A Life In Focus

Peace activist, protestor, photographer – all three can be used to describe Gil Hanly, who has spent much of her life using her camera to document the events that have shaped New Zealand. Now in her 80s, she talks about her extraordinary life and adventures.

- Judy Bailey

For more than 40 years, Gil Hanly has been documenting turning points in our nation’s history. Her photographs have captured the best and the worst in us. The unity and joy, the frustration and anger, the serene and the ugly.

She was there at the Springbok Tour protests in 1981 to shoot a nation divided; she was asked by Greenpeace to document the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior in 1985; she was there on Bastion Point, as Ngati Whatua fought to retain its precious land; and she marched with Maori from Ngaruawahia to Waitangi in the 1984 land hikoi. She shot the Queen Street riots and documented the outrage over the killing of Teresa Cormack.

It’s been said that if you had a protest and Gil wasn’t there to photograph it, then it wasn’t really a protest.

Of late, it’s her pictures of gardens she is most proud of, and it’s to her own peaceful tropical oasis in Auckland’s Mt Eden that she takes me when we first meet. She’s eager to show me her magnificent palms and the flourishing vegetable garden. Crimson poppies are a splash of colour in a border, chooks scratch about in a large run in the shade of a spectacular Brazilian silk tree. Gil’s a vigorous 85 – often, according to her grandson Michael, who is staying with her – to be found up a ladder or mowing the lawns.