Former Rainbow Warrior cook Margaret Mills looks back on the bombing 40 years on

Margaret Mills was only three days into her job as a cook on the Rainbow Warrior when the ship was bombed.

On the 40th anniversary of the event that forever marked the history of Aotearoa New Zealand, Mills spoke to Herald NOW’s Ryan Bridge about what it was like on the ship that night.

“I was a relief cook and had only been there three days,” the 95-year-old recalled.

“First I knew of it, I heard a loud bang and I woke up. I’d been asleep for quite some time because it had been a very interesting three days. It was the tail end of a birthday party, I was very tired.

“I tried to turn the light on in my cabin and it didn’t go on. I couldn’t find my glasses, so staggered across to the door, opened it and the ship’s doctor was there and said: ‘You’re still here? We’ve been bombed.’ I laughed at him. ‘We don’t have bombs in New Zealand,’” she remembers saying.

The Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior was sunk in Waitematā Harbour on July 10, 1985. Photo / NZ Herald

As she and the doctor went up the stairs to the deck, she saw a radio operator going down to the cabins to pick her up.

“We stepped onto the deck when the second bomb went off. The captain was standing there with no clothes on. I commented on his figure, told him I didn’t know he was so hunky,” she said.

Forty years on, she says that, despite not considering herself “a very emotional person”, she thinks of the event every year.

“I think about the people I met there. It changed my whole life being thrown into the company of people who were 15 or 20 years younger than me, who all became my friends. It took me back a generation, which was quite fun.”

She speaks matter-of-factly about the French agents behind the bombings. “They were given a job to do and they had to do it.”

She recalls hearing an interview with Alain Mafart, one of the agents, in which he stated that the Rainbow Warrior bombing was the thing he regretted most in his life. She said that, despite everything, she did not blame the bombers.

“I never blamed people anywhere, including us, for what their governments did.”

The interview with Margaret Mills, conducted by Ryan Bridge on Herald NOW, can be watched in full above.

Margaret Mills’ memoir, Anecdotage, can be ordered online on Inc Productions.

Dawn Service held in Auckland to commemorate ‘Rainbow Warrior’

A Dawn commemoration was held on Auckland Harbour to mark the 40th anniversary of the Rainbow Warrior sinking this morning.

It was “a very emotional service”, Niamh O’Flynn from Greenpeace told Bridge on Herald NOW.

The service also remembered Fernando Pereira, the Greenpeace photographer who was killed by the second bomb as he was aboard the ship.

O’Flynn says the incident had a “profound impact” on Greenpeace, and Greenpeace Aotearoa especially.

“For us, it was a symbol of when you are standing up against the biggest and most powerful nations and corporations, they’ll try to shut you down,” O’Flynn added.

“We’ve really embraced the saying we have that ‘you can’t sink a rainbow’”.

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