Words: Anna Leask
Video: Logan Church
Design: Paul Slater
Julie-Anne Tamati. Photo / Logan Church
Julie-Anne Tamati. Photo / Logan Church
Julie-Anne Tamati vividly remembers every second and every minute of November 13 1990.
It’s something she will never forget.
That day has invaded every cell in her body, every corner of her mind, and even 30 years on it’s raw, painful.
That day most of her family — her partner, her daughters — were murdered; their lives taken quickly and coldly by the man who lived next door.
Her other stepdaughter was also shot and Tamati bundled the bleeding girl into her van and drove for her life — as the man continued to pull that trigger, his violent hail of bullets striking the back and side of the speeding vehicle.
She escaped that day physically, she survived.
But 30 years on — and every day — part of her remains in the midst of the gunfire of the Aramoana massacre. It haunts her.
Eva Dickson, left, and Chiquita Holden. Photo / Martin Hunter
Eva Dickson, left, and Chiquita Holden. Photo / Martin Hunter
“My van was shot at but Chiquita was just saying ‘get me out of here, I’m scared’ ... my instinct was to stop and go and get my kids and Garry and see what was going on… but I just drove… I hadn’t realised at that stage that Garry, Jasmine and Rewa had been killed,” she said.
“And then we had to go and identify them… I had to identify Garry, but we didn’t have Rewa or Jasmine.
“That was when the reality hit.”
It all started just after 7pm.
David Gray and his neighbour Garry Holden — Tamati’s partner — had words.
David Gray. Photo / Supplied
David Gray. Photo / Supplied
Gray disappeared back into his place and returned with a high-powered rifle. He shot Holden multiple times in the back.
Then he stormed across to Holden’s place where his daughters Jasmine, 11, and Chiquita, 9, and Tamati’s girl Rewa, 11, had run to hide.
As the girls cowered under the dining table, Gray barged in, hunted them down, and shot them at close range.
He struck Chiquita first; she managed to get up and flee out of a sliding door.
Then he shot the other girls and set the Holden house on fire.
The remains of the burnt out Holden family home next door to gunman David Gray's house, right. Photo / Tim Mackrell
The remains of the burnt out Holden family home next door to gunman David Gray's house, right. Photo / Tim Mackrell
A couple of streets over, Tamati was finishing up the dishes. The blended family had had dinner together and the girls had gone with Holden to fix the handlebars on Rewa’s bike so they could go for a twilight ride.
Tamati couldn’t believe it when Chiquita arrived, clutching her middle, gasping and petrified.
“Chiquita was the only one who managed to get out the door and run around to me,” says Tamati, her eyes filling with tears.
“David shot me,” Chiquita gasped. Tamati didn’t know what to think or do.
“She had been shot in the arm and in the stomach… I put towels around her to stop the bleeding and then rang the emergency services and popped her in the car, put my dogs in the car and drove round to Garry’s.
“It was like ‘oh, it must have been an accident’, you know?
“And that’s when it sort of was all happening — David Gray was standing there shooting at us and the house was on fire and I just had to keep driving.”
Gray kept on killing.
Cole and Percy were rescued by police under the cover of night. Cole died in hospital and the little girl survived — the only member of her family to get out of Aramoana that day.
Armed police converged on the settlement and hunted Gray overnight, moving stealthily from house to house until they found him barricaded in a simple bach just 400m from where his killing spree began.
Twenty three hours after Gray first pulled the trigger, he was also dead.
Following a firefight with police he ran out of the house screaming “Kill me! F**king kill me!” as he reached for his gun and started firing from the hip.
Police fired back and Gray was hit five times.
Minutes later, after he thrashed and screamed at the officers, he was dead and Aramoana was safe again.
Fourteen lives were lost that day; many more were changed forever.
“What sort of triggered it off was that Buddha — Rewa’s little dog — had run up this little grass verge and David Grey yelled and told them to ‘get the dog off the grass’,” says Tamati. Behind her comfy chair there’s a photo of Rewa, beaming out across the room.
“And that’s when Garry has gone over — he still had the bike handlebars in his hand — and obviously said to him ‘cut it out’.”
The first confirmation she had that her partner and the kids were dead came the next day, in the local newspaper — a death toll with names, ages, addresses. Tamati knew when they hadn’t come out of Aramoana in the hours after Gray was killed that it was likely, but she was hoping for a miracle.
