Authors Notes

This work has been a long time in the making. It started back in early 1988 when I read a story in the Auckland Sun about John Earnshaw and the documentary he was shooting about the first aeroplane built by William Boeing.He was about open up some old tunnels at the North Head Historic Reserve and possibly retrieve the ancient craft from where it had been entombed since the mid 1920s.

I had been an aircraft nut since childhood and this caught my imagination. Furthermore tunnels were involved; mystery, imagination, airplanes, tunnel exploration, I was hooked like a fish. I contacted Earnshaw explaining that I was fascinated by his project, I was a photographer and perhaps I could assist with production stills. We met at his Birkenhead home shortly thereafter where I suggested that if he let me photograph his project to make a 'coffee table book', I would do all the production photography for his documentary for the cost of film and processing. A deal was struck.

Earnshaw informed me that the previous year (1987) he had entered a partnership with the New Zealand Government that allowed him to locate and retrieve the first Boeing and other historical artefacts from tunnels under North Head Historic Reserve. The contracts underpinning this partnership appeared clear enough - which may indicate how little in common ‘legalese’ has with plain English. The arrangements had been negotiated by the Hon. Jim McLay, a respected member of Parliament who was of the firm belief that Earnshaw, who had been researching the project since the late 1970s, should have his project protected and deserved to be generously rewarded for his work as it was of considerable value to New Zealand and its heritage.

The contracts were signed by Secretary of Defence, Denis McLean and by Denis Marshall, The Minister of Conservation. Would it therefore be reasonable to assume that the contracts would be executed honourably without malice or machinations on behalf of the Crown? I thought so and so in June 1988 I turned up at North Head ready to start a short term project that should be all over and done with within 12months with the result that John Earnshaw would have a fascinating documentary film in the can and I a portfolio of pictures for an equally fascinating book.

We all make mistakes. Six years later, having observed various officials engaging in some fairly questionable activities in respect of what one would normally consider 'fair play', I found myself entangled in High Court litigation that dragged on from 1996 until 2003. After six long years of legal posturin, the final judgement was as questionable as the activities of the people who had provoked it; the whole package had as little to do with 'Natural Justice' as did Hitler's invasion of Poland.

The coffee table book full of photographs with a bit of descriptive hyperbole on the side had to become a full on book - countless pages filled with descriptive narrative based on in depth research: far deeper than the literary padding pool I was used to. My frivolous photobook idea became the story of how a film maker's legitimate project was hijacked and handed on to a rival. And about how, when, after years of duress and damage control, the film maker finally took a legitimate claim of breach of contract to the Courts and won, he was set up and then set upon vindictively and vexatiously and, with a campaign of lies and misrepresentations, was unscrupulously driven into ill health and barely survived an attempt by the NZ Defence Force to take his home and throw him and his family onto the street.

John Earnshaw, the protagonist of my story, was a sacrificial victim of New Zealand's infamous 'tall poppy syndrome’; the ‘Great Kiwi Knocking Machine’. But he didn't go willingly to the scaffold; he went loudly proclaiming his 'rights'; 'rights' being a very ephemeral thing as it turns out. Some of those involved or who witnessed Earnshaw’s ignominious legal assassination lost their innocence. Others apparently had no innocence to begin with and lost little or nothing . But then what ‘goes around’ in my experience has an alarming tendency to ‘come around’ - as is perhaps prophetically referred to in the quotes from Dept. of Conservation memos (below) - part of a simply astonishing collection of official records that document the deliberate scuttling of John Earnshaw and “The Search for Boeing One”.

So while this is a ‘boy’s own’ story about the search for a famous flying machine and hidden tunnels and all, it is also a story about the loss of innocence, the transient quality of human nature, the pliable quality of human rights and the infamous behaviour of certain public servants who clearly forgot that they were servants of the public.

Jon Smyth

Tuesday 07 March 2007

THE HIJACK OF BOEING ONE

“Smyth explained that he's now writing a book about how the bureaucracy had dealt with Earnshaw and the North Head quest. Given his penchant for selective use of facts, a book about his dealings with the Government, the Navy, Lands and Surveys, Hauraki Gulf Maritime Park and the Department of Conservation could be a bit of a nightmare.”

Dr. Graeme Campbell, Regional Conservator, Auckland Conservancy

Department of Conservation inter-departmental Memo to Bill Mansfield Director General, cc: John Daniels Historic Resources 05 March 1992.

“At the recent meeting Mr Smyth explained that he is now writing a book about how the bureaucracy had dealt with the whole matter. Given his penchant for selective use of facts about his dealings with the Government, the Navy, Lands & Survey, Hauraki Gulf Maritime Park, and the Department of Conservation, this could prove to be a problem".

Alan Edmonds, Assistant Directory General, Dept. of Conservation

Letter to the Minister of Conservation dated 10 March 1992.

"The statements by Jon Smyth about his intentions to publish material are also disturbing but not a surprise I suppose".

John Daniels, Director Historic Resources, Dept. of Conservation,

Memo to Dr. Graeme Campbell in the aftermath of a meeting during which Campbell discovered that a plan to secretly take over John Earnshaw's documentary project and plagiarize his research was no longer a secret.

11 March 1992.