Glencourt Place
Carole Prentice
Carole Prentice exhibits paintings and drawings in an exhibition to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the bombing of the Greenpeace flagship, the Rainbow Warrior.
Glencourt Place, a cul-de-sac at the end of a steep road that winds down a nondescript
gully in Glenfield on Auckland’s North Shore.
It’s not likely that you’d know where Glencourt Place is and that’s OK, but this place is
important to me because it’s where I came from before I moved to Whangarei. It’s also where many of the ideas I like to make art about had their beginnings, including the white plastic chair I often put into my photographs and paintings. For me, the white plastic chair is all about taking a position or being in the picture too, which is what I invite
you to do as you choose a seat, make yourself comfortable and consider your place in the artworks I present.
This series is about the role the small provincial city of Whangarei played in a story of espionage and calculated murder that unfolded in the winter of 1985.
At that time, no one knew, that far away in the gilded corridors of the Elysee Palace in Paris, the French Secret Service was plotting to use Whangarei as a staging ground for an act of international terror. Posing as tourists on holiday in Northland, a boatload of French undercover agents were ordered to sail up the harbour, anchor in the town basin
and over the next ten days innocently wander the streets of Whangarei at will, pausing to shop, eat, make use of our community sports facilities, patronise various establishments, and of course, to chat up the local ladies. While enjoying their supposed vacation in the ‘winterless North’ the French agents were not only secretly researching travel and
escape routes to get them in and out of Auckland but also clandestinely securing both the necessary resources and connections to ensure that their mission to sabotage the Greenpeace flagship, the Rainbow Warrior, would proceed according to plan. Or so they thought…
Right from the beginning, the people of Whangarei were on to them. Were you among those who remember the visit of the French secret agents? Did you interact with them? What was this experience like? How would you place yourself in the picture? Ocean Pacific In the driveway of our house at Glencourt Place, over many weekends and late night hours
snatched after work, we fitted out the twin hulls for a Great Barrier Express catamaran we had purchased. She was a great yacht; one to be shared with friends and family; fast, efficient, and easy to launch in shallow water. We named her Ocean Pacific and moored her down at Little Shoal Bay in Northcote, and at high tide would sail her out under the
Auckland Harbour Bridge and on into clear water. This was not the case in early June 1983 when our vessel passed too close to the visiting nuclear-powered cruiser USS Texas, riding at anchor just outside the sea lane. As the sails of our catamaran suddenly lost wind, we found ourselves being sucked into the looming shadow of the giant American
warship. From a deck high above our heads, a speaker fastened to the railing roared and ordered us to, ‘Move away, move away’. And so we did. We sold Ocean Pacific and moved to Ocean Beach, to a home we made
out at the Heads in Whangarei.
