move closer to the jail suited Larsen, who used the prison labour around his home and the personal golf course he was getting his inmates to build for him beside the prison.
At all times he operated without outside scrutiny and with near impunity.
On the day of his death, Larsen had hit a young offender called Tamaeli in the stomach with a stick for not understanding a gardening order in English, even though the lad knew not a word of English at all.
Later the same day, Larsen gave some ‘‘hand’s on’’ to another inmate, Latoatama, who vomited on his verandha. Larsen could smell whisky in the mess and suspected the man had taken a swig from his liquor cabinet, so after smacking him around the head, he slapped a summons on him, effectively sentencing him to two years more hard labour for breaking and entering.
That night the inmates all got talking. Larsen must die, they decided. So while the prisoners all sang and danced to create a diversion, Folitahu leapt into the rafters and kicked a hole in the fibro roof. Tamaeli and Latoatama followed him out, and around midnight they made their way to the kitchen attached to the courthouse where they found a big bush knife.
Then they collected two more bush knives from Larsen’s toolshed before breaking into his house via an attached garage. Creeping into the Larsens’ bedroom they positioned themselves next to his bed as one of the men whispered to three . . . Taha, Ua, Tolu . . . before all thrusting down and wielding their knives to slash their tormentor mercilessly.
Larsen’s wife, Jessie, was in an adjoining bed and she got her arm slashed as she reached out to her screaming husband.
Larsen was buried at 3pm on the day he was killed, his funeral attended by no less than half the 4600 islanders. After giving themselves up, the three men were incarcerated in a 6ft by 6ft by 6ft concrete cell hellhole with three small ventilation holes.
The murder was big in New Zealand, but the newspapers literally regurgitated the government line that the killers were nothing more than dangerous escapees.
Few New Zealanders knew anything about Niue, the impression now confirmed for many that it was full of dangerous criminals. The only action taken by our Island Territories Department was to order security tightened at Alofi jail and send up more pictures of the Queen to hang up all around the island.
Auckland magistrate Leonard Sinclair, temporarily assigned to the High Court of Niue, travelled up from New Zealand to hear the murder trial in which he was aided by six appointed ‘‘assesors’’ because Niue did not have a jury system.
At the trial, the three men strenuously gave evidence as to Larsen’s brutality, all outlining how they were all regularly beaten by him. Latoatama asked the judge to consider this: ‘‘Please find out why he was killed. Would a good man die?’’
The latter sentence would end up the title of Scott’s book, which not only outlines the whole sorry affair, but goes into all the colonial heavy-handedness that led up to.
It took less than two and a half days to conduct the trial and less than one hour for Sinclair to deliberate with his assessors and find the men guilty of murder. They were sentenced to hang.
The arrival of gallows on the dock at Niue was macabre, and reeked of a dominating, colonial power. They were erected near where the airport is now, and the prisoners were only hours from being hung when an 11th-hour reprieve came in by way of telegram from New Zealand that the Howard League had won a court stay of execution.
By now the executions were turning into a fiasco for Sid Holland’s government back in New Zealand. Everyone from Women’s Division of Federated Farmers to church groups to unions and welfare organisations put their weight behind saving the men.
The Government sought to shift the hanging to Samoa, but that caused a huge uproar there. They weren’t going to be our whipping lackeys, and good on them.
Finally, 222 days after the murder, a court here ordered that New Zealand had no jurisdiction to order Samoan gaolers to execute the men, and they were promptly transported here to serve out their sentences in Mt Eden Prison. In effect they became political prisoners, too complicated to release or even consider for parole.
The last was not released from Mt Eden until 1970, after serving 18 years behind bars. Only Tamaeli returned to Nuie, the other two absorbed themselves into work here, one in Christchurch and the other New Plymouth. All of them led law-abiding lives upon their release and never caused any more trouble.
Today, most Niueans still prefer to avoid the subject of the Larsen killing. It brought shame upon them, motivated in part by the upset it caused palangi.
In his book, Scott recalls when starting his research on Niue, an official said to him: ‘‘Oh no. I beg you not to concentrate on that – it is just too hurtful for the people.’’ Another said his retelling of the story would deny their identity as a people.
But the event was a wicked wake-up call for our administration in the Pacific.
The murder of Larsen showed us the true face of our colonial rule there. And it was not pretty to confront.
Larsen was not all bad, hailed as an efficient administrator who balanced the books, always lobbied New Zealand for more money for the school over there, and kept a tight ship. For his efficiency he was left largely to his own devices, and all without any civil service to assist him.
Documents declassified in 2002 indicate Larsen’s bullying was brought up by several officials after the murder.
Magistrate Sinclair wrote to the Justice Minister saying he felt the claims had an element of truth.
The men’s defence counsel also wrote to Island Affairs Department pointing out the shortfalls of Larsen’s role, which allowed him to be both judge and jailer, and how his position and personal attitude was completely out of step with ‘‘modern ideas’’.
It says something for Ross Ardern as our commissioner to Nuie that his tenure there has been characterised by a win-win approach with dealing with our ‘‘rock’’ of the Pacific. May we continue to learn from the past when it comes to our Pacific partners.