KEY POINTS:
The longer Jody Williams talks, the harder she thumps the table. Not at me or her audience, but to make her point. She takes after her grandfather on her mother's side. "He didn't give a **** about what anybody thought [of him] And I don't either," she says.
"I don't view my life as a popularity contest. I figured that out when I was 13." (She knew she was not cut out for babies by then too.)
As she says, "It's hard to have clarity if you don't know who you are" and Williams, now 57, knows exactly who she is. She is the straight-talking woman whose campaign to ban landmines was so successful they awarded her the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 - the 10th woman to receive the honour.
And what did she do then? She mounted a new campaign to ban cluster bombs.
Aren't landmines and cluster bombs the same thing? Haven't we been here before?
No, says Williams, while cluster bombs may have the same effects - kill people, rip off arms, legs and bits of body - they are different. Landmines are laid like booby traps. Cluster bombs come out of planes as regular big bombs, which then open, disgorging millions of minibombs or "sub-munitions".
"In theory the air pressure is meant to explode them," she explains. "In practice there's a 25 per cent failure rate. So out of the 4 million dropped on South Lebanon by Israel over three days, there were a million duds that didn't go off."
So there they lie, filled with shrapnel and worse, waiting to kill. They have bright plastic casings and shapes that children (especially dirt-poor kids) must itch to pick up. "Round ones like tennis balls with wings, others no bigger than matchboxes with nifty little straps that get caught in trees - or like this one," says Williams holding up her trademark drink bottle. It is bright orange, with a strap holding the stopper on: and "an exact replica of a Blu97 cluster bomb".
The most cluster bomb-contaminated areas are Southern Lebanon - where Israel's million undetonated bombs are waiting, and Iraq "where the US dropped a minimum of two million on Baghdad" and there are those Britain dropped in Basra.
Just finding and detonating landmines and bombs is not enough. The work is difficult and dangerous "mostly on your hands and knees digging in the ground". The only answer is to stop them before they are dropped.
Which is why Williams is here. Her real work is in Wellington and the Conference on Cluster Munitions. While she has flown to the Auckland War Memorial Museum to address a sell-out Oxfam breakfast, her colleagues from all over the world, including her husband, Steve Goose, are in Wellington ironing out the finer points around what constitutes a cluster bomb, "struggling with diplomats who want to weaken the treaty". Goose is probably with Phil Goff whom Williams rates highly: "an incredibly quick study and a very, very, good speaker. If you can't speak well and get people inspired you'll find it difficult to wind up your troops."
Wellington is part of the Oslo Process which began in February last year, a decade after the landmine ban treaty was signed in Ottawa. Its aim: to persuade countries to come together and ban cluster bombs. This time last year Williams and her colleagues had attracted 46 countries to the cause. By the Vienna conference there were 138, and right now international delegates representing 122 countries are gathered in Wellington for another chance to put pressure on the international community.
What happened to the rest? "Too far," says Williams, eyebrows raised at the number who did make it, given the 20-odd hours flying time many of them took to get here.
Next comes the final push: "following up, lobbying, pushing" various governments in preparation for the final step in December this year when the committees have fine-tuned their definitions, sewn up the loopholes, and delegates get to cast their votes.
And no, she says, the fact that the United States, China, Russia and Israel did not sign the landmine agreement and will not - barring miracles - sign against cluster bombs either, is not the point. "If the world just sits and waits for the big ones ... " She shakes her blonde head. "The big ones have made a good job of messing everything up!"
So how did this one feisty woman manage to fight the "big ones" to a point where small countries like New Zealand have had an impact on the arms trade and the way we fight international wars? Networking, especially through women, working through Non-Governmental Organisations, talking, using faxes when they were cool and new, and email later on.
A thousand of them from 60 different countries got together for the landmines. Here there are about 164 belonging to different NGOs in 38 countries.
And this time she has the power of the Nobel Women behind her. "There's nothing magic, it's just damned hard work," she says. "It takes planning, strategy and following up every day." Nor, she says, was it because of her: "They didn't get behind me, it was behind the belief we could get rid of the landmines. They recognised if we worked together we could do something about it."
It was tough, exhausting, work and even the indestructible Williams didn't know how to care for herself. "I got burned out. And I got to know that if you don't take a break ... " It ended up taking her a week to write a letter.
There were disappointments: The UN, she says, "should have its own standing force - shouldn't have to beg powerful states that keep it emasculated over 'principles'. It's disgusting."
Bill Clinton was a "petulant, spoiled brat" who "didn't sign [the landmine treaty] because the military yelled at him. He was ready to sign but he didn't like that." She certainly does not want him in the White House again, even as second-in-command to Hillary and, like so many Americans, is backing Barack Obama.
She and Goose, who she met on anti-munitions business and married in 2001, live in Fredericksburg, home of Yankees and American Civil War battles. She works alone, at home, without an assistant. If she had her way this home office would be in Vermont where she grew up, rather than Virginia where Goose lived before he met her - and where his three children are still. The youngest, Emily, has just finished junior high "thankyou" she mouths, one has graduated and the eldest is a sophomore in college.
Now, she says, they take a vacation every year - this time around Milford Sound, the South Island glaciers and Kaikoura. "We share the same values. He's funny and smart.
And then she says something extraordinary: something which explains the depth of her endeavour, her amazing commitment and the strain written on her face: "I'm an introvert. That's why, when I go home I'm a complete limp rag."
She puts herself through it - the meeting, greeting and endless networking - because it is so vitally important: "I believe in what I do."
