Janet McAllister: Pictures recall days of terrorism

Bob Kerr's poster of Ernie Abbott is on display at AUT's St Paul St Gallery.

Coincidentally, nine days ago, two arts events in Auckland simultaneously remembered an incident from the nation's 1980s terrorism spate. The episode in question was not the 1985 Rainbow Warrior bombing or the 1983 Molotov cocktail attack on the Clerical Workers Union but the day Ernie Abbott died in 1984 when he picked up a suitcase bomb at Wellington's Trades Hall.

At his Shakespeare Brewery book launch, poet and theatre maker Murray Edmond gave a reading about Abbott from Then It Was Now Again, his new collection of wry, lucid critical writing. At the time, he writes, such dramatic happenings helped to give the year of the snap election "a feeling of crisis" rather than the sense of inevitability that we often mistakenly attribute to the past.

On March 27, 1984, Edmond went to a theatre policy conference where "the New Right policies of the next 15 years" as outlined by a "silly man from Treasury" inspired chuckles of disbelief rather than any chill of certainty. Afterwards, Edmond stumbled upon the aftermath of Abbott's murder, "cordoned off with yellow tape" while "the revolving blue lights of police cars shone out in the dusk".

Chris McBride, a Wellington Media Collective designer and screenprinter, had heard the explosion from the collective's premises behind the Trades Hall. Earlier that day, needing to consult Trades Council president Pat Kelly about union campaign material, he had "walked past that suitcase about five times".

McBride related this during a floor talk at AUT's St Paul St Gallery, at the same time that Edmond was speaking at the Shakespeare, a kilometre away. Beside McBride was a large portrait poster of Abbott, the vice-president of the Caretakers and Cleaners Union. Underneath Abbott's face are words from an old socialist poem in an angry red scrawl: "If blood be the price of your cursed wealth, Good God we have bought it fair!" (The killing remains unsolved; the bombing's intent is suspected of being political.)

The Abbott poster, illustrated by Bob Kerr from a photo by Gaylene Preston, is one of several dozen Wellington Media Collective posters that grace the gallery until October 24, offering a fascinating angle on recent political, social, cultural and design history. The collective was active between 1978 and 1998, and the exhibition takes its title from their motto: "We Will Work With You."

Among historic anti-Springbok tour posters are others protesting such chronic issues that they could be pasted up again tomorrow, about poor housing and benefit deprivation, and cocking a snook at election year royal tours (one poster shows the Queen as she appeared on a postage stamp, only she's made up as a clown).

In terms of design evolution, by the 1990s the handmade screen prints inspired by Cuban and Black Panther posters had given way to the early digital obsession with fonts. Words were no longer treated primarily as picture captions but often became the whole picture.

Happily, such image-free design, like terrorism, is now a low risk.