There was Francis Marden of Barrytown, described by his wife Lauryn as a family man, an artist, a potter – ‘I am wearing a piece of jewellery he handcrafted. He was a great gardener who had an affinity with the birds, communicating with them, I think, because of his gentle nature.’ She told the Greymouth Star, ‘He hated every day of it [mining] … only did it to pay the bills. He could ride a horse, shoot a gun, he has built us two houses from the ground up. …
‘Francis was anything but a miner. Some stories have said he loved going to the pub with his mates. He never went to the pub. He was too tired when he got home to go anywhere. He’s never set foot in the pub.’
There was Terry Kitchin. His partner Tara Kennedy told the royal commission she held out hope he’d survived the first blast. ‘I was going home every day and telling my three kids that Daddy would be home in time for their birthdays,’ she said. They’d made Welcome Home cards for him.
There was Zen Drew. His father Laurie Drew sat in the royal commission with a tattoo of an enormous spider – possibly a tarantula, but it didn’t seem the right time to ask – covering the top of his skull.
There was Michael Monk. The day of his memorial service was also his birthday. ‘Michael,’ sighed Bernie Monk. ‘Well, Michael at 23 was very motivated. He had a lovely girlfriend, Gemma, and you could tell the way things were going to go with those two. He’d bought a section for $165,000 overlooking the sea for the two of them to build on. But anyway in a split second it’s all over.’
He sighed again. ‘He was very quiet as a boy. He hardly said boo. Then he spent a year overseas and travelled around Europe when he was seventeen, eighteen, and that’s when he came out of his shell. That’s right, isn’t it?’
Cath Monk said, ‘No, he came out of his shell before that, when he was made a prefect at St Bede’s.’
Bernie was thinking about something else. ‘Let’s get the men out. It’s all I think about. The way I feel about the royal commission is, let the police prosecute those who should be prosecuted, and just scrap the commission and spend the money on getting the guys out.’
He talked about meeting the prime minister at the public memorial service for the 29 men. He called him ‘Keys’. He said, ‘I said to Keys, “Don’t think you can give me a flash memorial and bring all those dingoes in to shake my hand and then walk off.”
‘We’ve saved the mine from being sealed off twice. We’ve had bullshit after bullshit.’
Cath said there had been Pike families in that night, eating dinner at the hotel: the families met every Wednesday at the Holy Trinity Church. She talked about the night of November 19. ‘We were going to have a pot-luck dinner at our house: a lady from work was leaving. I rang Michael to put the chicken on. Of course he never answered.’
She put her hand on Bernie’s hand. She said, ‘I never read any papers or saw the TV news all that time we were waiting because they might have said he wasn’t alive. You had to believe he was alive, didn’t you?’
She gripped Bernie’s hand, put her other hand to her face, bowed her head. ‘But anyway in a split second it’s all over.’
Friday night at the Paroa Hotel in the republic of agony with no end in sight. The recovery of 29 men from a toxic underground mine remains indefinitely postponed.
What happens after one minute and 36 seconds of the most unforgettable film in New Zealand history is that all hell breaks loose. It really does: it’s not a metaphor. Hell breaks loose from the Pike mine and shows itself. For one minute and 33 seconds, the underground pressure wave travels two and a half kilometres through the black mine, killing all or some of the 29 men (‘concussion … thermal injuries … acute hypoxia’) who were at their jobs on a Friday afternoon in early summer. The piece of plastic tape – that seemingly innocuous rag attached to a rib bolt on the inside wall of the cave opening – anticipates the explosion. It stirs suddenly, and swings towards the tunnel, only for a moment, and then swings back with even greater speed in the opposite direction. Hell is on its tail.
Hell arrives. A white flash fills the screen, a dazzling shaft of light that bursts again, and again, and again, dancing. It is stone dust, ripped off the sides of the tunnel. The blast lasts for 45 seconds. Throughout the crisis of the next six days, the mine will often be referred to as ‘the barrel of a gun’. The film is the gun firing, but it looks more like a volcanic eruption from a crater tipped on its side, ejecting white-hot lava.
The blast goes on and on. The violence is all the worse for being on a silent movie: you have to imagine the noise. The scaffolding shakes, the roof wobbles; dark objects spit from the tunnel; a sheet of metal tied to the inside of the cave is flung forward, and bangs against the walls – it’s a speed sign, advising vehicles the limit is 25 kilometres per hour, in which case the explosion is breaking the law.
