On December 7, 1984, more than 10,000 peopled piled into downtown Auckland for a free concert in Aotea Square. A few hours later, Queen Street had descended into chaos. What happened? Gabi Lardies asks people who were there.

With special thanks to Bryan Staff and Bruce Jarvis for use of their photography.

December 7, 1984 was a sunny, pleasant summer’s day in Auckland. The school year was over, and to celebrate, a new radio station, Triple M 89FM, had put on a free concert in Aotea Square and called it “Thank God it’s over”. About 10,000 Aucklanders gathered to see the hot bands of the day: The Mockers, Herbs and DD Smash. Things got started at 4pm. Five hours later, Queen Street was a wasteland of broken glass, rubbish, cans and splatters of blood. Police clutching batons and rioters grasping rocks had formed ranks on either side of the street, and 120 people ended up being arrested, with many more injured, including 42 police officers. Cars were turned upside down and shop windows smashed in, causing damage in excess of $1 million. Jewellery from a nearby store had been grabbed up in handfuls. 

So how did a concert in the sun turn into a riot?

4pm

“It was a really boiling hot day,” says Debbie Harwood, who has done everything there is to do in the New Zealand music industry. Three years prior to that scorching day at the end of 1984 she’d co-launched the New Zealand arm of Mushroom Records with Mike Chunn, and they’d signed DD Smash, fronted by Dave Dobbyn, who was at the “absolute peak” of his career. “He was flying,” she says, and she was excited to see him headline. Herbs played first and the whole event “had this beautiful vibe and it felt really nice”.

The first thing Mike Chunn noticed was that there was a “long, long queue to get into the Civic Tavern bottle shop”, he told Metro magazine in 2009. People were leaving the shop not with one or two beers, but whole trays of Steinlager cans.

A few police were there in riot squad gear, but this wasn’t unusual. In those days when Harwood was at music venues, “almost every night, at least 20 or 30 cops would come in with their bobby helmets and go through the crowd”. They would seek out underaged people and “drag them out”. During the Muldoon era (which came to an end the same year as the riot), the police made their presence known in the music scene, she says. “They thought we were troublemakers. I’ve always had a lot of respect for the police, so I struggled with that.”

Harwood says that in those days musicians were “absolutely reviled” in New Zealand. “We were hated.” The government “thought we were anarchists and that we were troublemakers. We weren’t supported. New Zealand music wasn’t considered any good by anybody. It was a real battle. We were considered anti-society… we were considered sort of feral.”

Perched above the awning of the information centre on the corner or Aotea Square (where Sky World sits today), a 35-year-old Bruce Jarvis was taking photos for 89FM. They’d asked him to get photos showing the big banners with their logo behind the stage – which was close to where the Aotea Centre is today. Below him, the crowd was “bumper to bumper” in the square. There were lots of young people, and in his photos Jarvis can pick out a mother with a pram. 

Late afternoon

Next up were new-wave-punk-power-pop band The Mockers. Andrew Fagan, the man behind their drawling pop vocals, says the crowd was “quite divided”. Up at the front were young, school-aged people, “teenagers and stuff”, who the band were popular with, and at the back were people who “really didn’t like us at all”. The Mockers’ music was “quite fast, and loud”. Fagan was a flamboyant, showy frontman. During their set, “big brown beer bottles” were thrown from the back and were exploding on the stage. 

Harwood was in the crowd watching people “sculling can after can after can”. There were so many empty beer cans on the ground that “every step that I took I tread on a can”. Around her, she felt the crowd had “got shitty”. People were suddenly “really drunk” and pushing, shoulder barging and throwing things. The sun was beating down, there was no food and no water. “In the 80s, what people forget is we didn’t used to drink water,” she says. “Bottled water wasn’t a thing.” 

After dodging the glass missiles, Fagan headed home – which was a boat anchored on the mud flat at Cox’s Bay in Westmere. The Mockers had been on a six-week tour and since another of his boats had washed away, he was keen to see if his home was where he’d left it (it was).

7.15pm

The DD Smash set didn’t start well. During the first song, there was a power failure that lasted 20 minutes. The crowd got antsy. The drummer, Peter Warren, chatted to the crowd from the front of the stage. “He was doing his best to say ‘come on guys, it’s not our fault’, and keep the crowd happy,” says Harwood. “He’s a really neat person.”

7.40pm

Jarvis looks at his photos to piece together details. “Looking at the town hall clock, it was 20 to eight,” he says. “I could almost see to the right of me where the problem happened.” He says there were a “couple of gang members” who had clambered onto the top of a covered walkway by the Wellesley Street post office and they were “causing a bit of disturbance”. From above they were pouring  “beer or something” down onto the crowd. 

By most other accounts it was not beer. “We got a complaint that some youths were urinating on the crowd,” said Rod Hodgins, a senior sergeant, in the 2009 Metro article. “A small squad of police went up there to bring them down. And the bottle throwing and rioting started at that point.” 

Another police team was sent in wearing riot gear. Just three years after the Springbok tour protests, the shields, helmets and batons were familiar and deeply negative symbols. Many in the crowd did not take well to their presence. “We were coming under siege,” said Hodgins. “In the end the only form of defence that we could actually revert to was attack.”

Julie Roberts, a 16-year-old school girl from Howick, was near the front of the crowd feeling “warm and receptive”, she told Metro magazine in 1985 in a first-person “as told to” piece. DD Smash was in full swing and the smell of stale beer, sweat and marijuana were dulling her senses. Suddenly, she was shoved forwards and crushed. “I twist around, straining my neck to catch a glimpse of what’s going on. Eight policemen in full riot gear, batons extended, are approaching the crowd.” 

