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Overview
This badge features an image of the Fri, a yacht which led a flotilla of yachts in an international protest against atmospheric nuclear tests at Moruroa in French Polynesia in 1973. The badge was sold as a fundraiser at street stalls run by Greenpeace in the 1970s-80s.
The Fri is an important part of New Zealand’s anti-nuclear history, alongside the protest voyages of David McTaggart on the yacht Vega in 1972 and 1973.
Fri was a Baltic coastal trader built in Denmark in 1912. In 1971-72, under her new owners American David Moodie and his brothers, the Fri sailed from Hawaii to New Zealand.
Not long after their arrival in Auckland, the crew were approached by Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (NZ) and Barry Mitcalfe from Peace Media, to see whether they might be interested in joining a planned flotilla of protest yachts which would sail in an act of civil disobedience into the Moruroa exclusion zone in French Polynesia to attempt to disrupt French atmospheric nuclear tests, and force a nuclear test ban.
Mitcalfe organised the logistics, selecting an international crew of activists and peacemakers for the Fri. Fri was to act as the mother ship to a fleet of smaller yachts from around the Pacific.
Fri was made ready and sailed from Whangarei in March 1973. Fri and her crew maintained a 53-day vigil within the test exclusion zone, just outside Moruroa Atoll and in sight of the test island, in the company of another yacht from New Zealand, the Spirit of Peace.
Not long after, the Labour government under Norman Kirk, sent two of its navy frigates, HMNZS Otago and Canterbury into the test zone as a symbolic protest.
On 17 July 1973 French commandos stormed the Fri and arrested the crew and ship, impounding ship and crew firstly at Moruroa and then at Hao Island.
The French Military conducted more than 200 nuclear tests at Moruroa and Fangataufa atolls over a thirty-year period, 40 of them were atmospheric tests. International protests, including the flotillas, eventually helped force the French to cease nuclear testing in the Pacific in 1996.
In 1974, the Fri embarked on a three-year voyage of the Pacific coordinated by Greenpeace New Zealand (called the Pacific Peace Odyssey), carrying a message of peace to nuclear states around the world.