The force, finally, is spent. There’s one last white flash: the stone dust travels through the open air, hits the stand of native bush, and the impact lights up the screen. The trees shake, and then settle. For the last six seconds of the film, the plastic tape reverts to normal – it follows air into the mine. Once more it’s a lovely afternoon, sunny and calm.
The weather was like that three weeks later when the public memorial was held at Greymouth’s picturesque Omoto Racecourse beneath the Paparoa Range. An estimated 11,000 people attended. There were courtesy buses from Blackball, Dobson, Paroa and Karoro. Some people came by boat. There were picnic rugs, sun hats, chillibins. The service ended with the national anthem. The loudest cheers were for a haka by the Blaketown Rugby Club. Families of the 29 men placed ferns on 29 tables. Personal items were added – a surfboard, a cricket bat, ski boots, a cloth with Egyptian patterns. The mourners were piped out by bagpipes. A little boy held on to balloons on a string. He let them go and the bright colours rose against the tender green of beech forest that surrounded the racecourse. He looked up and waved, and said, ‘Bye-bye, Daddy.’
Collingwood
Lenny, Denny, Buttons and Tink
Buttons was there. Gorsey was there, Brighty was there, Tink was there. In short, everyone was there. It was Friday night. The wood burner was roaring. Len, long-haired, 60, was in top form, talking rapidly about gold, milk, good bastards he had known, and how the thing about Collingwood was that it was a one-pub town.
‘Mate,’ he said, ‘we don’t stuff up in this town.’ ‘Mate,’ he said, ‘I’ve never once witnessed a single punch.’ In Tākaka, he said, there were factions, and the town had two pubs. ‘Well, three,’ he said, ‘including the one for dope smokers.’
Collingwood Tavern was about to host the annual pig-hunt prize-giving – $150 for heaviest boar and $50 for longest tusks, children’s prizes of $20 for heaviest hare and heaviest goat. The fat of the land was soon to be dragged out of the hills of Golden Bay, that amazing Eden at the top of the South Island, up and over the marble and rock of Tākaka Hill. The central fact of life in Collingwood, pop. 250, was Tākaka Hill. The rest of New Zealand lay over it.
On one side was Aorere River, radiant with trout, whitebait, gold; on the other side was the Tasman Sea. When the tide was in, it licked the shore. When the tide was out, it went way, way out, leaving a parched mudflat as far as the eye could see. One of New Zealand’s most extraordinary postcards shows Collingwood at low tide. It looks like a nuclear-testing site in Nevada. The sky is light blue. The photographer stands on a low hill; there is a dirt track in the foreground, then a cabbage tree, then the red roofs of nine low buildings on either side of the main street. Then, the mudflats, bare as a desert. In the distance, Farewell Spit. It looks like the loneliest town in the world, deserted and beautiful, the end.
It was supposed to be the end of the world that weekend. May 21 was the doomsday predicted and widely publicised by a California radio preacher, Howard Camping, who had spooked the superstitious Christians of Samoa when he erected doomsday billboards in Apia in March. News of the apocalypse travelled to Collingwood as a joke, something to laugh at on Frida
y night in the tavern, where Len and Buttons and their mates drank from a long, thin, sensuously designed glass holding three litres of beer. They called it The Barmaid. The Barmaid cost $30. Steak pies cost five dollars, and the bar also sold Panatella cigars.
‘Mate,’ Len said, ‘you should have been here when I had my sixtieth. Mate,’ he said, ‘I had a rock ’n’ roll band, a pig on a stick. Mate, I had this place honking.’ There were riotous photos on the wall.
Buttons was about Len’s age, maybe older, with suspiciously jet-black hair. It looked like a toupee. It wasn’t a toupee. His mother had jet-black hair and she was ninety. Buttons drank his beer and talked about fishing. ‘You should try smoked stingray,’ he said. ‘Some people say it tastes like bacon.’ What people? ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I do.’
Len drove a Fonterra milk tanker, a rigid truck and trailer carrying 25,000 litres. It didn’t interest him. ‘Nah’, he said, ‘I’m into classic Ducatis. Got a 1928 Ford Sports Coupé.’ Where? ‘In the shed. I’m a shed man.’ He was also a gold man. He’d found some good nuggets over the years. ‘You want to talk to this fella fossicking for gold up in Devil’s Boots,’ he said. Good guy? ‘A bit strange, but you have to be strange to fossick for gold.’
