‘Regular and rolling stone’

As a young boy from Amstelveen, near Amsterdam, Rien Achterberg (1949) already had the urge to sail and discover the world. After finishing culinary school he became a ship’s cook. He joined the Dutch merchant navy, instead of doing compulsory military service. But, being an aspiring hippie and a born pacifist, he did not fit in too well and dropped out after a year. Rien embraced hippie life, looking for soul mates and a spiritual existence. With a joint and 100 dollars in his pocket he decided to hitchhike to India. He encountered some misadventure in Istanbul and was forced to return to the Netherlands.

He emigrated to New Zealand and opened a small coffee shop, named ‘Middle Earth’. In 1973 Martini walked in and they became close friends. Soon after, Rien joined Martini and the rest of the crew on the “Fri”, a peace ship, which had led the protests against nuclear testing in French Polynesia. Working as a volunteer cook and activist, he sailed with the “Fri” in the Pacific, and then got involved with and sailed on various Greenpeace ships till 2005. He also worked as a campaigner for the Australian and New Zealand Greenpeace offices.

In 1983, Rien ‘discovered’ beautiful Waiheke Island, which was then known as an
alternative island close to Auckland city. He bought an old house on a small plot of land from a small inheritance. Two years later, while he visited the “Rainbow Warrior” and catching up with Martini in Auckland, the French bombs went off and he and the crew barely escaped from the sinking ship, except for Dutch-Portuguese photographer Fernando Pereira. In the following weeks after this devastating experience, several members visited his house on Waiheke. They fell in love with the island and eventually settled there as well.

Currently Rien is a man with no regular income. He now works as a waiter in a local restaurant and picks the fruits from his own organic gardens from which he makes jams and chutneys and sell these along the roadside. His only real possession is still his beautiful house, with stunning panoramic sea views on Waiheke, which he has renovated over the years. But because his personal circumstances have changed he now intends to sell and move on. He is after all still a hippie and a rolling stone!

Rien remains a dedicated activist. With Martini and some of his other old Greenpeace mates, he is trying to help the people of the Chagos Islands, to return to their homes. The population had been forced by the British government to leave in the early 1970s and was turned into a huge American military base.

Recently, Rien has also been fighting plans by the Auckland Municipality to outsource the locally garbage & recycling services to a big firm on the mainland.
The People’s Republic of Waiheke resists!