8pm-ish

From the stage, Dave Dobbyn noticed the police lining up behind the crowd. “I wish those riot squad guys would stop wanking and put their little batons away,” he said. A few minutes later, he tried to divert attention back to the music. “Forget about that, let’s just get into the music.” The band played a few more minutes and then Triple M’s Fred Botica got on stage to make an announcement: “We’ve been asked by the police to stop the concert.” In 2009 Berrie Everard, the managing director of Triple M 89FM at the time, told Metro, “The riot was started by the police ordering the concert to be stopped.” 

In the crowd, Harwood, who had “been in the middle of brawls and everything”, could feel something “really bad was happening”. She said to her brother, Justin, “I think we need to get out of here.” They made their way down Queen Street, and stopped in for a cold drink at a little coffee shop in Queens Arcade, since they’d had no water all day. 

Julie Roberts remembered that about 2,000 “kids” burst out of the crowd and charged towards the police. She heard some of them say, “We’re gonna kill you bastards.” She described the police being “bombarded” by bottles and cans as an “angry mob” chased after them. “I try to run backwards, towards the safety of the footpath. I can’t move. Struggling, fighting,” wrote Roberts. The crowd was stuck. Half were scared, like her, and the other half were egging on the rioters, cheering, whistling and roaring. The shopfronts were packed full of frightened onlookers.

Jarvis took photographs as the crowd and the police charged at each other “half a dozen times, back and forth”. The police had their batons drawn and the paddy wagons out. About 120 people were arrested. The crowd threw cans and rocks. Then, the police withdrew. “That’s when all the kids just came down Queen Street and started tipping over cars and setting them alight,” says Jarvis. He notes that the cars didn’t quite catch fire.

9pm

As the riot spilled down Queen Street, shopfronts were smashed and looted. People grabbed handfuls of jewellery from Walker & Hall and cigarettes and gum from lunch bars. In the little coffee shop down the road, Harwood and her brother looked up at the telly on the wall. “Just at that moment, it was unfolding in front of our eyes. It was pouring down Queen Street.”

Julie Roberts was still on Queen Street, “a wasteland of rubbish, glass, cans and broken bottles”, and “everywhere people are screaming”. She watched a little kid run past, about eight years old. He was clutching his right hand, where there were only four fingers. “Blood is everywhere.” Around her, people were saying “it’s the pigs’ fault” but she wasn’t so sure.

The mayor of Auckland, Catherine Tizard, had been watching from the 18th floor of the Civic administration building. “I’ve never seen something happen like that in my life before,” she told Metro in 1985. When she headed down, “the whole square was almost ankle deep in glass”.

10.15pm

Finally, Roberts was able to get out on a bus. She saw “a mockery”. Above the street hung a huge silver tinsel star, “signifying good will and peace on earth”.

Bruce Jarvis raced to his darkroom on Lorne Street to process his film. He went off to the Herald, Sunday News and the Auckland Star. It was a “good night’s work for me”, he says, even though the Herald chose the “wrong one” to splash across the next day’s front page.

The aftermath

The morning after, Andrew Fagan tuned into National Radio and was shocked to hear about the riots he narrowly missed. “People just wouldn’t have thought, never would have thought that would happen,” he says. 

Dave Dobbyn was charged with inciting the riot for the comments he made on stage. “It was incredibly easy for the establishment to go, ‘oh, Dave Dobbyn, one those rowdy musicians, caused the problem’,” says Harwood. Her sentiment that he was a “scapegoat” is widely shared. 

When Jarvis heard that the mayor was trying to piece together what had happened, “I went and saw her with all my photos.” He tried to show Tizard how the police stirred up the crowd, and that disorder started before DD Smash ever made it on stage. “But you know, no one was going to believe me,” he says. To this day he believes “if they just let the concert carry on and dealt with a few idiots down the side, nothing would have happened”. 

By many accounts, the police were heavy-handed. While their number started small, by the end 400 were involved. In 2013 Dobbyn told Canvas that police were clubbing the crowd from behind. Another person present saw policemen hitting girls with batons and throwing them off a wall onto concrete. In a round-up of accounts collected by AudioCulture, people describe the police “bashing” people, but also “running for their lives”. A Māori warden, Hine Grindlay, received a Queen’s Service Medal for forming a human chain between police and rioters with members of a peace group. In 2009, she told the Herald it was mainly well-dressed, middle-class youth who she saw throwing bottles at police.

David Lange, who had been prime minister for four months, ordered a commission of inquiry. Its 39-page report found that the riot was without social or racial motivation and criticised poor planning between the organisers, council and police, as well as easy access to alcohol. It led to law changes that gave local bodies greater power over alcohol licensing so they could declare areas and events no-alcohol zones, and the introduction of age ID cards for buying booze.

But commentators criticised the lack of sociological inquiry; the fact there was little attempt to determine the deeper causes of the riot. Tim Shadbolt, who was then mayor of Waitematā, told Metro in 1985 that many of those arrested were from his ward. He suggested that to prevent riots, the number of jobs for young people should be increased and housing facilities should be improved, as should community and recreation facilities. “The reason I want a better deal for the socially oppressed isn’t because I’m a bleeding heart, muesli-munching, yoghurt-eating, wool-spinning liberal from Titirangi, but because I believe that if everyone in society doesn’t have access to these basic needs, then none of us are going to live happy lives.”

The following June, Dobbyn’s case went to trial. He was acquitted. Outside the courtroom, he said, “Thank God it’s over.”