home village on the remote slopes of Mount Kilamanjaro (even climbing to the top himself). He made a living by operating a flour mill he built to serve local farmers and also grew bananas, avocados, pineapple, corn, and vegetables on the one hectare plot they owned. Amos said the period in his life as one of finding new challenges which met his personal philosophies In 1985 he made headlines in New Zealand again after it was rumoured he had died following a failure to reply to an invitation from David Lange to attend a reception he was also attending in Dar-es-Salaam. Amos later said his "disappearance" was just an invention of the media. His first wife Jill said it was unusual for a former cabinet minister to voluntarily live in such a remote place but also stating "...he always was an unusual politician." A parliamentary colleague Richard Mayson who travelled to Tanzania to visit him, described Amos as living the life of a 20th-century version of David Livingstone. In 1988 he returned to Auckland and immediately became disillusioned with the then state of the Labour Party and horrified by New Zealand's economic reforms, Rogernomics, which pushed for free market economy and privatisation of state assets. He protested by joining Jim Anderton's NewLabour Party (NLP) soon after it was formed and later became president of the party. He told Anderton he was "devastated by the actions of the Labour Party". He received many invitations to stand for parliament again for the NLP, but declined after consultation with his family who thought he was of better use as a "supportive and wise head for the new breed of NLP politicians." At the 1992 local-body elections he put himself forward as a candidate for the Mount Albert ward of the Auckland City Council. Standing as an Alliance candidate (the NLP was a component party of the Alliance) he narrowly missed out on being elected by a margin of just 17 votes. Death Amos was a heavy smoker most of his life. He had been admitted to hospital several times in the months before he died in Auckland on 8 June 2007 of lung failure, aged 81. He was survived by his first and second wives and children from both his marriages. Personal life He married Jill Edwina Turner in 1949, the daughter of Ross Turner, and had two sons and one daughter with