“It was hard, but I knew on a spiritual level that they had gone,” she says.
Though many of the survivors — including Chiquita and Stacey — don’t like to talk about what happened at Aramoana or the aftermath, Tamati doesn’t mind. For her, talking helps and heals.
She can recall going to tangi after tangi, farewelling neighbours, friends — her partner and then her child.
Julie-Anne Tamati stands outside her home. Photo / Logan Church
Julie-Anne Tamati stands outside her home. Photo / Logan Church
Rewa’s dad was cross at Tamati because he didn’t think she was mourning enough but she had to deal with the funerals one at a time, or the grief would have killed her.
“I had to do Garry first and then I could turn to Rewa, which sounds terrible… You know, it was really hard,” she explained.
After all the goodbyes were said and done, Tamati went back to live in Aramoana in her little cottage.
“I needed to do that — just for a cleansing,” she says, pausing, reflecting.
“Some of Rewa’s friends came and we planted daffodils on Gray’s property and put some rose quartz crystals around.
“Yes, there were memories, but I didn’t want to run away — I wanted to face everything. And in Aramoana I had a garden, I had goats and chickens and I needed to keep grounded.
“I actually didn’t wear shoes for a whole year after that day, firstly because most of my things were at Garry’s and I lost everything — but mainly because it kept me grounded. For me Aramoana was a healing place and I had to work through everything.”
Tamati has spent time living in Hawaii, the US and Perth but returned to New Zealand, to another small South Island settlement.
She moved back — with the beloved huskies that she trains and races — to retire and be closer to family.
Her life has been punctuated with deep, debilitating depression, chronic fatigue and sickness.
Darkness.
And though the parts of her soul that were destroyed in Aramoana can never be repaired, Tamati is happy.
She will never forget the gnawing feeling of guilt that cloaked her for many years over not stopping Guthrie from going into Gray’s killing field, the anger she felt at Holden for leaving her, for letting the girls go with him that night, or her fury at Gray.
But she takes great comfort that the girls’ last day on earth was happy, full of smiles — and that they all knew they were loved.
A photo of Rewa Bryson, one of the children shot by David Gray, sits on the kitchen bench of Rewa's step-mother Julie-Anne Tamati. Photo / Logan Church
A photo of Rewa Bryson, one of the children shot by David Gray, sits on the kitchen bench of Rewa's step-mother Julie-Anne Tamati. Photo / Logan Church
“I was at home and did some baking with the kids after school and I got Chiquita, and Jasmine to write letters to their mum, who was living in Auckland,” Tamati smiles.
“And my daughter Rewa, who we adopted as a baby, her mum lived in Australia and I always encouraged a connection there, so Rewa wrote a letter to her as well.”
Everything seemed normal. Everyone was happy.
Tamati realised she had one photo left on the film in her camera and told the girls to gather together outside for a photo.
Rewa was wearing a T-shirt that said “be happy” and the sisters smiled broadly for the camera.
Then dinner, the decision to go for that bike ride, and Holden heading off with the girls.
“I think about it a lot… they had a fabulous day — and I always told my girls that I loved them every day; Garry was exactly the same.
“A lot of people find it really hard to talk about grief and bad things that happen. But I believe that you need to be able to talk about that day because otherwise the people who died there, the lives lost, the deaths were wasted, you know?”
There are only nine streets in Aramoana.
They call it settlement, a village — but it’s more just a smattering of simple houses — many just holiday homes — set against the rugged mouth of the Otago Harbour.
You can hear the sea from every place in Aramoana, the constant rumbling and rolling of waves crashing into the white sand beach.
Seagulls. Sea breeze. The occasional car snaking through the narrow streets or crunching over the gravel beach road.
It’s quiet, eerie if you know the history of the area.
The locals who were there that day don’t like to talk about it. It almost feels like they’d rather no one did.
Darrin Gibbs at his home. Photo / Logan Church
Darrin Gibbs at his home. Photo / Logan Church
Darrin Gibbs is a rarity in that regard. He’s pretty open about what he saw and survived.
He was home having a beer — a pretty ordinary spring night for a 26-year-old — when all hell broke loose.
For him, the memory starts with a noise — a kind of banging, or popping — which he assumed was fireworks given the time of year.
But after a few minutes, something didn’t feel right. Gibbs wandered outside and found the Holden house was ablaze.
