‘My really special person’
Greens co-founder Jeanette Fitzsimons died unexpectedly on Thursday. Husband Harry Parke tells Mike Mather about her remarkable life from a little chair on the couple’s porch. ‘‘She was one of the first in New Zealand to get people thinking about the envi
Harry Parke is keeping it together. The voice of Jeanette Fitzsimons’ husband hardly quavers as he sits in a little chair on the front porch of their home in Kauaeranga Valley, recounting the feats of her remarkable life – and the circumstances of her death.
It was a demise entirely unexpected, he says.
‘‘She had been using the chainsaw on Wednesday, and was cutting up a bit of firewood. She had gone down to the bottom paddock to check on a dairy cow we have down there, which had an extra calf. She was coming up the drive when she fell over.
‘‘She must have hit her head. She was there for a few minutes before I discovered her. She was pretty disoriented.’’
Parke took the 75-year-old to a medical centre, where she was assessed and discharged. ‘‘Then, about 6pm last night she suddenly deteriorated and at 9.45pm she died of a massive stroke.’’
He stops and takes a breath and looks down towards the gravel driveway, where his wife slipped and fell. In spite of the dry summer the valley remains verdant, a bastion of greenness befitting of its bestknown resident.
‘‘All you see here is the creation of Jeanette and myself. We have lived here since 1991, when we bought the property as bare land.’’
As well as the house and the paddocks there are now a few sheds and an impressive garden, testament to the couple’s hard work.
Parke smiles as he reminisces.
‘‘We did a lot of it by hand. Probably stupidly. But there it is.
‘‘She was my really special person ... she was relentlessly positive, with a deep caring for the planet and for people.
‘‘She was one of the first in New Zealand to get people thinking about the environment and the climate in a way that no-one else had until that time.’’
Parke has ‘‘so many’’ memories of Fitzsimons’ exploits and it is hard to name one that he – or she – was the most proud.
Her time aboard the little sailing ship Vega with Greenpeace executive director Bunny McDiarmid, when they and other members of a small flotilla were involved in a tense stand-off with a much larger oil drilling ship off the Raglan coast in 2013 comes to mind. ‘‘She was prepared to have her day in court for that one. In any event the government decided not to proceed with action against her for disrupting the oil ship ... she was a little bit disappointed by that.’’
Then, in 2017, she and other protesters chained themselves to a gate at Fonterra’s Clandeboye factory in South Canterbury in protest against the use of coal. ‘‘They didn’t arrest her for that one either. She was always trying to get herself arrested, but it never happened.’’
Parke reckons her 1999 victory in the
Coromandel electorate was probably her greatest moment. ‘‘She made world news. She was the first Green Party member anywhere to win a constituent seat.’’
Since leaving Parliament in 2013, the couple continued to fight for various causes, and were big supporters of movements such as Extinction Rebellion and the schools strike for climate change. However, Fitzsimons had recently become disillusioned with politics as a means of engineering real change.
‘‘She was coming to the conclusion she had failed ... She tried to change the way politics was done. It became a Green Party policy, under her and Rod’s leadership, to always attack the subject and not the person.’’
What did she make of the current state of the party she helped found? Parke gives a wry smile.
‘‘I’m not going to answer that,’’ he chuckles.
‘‘For a long time she thought Parliament was the place where she would be able to affect real change. She said she had slowly come to the realisation that you don’t change things in Parliament. Real change comes from within.’’
Fitzsimons’ former parliamentary comrade Catherine Delahunty lives a few kilometres down the road, and her partner Gordon Jackman had asked to build Fitzsimons’ casket.
Fitzsimons is survived by her two sons Jeremy and Mark, and with Parke’s own two sons and daughter – ‘‘we are a reconstituted family’’ – they make a big family. Some of that family begin to arrive as our interview winds down.
Parke gets up to embrace them and as he does so his composure cracks and the tears begin to come.
‘‘I think you had better go now,’’ he says, with an apologetic smile.