Did you have to be strange to live in Collingwood? Len said you had to pull your head in to live there, but he was too hilarious, too full of life, to observe any code of dourness, and there was nothing dour about Collingwood.
The last two drinkers at the tavern were young farmhands, one from Westport, the other from Ukraine. The one from Ukraine said he was related to Osama bin Laden. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I am, true.’ The one from Westport said, ‘Haha!’ He had his mate’s bush shirt on top of his pool cue and was threatening to poke it into the open door of the wood burner.
Jamie the barman dried the glasses. His marriage had gone bust. His wife had got caught up in Christ College of Trans-Himalayan Wisdom. He had an intelligent face and it also seemed to be on pretty intimate terms with suffering. He said he had moved to Collingwood after the Christchurch earthquake. He had been in the shopping mall at Shirley on February 22. He said it was like being in a matchbox. He picked up a matchbox and shook it. He said, ‘I write poetry.’ He hung his head, sipped his beer; the next second, he was gone.
There was only one car parked on the main street. It was a ute, covered in mud. It wasn’t parked anywhere near the kerb.
Doomsday dawned with a high tide, and big snow-white flowers twitching and trembling in the top branches of the lone pine tree on Māori Island. The flowers were actually a colony of fifteen royal spoonbills. According to local birder Chris Petyt, they arrive in Collingwood around March and winter over at Ruataniwha Inlet, returning to the Wairau River in Blenheim in September.
Len came into town at about nine for a loaf of bread. He left, and then a mud-covered ute came around the corner. ‘How’s it?’ said the Ukrainian. He took his gumboots off at the door of the dairy and walked in to buy a packet of Park Drive. The dairy was opposite the Collingwood volunteer library, open on Tuesdays and Saturdays.
At about ten, Briar Saunders, 49, drove her wheelchair into town to open the library door. Borrowers paid a fee. ‘Today,’ she said, ‘I might make thirteen dollars. Or it could be one dollar sixty.’ She had lived in Collingwood for 23 years. She arrived as a single parent and raised three kids, and had had MS for 20 years. She said, ‘My whole left side is shot.’ She said, ‘This place has adopted me. Collingwood owns me. It’s put so much money into me.’ The community organised a sheep on a spit and a raffle, and raised funds to buy her a heat pump. She said, ‘It’s humbling.’
Denny Gillooly, 73, walked in the door. He was sixth-generation Collingwood and lived in a blue stucco house on Collingwood Quay, where his wife had dozens of pots of begonias hanging up on hooks in the sunroom. Danny had an office with historic maps, photos, and documents of Collingwood and Golden Bay. His people founded Collingwood in 1853 when they came looking for lost cattle and found gold. By 1857 the population was 1,300. The boom didn’t last long, Denny said. He talked about placentas buried on Māori Island, and leaving school at fourteen, and the first hippies, who arrived in the 1970s.
He walked across the road to the banks of the river. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘that’s fossils in these rocks.’ He pointed across the river. ‘That’s the Wakamarama Range. We call it the Sleeping Lady. There’s her face, her boobs, her knees.’ It really was a sleeping lady, gigantic and supine. She apparently ate food of the gods: on the shortest day of the year, Denny said, the sun went down in her mouth.
He talked about the December floods. The rain had fallen in sheets of water. The vital statistics were ten houses flooded, two bridges washed out, 270 lambs, 105 milking cows and 55 heifers washed away, although a hundred of the cows had been found later, safe downstream, and all but 20 of the heifers were recovered alive.
‘In winter,’ Deborah Humphries said, ‘the wind blows its arse off, but in summer you can’t fault it.’ Deborah and her husband Dave lived in Nelson and had whitebaited in Collingwood for years, staying with their son Callum at the camping ground. ‘Callum’s nine or ten,’ Dave said, ‘and he’s never had a summer here, so we bought this place in September.’
Callum and a gang of mates were fishing off the wharf. They scampered along the old wooden piles, their silhouettes small and sharp in the bright sun, and they looked like a Huck Finn fantasy or characters in a classic New Zealand childhood. They were characters in a classic New Zealand childhood. They’d been outside all day and had caught four yellow-eyed mullet. Deborah gave them Freddo chocolate bars. ‘Put the wrappers in your pockets when you’re finished,’ she said, ‘and not on the front lawn.’ Callum said, ‘Yes, Mum.’