“I saw Dave, with a gun,” he says, matter-of-factly.
“I remember he was covered in camouflage. I could see his face, yes, I was that close…. He was just staring at me, there was no expression, just staring.
“There were no words, no noise, he was just standing there.
“Dave just shot at me, he didn’t say anything.
“I can see it like it was yesterday — I can tell you every moment, every bit of it…
“He just aimed at me and I turned around and ran off… I saw the bullets hitting the stones, they were flying up as I was running out of the way.”
Gibbs called the police then grabbed his own gun. Most of the locals had a firearm, it was a country town.
“I remember… just the banging and banging and banging,” he says.
“I had my gun, I could see him — he was only from here to about that door (4m) away and I thought ‘I can shoot him now’.
“If it was today I wouldn’t have had a second thought, I’d just drop him.”
Sergeant Stewart Guthrie arrived soon after.
“I told him what was happening, what I had seen — and that was the last I saw of Stu.
Darrin Gibbs at his home. Photo / Logan Church
Darrin Gibbs at his home. Photo / Logan Church
“There were just shots.”
More police arrived and a patrol car was parked in Gibbs’ driveway, the police radio on.
“I was just sitting beside the car listening to it all happening… then I climbed a tree and I could see everything.
“I saw Dave in front of his house, he was just standing there. He didn’t run, he didn’t hide — he was just standing there in full view, standing with his rifle.
“I could see the whole place, he was just wandering around his house — he’d go out the front, then out the back, then randomly he’d just fire at stuff.
“When Stu went over to Dave’s he went out the back, it was all coming over the radio,” Gibbs explains.
“I could hear him talking to him — saying ‘come out Dave’ and ‘come on Dave, put the gun down’.
“The next thing — bang.
“The other cops were calling Stu on the radio but he didn’t answer.
“Then someone eventually got closer and said ‘he’s dead’ and then it went quiet…”
Down the road at Carey’s Bay, not far from Aramoana, Guthrie’s son Scott was doing cannonballs off the jetty with his mates.
“We travelled down there by car around 3.30pm so we were there not long before everything kicked off,” he recalls.
“I can remember that it was a very calm day with clear blue skies — later that evening we could see the smoke rising straight up from the village from the Flagstaff Lookout in Port Chalmers.
“We knew something was up but none of us could have imagined what it was to become.”
As he lay in bed that night Scott, just shy of 16, could hear people coming and going from the house.
At about 11pm his mother Sandra came to him.
“Mum told me dad had been shot but didn’t say too much more that night and I found out he had been killed the next morning,” Scott says.
“It was a real blur for the next few weeks, with people like the Prime Minister and other dignitaries visiting our home and the funeral not long after. It was a very confusing time.”
One of the people who filed through the Guthries’ home in the days that followed the massacre was then-Police Minister John Banks.
John Banks, Police Minister. Photo / Martin Hunter
John Banks, Police Minister. Photo / Martin Hunter
There are two things he remembers often about Aramoana.
The bodies. And the Guthrie family.
“We slowly walked among all the victims,’ he says, recalling the morning after Gray had been killed.
“I remember the abject fear, caught in the split second of death, etched on the face of an angelic 6-year-old boy with arms reached out and large sky-blue eyes that seemed to follow me as I walked around him.
“That is etched not just in my memory but in my heart; that can’t leave me.”
Banks left the settlement with then-Commissioner John Jamieson and headed for Port Chalmers to meet Guthrie’s widow and kids.
“I have never been so extraordinarily sad, yet so proud, as I was witnessing these strangers — numbed bravery, palpable grief and role model stoicism comes to mind,” said Banks.
“Mrs Guthrie remains, for me to this day, a true hero and the epitome of grace and dignity ... I often think of her and the family.”
Soon after, Banks made an application for Guthrie to be posthumously awarded the George Cross — the Commonwealth’s system’s second highest award for “acts of the greatest heroism”.
Detective Paul Knox at Aramoana during a press conference. Photo / Tim Mackrell
Detective Paul Knox at Aramoana during a press conference. Photo / Tim Mackrell
Scott Guthrie is tremendously proud of his dad but believes the sergeant did “what other officers would have done in his situation”.
“They are all heroes in my eyes,” he said.
“I have the greatest respect for what they — the Aramoana residents of that time, police officers, survivors and those taken from us — all did for our community that day, and what they have been through since then.”
