The young prince, now King Charles III, was on his scheduled official walk along Auckland’s Queen Street.
“I was a student at Wellington’s Victoria University undertaking research on Bastion Point in Auckland,” Gurunathan told FMT.
“Only days earlier, Maori activist Dun Mihaka had been arrested at a protest against the royal visit in Wellington. I decided to make my own placard and join the Auckland protest.”
Gurunathan, now mayor of Kapiti Coast in Wellington for a second term, went to the location looking for the protest but there was none. Instead, the crowd lining the street was stirring with excitement, anticipating a glimpse of the prince.
“I knew the prince was coming. I decided to stage my own protest regardless. I removed the newspaper covering my placard, held it up high with my message ‘Pommy Go Home’ on one side and at the back ‘Down with Feudalism’.”
He said a white man on the other side of the street shouted out angrily: “It’s a bloody curry-muncher!” in reference to Indians.
And then things happened quickly.
“I felt a mighty tackle from behind that knocked me face down. The cops handcuffed me. I was taken to the police station, processed, charged and released all on the same day. I found out later the reason for the mighty tackle. The cop was Pommy.”
The Auckland Star report noted this defence from his pro bono lawyer Barry Littlewood at the district court: “A conviction of his client would be seen by some as the court taking sides with those holding the conventional view of relationships in the state against this little man from overseas who was airing his unconventional point of view.”
Littlewood was quoted as saying: “Gurunathan is doing a degree in political science and found that New Zealand had a colonial and feudal relationship, which was oppressive to minority groups, particularly Maoris.”
The judge convicted him of disorderly behaviour but freed him without a fine.
“He took the trouble of explaining the situation I had put myself in. He said that while I was entitled to freedom of speech, my behaviour and unconventional views were, he noted, contrary to the views of all the other people gathered there and I had therefore created disorder.”
Agreeing with the observation, Gurunathan said his activist student intellect had intended to politically target the “Pommy Go Home” message at Prince Charles.
“I did not realise that many in the crowd, being of English heritage and nationality, would have seen my message as a personal attack on them. It’s possible the police intervention had saved me from a potential beating.”
Thirty years later, when Gurunathan decided to become a New Zealand citizen, the final step was the mandatory declaration of oath/affirmation of allegiance to Queen Elizabeth II.
“I resolved that visceral dilemma by requesting permission to recite the oath in the Maori language instead of English, and I was allowed to do so.
“Not knowing the language, I learned the words by heart. During the ceremony, the language acted as a buffer to help me cross my colonial past into the blessing of citizenship of New Zealand.”
Gurunathan said that in the last six years as mayor, his responsibility included officiating citizenship ceremonies in the council chambers, with a portrait of the Queen on the wall.
“Yes, the British monarchy has been part of an oppressive colonial economy. But I have always seen the office of mayor, and its duties, as being bigger than my personal views and journey.
“I have been faithfully carrying out my duty to the office I have been elected to. But I will remember the prince who is now king that I, sort of, met back in 1981 in Queen Street.”