Snapper in summer, whitebait August to November; Ken King left to put out his flounder net. ‘I’m 78 tomorrow,’ his mother Pamela said. ‘He’s going to take me out for dinner.’
They lived in a house on the corner of the main street. Ken had just moved back to Collingwood after teaching English in Japan. ‘Ken and his Japanese wife will have one end of the house and I’ll make do with this end,’ Pamela said. Her end was crowded with porcelain figurines. ‘Ken calls it my build-up,’ she said. There was a wonderful painting of a deer in front of a waterfall. ‘Mother bought it off a door-to-door salesman,’ she said.
Her mother had come to New Zealand from England as a war bride. It was her second marriage. Her father had survived Dunkirk but been killed in a hit-and-run during a blackout. It happened at Christmas, Pamela said, the 21st of December. She’d hung up her stocking but got nothing that Christmas. She was seven.
Pamela’s husband Doug managed the dolomite quarry on Mount Burnett. He had been fire chief during the Great Fire of Collingwood – the fourth Great Fire of Collingwood, after the infernos of 1859, 1904 and 1930 almost razed the town to the ground. In 1967 infernos took out two shops, the pub and the movie theatre, which was playing Elvis Presley’s Flaming Star. The siren went off at one in the morning. Pamela said, ‘Doug turned to me and said, “Get the kids out of the house.”
‘Oh the noise of it,’ she said, ‘the roar of it. The wind was up, and it was that cold it felt like it was blowing in off the snow.’
Her house backed on to the river. A winch in the backyard was used to haul in logs during floods. Dave Humphries had explained the law of Collingwood earlier in the day when he said, ‘The rule here is when logs come in on the flood you rope ’em in, and there’s your firewood for winter.’ Pamela said Doug liked only good wood. If a big rata came down he’d be highly delighted.
‘Collingwood’s good,’ she said, ‘but you get people who come here and say, “I love Collingwood” and the first thing they do is try and change it. There was an American who wanted to change the name of the town to Aorere. Well,’ she said, ‘he didn’t last five minutes.’ There were two museums next to each other on the main street: Collingwood Museum and Aorere Centre. Neither talked to the other or shared exhibits.
> Sunday, and no one was there, nowhere on the main street, with its two museums, its pub, dairy, library, post shop, memorial hall, and café, which was for sale, asking price $155,000. Was it possible the ancient, drooling apocalyptee Howard Clamping had got it right? After the devastation of the 1967 fire, Bill Wizgell said, Collingwood is Collingwood. It will live again. But the end looked well on nigh in the deserted town on a weekend in May.
The noticeboard advised that Kent Strange had won the Collingwood playcentre raffle. Would he ever collect? Outside the playcentre, paintings were pegged on a line to dry. The school pool was empty. Collingwood looked like it did on the postcard. It was easy to find the exact spot where the photo had been taken, on the hill beneath the church. The gravel path was paved over but the cabbage tree was still there, the tide was still out – miles out, leaving a yellow, melancholic terrain. It looked vulnerable, a soft touch. But the town had recently seen off shambolic Australian mining company Greywolf, which withdrew its applications for oil exploration in Golden Bay and coal prospecting near Collingwood. Visions of some kind of economic boom collapsed, and so did fears of ecological butchery.
The spoonbills had come down from the pine tree. The day before, Department of Conservation rangers Ian Cox and Dave Homes had been out in their chopper at Farewell Spit, dealing to wilding pines – the name given to rogue stands of Pinus radiata. They used the basal spraying technique. It was dangerous, intense work, pointing a hand-held wand of poison towards a tree trunk while the helicopter hovered. A dose of Grazon herbicide and oil was sprayed on to the trunk. ‘It rolls down,’ Dave said, ‘and the bark sucks it in.’ Ian said, ‘It’s taken to every point of the plant, and so the plant grows itself to death.’
For sale: soy milk, rice milk, almond milk, hemp milk; a moveable chook run with chooks, $200; a house bus, 33 foot long, $6,000 (‘Motor good. No brakes’); services, web design, holistic pulsings (‘experience the magic of colour via Aura-soma’). But who was around to experience the magic?
Civilisation Page 23