He says anniversaries bring a flood of memories back, and his mind turns to the families of the dead.
“I tend to keep the anniversaries low-key and share a few drinks and memories of all those who lost their lives that day with a close group of friends and family.
Detective Senior Sergeant Jimmy Doyle (left) with Superintendent Arthur Jonas (officer in charge of the anti-terrorist squad) at Aramoana. Photo / Tim Mackrell
Detective Senior Sergeant Jimmy Doyle (left) with Superintendent Arthur Jonas (officer in charge of the anti-terrorist squad) at Aramoana. Photo / Tim Mackrell
“In 1991 a group of dad’s friends and colleagues from the Port Chalmers Rugby Club and the Dunedin Police Rugby team played a game in his honour.
“The game has been played (almost) every year since.”
Guthrie was a social man, a sporty man who worked hard and was proud of his policing career and his family.
“He was a fair and just person who was controlled and level-headed with a great amount of loyalty,” says Scott.
The officers who stopped Gray — ending his life and the siege — were also honoured.
Tim Ashton was one of the men who pulled the trigger, and though it was not the only time he has been involved in an armed incident during his lengthy police career, it has deeply affected him.
Tim Ashton. Photo / Alan Gibson
Tim Ashton. Photo / Alan Gibson
“When we got there we were put in the Port Chalmers rugby clubrooms until we were deployed; at 6am (on November 14) we were operational, on the road. Nobody knew where Gray was at that stage.”
Over the next 12 hours Ashton and three colleagues — members of the Anti-Terrorist Squad — moved from property to property.
“Each house had to be entered and cleared — the terminology is assaulted, which means you have to make sure every room is tactically clear,” Ashton recalls.
“It was almost exactly 12 hours after we’d been deployed when we got to the house where we found Gray.
“There was a window slightly ajar… and when we got close to that a fuselage of shots came out of it, from that window.
The officers fired warning shots to let Gray know “we’re here”.
Bullet holes in the front window of the house where David Gray was killed. Photo / Tim Mackrell
Bullet holes in the front window of the house where David Gray was killed. Photo / Tim Mackrell
“He was being called on to come out — that’s when he appeared at the back door with a rifle hidden by his side,” says Ashton.
“He slunk out then brought the AK47 lookalike up and fired at us — so we returned fire, and he was shot five times.”
As Gray lay dying, Ashton and the others approached cautiously. “For the briefest of seconds, I did point my firearm at him,” Ashton says. “And for the briefest of seconds I thought of shooting.
“But we are the police, we are trained, we have responsibility, we have morals, we have a set of rules — and should we have stooped to that, then we become him.”
Following Aramoana, protecting innocent people from high-powered weapons has been a big motivation for Ashton in his police career and personal life. He has lobbied authorities for many years to ban them.
“The aftermath for me was to go on and to want to remove those weapons from society. That’s what I have focused on.”
When Gibbs looks back at Aramoana, he mostly feels annoyed.
Annoyed that people talk about Aramoana, speculate. Annoyed that people who had no part in it think they know the inside story.
In the beginning he was shaken and the sight of dead bodies, carnage, played on his mind.
But now he doesn’t “dwell”.
A memorial to 14 people who were shot and killed. Photo / Logan Church
A memorial to 14 people who were shot and killed. Photo / Logan Church
“There’s been a lot of speculation, a lot of theories but at the end of it, no one really knows what happened that day,” he says.
“Garry is dead. Dave is dead. So the rest — it’s all hearsay.
“He snapped — he obviously snapped, he shot a lot of people. But I still feel sorry for him… I get angry because people had a lot to say about Dave, and he wasn’t there to defend himself.”
Tamati is also over anger — the white-hot fury and the desolate sadness.
“It was one hour at a time there for a while… and there were probably three or four years that I was just working on healing.
“I was quite angry with Garry for leaving me — way before I was angry at David Gray…
“There were times where I was tired of life and I had to deal with that, and yes, that’s been an ongoing process.
“Lots of other things have happened in my life and I’ve moved on — but Aramoana will always be a special place and I still sometimes go, because it changed my life, it changed so many people’s lives.”
The memorial to people killed by David Gray in Aramoana. Photo / Logan Church
The memorial to people killed by David Gray in Aramoana. Photo / Logan Church
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