At Pike River

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The drive from Greymouth to the Pike River picket line is as wild and beautiful as any tourist could hope to see. You pass through stands of native bush – towering rimu and nīkau palms – and cross bridges over surging rivers. You come then to open farmland and, on the side of the road, there is a space, a corner that a farmer has set aside and on which have been placed twenty-nine rocks, brought up from the river below. Each carries the name of a worker who died in the explosion at the Pike River Mine on 19 November 2010. Most of the rocks have a little headstone bearing messages and tributes. It’s like a tiny cemetery – except, of course, that it’s not a cemetery, because there are no bodies. The area is known as Atarau, and this is the Atarau Memorial.

Ian and I set out for the picket line on a Friday morning, 2 December 2016 because, after six long years, the families of the miners who died were no closer to retrieving the remains of their loved ones – their fathers, sons and grandsons, brothers, husbands, lovers – than they were at the beginning of the nightmare. At the time of the disaster, then prime minister, John Key, had said: ‘The first thing I’m here to give you is absolute reassurance: we’re committed to getting the boys out and nothing’s going to change that.’

But something did change.

We believed these grieving families needed our support. Ian had a history with the West Coast, stemming from the days when he was a young teacher working at the Blackball school, not far from Greymouth and Pike River.

The stories that had emerged from a royal commission of inquiry, conducted in 2012, revealed a worksite that had been set up in haste and was under-resourced from the beginning. Coal has been the dark living heart of the West Coast for more than a century, its production essential to the livelihoods of thousands of people above and below ground. It’s dirty work, hard work performed in subterranean tunnels, away from the light, with the danger of explosive methane gas ever present. There had been deaths before: the Brunner Mine in 1896, sixty-five dead; the Strongman Mine at Runanga in 1967, nineteen dead. In both explosions, all but two of the bodies had been recovered. Not one body at Pike River had been brought out. For there was a second explosion, five days after the first. The families were told that rescue was impossible and that all the men would have been consumed by fire.

As fossil fuels were replaced by natural power sources like wind and solar systems, coal production on the Coast had slowed and the region had become poorer. This new mine was to have been a saviour, a revitalising shot in the arm for Greymouth, the town at the edge of the sea, where most of the men lived. But machinery and other equipment in the mine were inadequate. Chaos, we were told, often ruled, and the workers themselves had begun to question health and safety precautions. The owners, an Australian Consortium called Pike River Mine, were desperate for a return on their investment, but little coal was being produced.

The picket line Ian and I joined had been set up because Solid Energy, the state-owned enterprise that bought the mine following the accident, was about to seal it off with 30-metre walls of solid concrete, so that it could never be entered again. In fact, nobody had gone into the mine since the day of the first explosion, which meant that nobody was quite certain what had happened, and what they would find if they went in. That was the problem. Some experts on the Solid Energy side said it was not possible to enter safely. But the people of Greymouth had been offered expert opinions that suggested it was possible to enter, if not the mine proper, the area known as the drift, where it was believed that many of the men lay. These locals, who had often spent their lives in mines, were willing to go in and find out.

If they couldn’t prevent the seal-off, the families would never know what Solid Energy, and by implication, the government, needed to hide. Because no one had ever been held accountable for the manifold failures that we now knew had occurred in that mine. In her first-rate book, Tragedy at Pike River Mine: How and why 29 men died, investigative journalist Rebecca Macfie had outlined a dreadful string of mistakes, from consent being given for a mine of unsuitable design and the lack of proper monitoring equipment, to the pressure from management to ignore safety requirements and the provision, effectively, of only a single exit. Was there more? We didn’t know. But as far as the families of the Pike River men were concerned, the mine was now a crime scene.

The Solid Energy trucks carrying workers preparing for the seal-off drove along the road around seven every morning. A locked gate barred entry to everyone else. This was where the family members stood in the picket line, hoping to stop the trucks. It was a last stand, a brave cry of defiance. It interested me, however, that some local contractors and electrical companies were standing with the families, refusing to go to the mine, even though work was hard to come by on the Coast and times were lean.

So lean that getting to Greymouth was almost a deterrent in itself. There were no flights from any cities. It was possible to get flights to Hokitika to the south, or to Westport, a couple of hours’ drive north. From there it was a case of finding ground transport to the town. All the same, Ian and I decided to go. We thought of the thousands who had gathered for memorial services in the first years after the disaster. But when we watched images of the picket line on television, there was just a handful of people, perhaps about twenty. And out there in that wide space, they looked so lonely. I remember turning to Ian and saying, ‘Shouldn’t we be there with them?’ Ian was going on eighty-five. He looked at me and said, ‘Let’s go.’

We made contact with Bernie Monk, who had lost his son, Michael, in the mine and is a leader among the families, to make sure that we would be welcome. The answer came back, ‘Please come.’

And so there we were on the eighteenth day of the protest, sitting on the road, the police line behind us. The sun was breaking through the clouds, the nearby mountain wreathed with mist, as we waited for the trucks to arrive. Across the gate the protesters had placed messages to the government, which alone could now prevent Solid Energy from continuing with its nefarious task. The messages were aimed squarely at John Key. ‘NATIONAL CARES ABOUT WORKERS’ SAFETY – YEAH RIGHT’, or ‘THE KEY TO THE MINE IS JOHN KEY’, and others, more bitter and personal. What struck me most, though, were the photographs on a board of the dead men. Some of them were the ages of our grandsons. If we had had moments of wondering why we had made this journey, the reason was here in front of us. It was impossible not to be moved to tears before the faces of the lost.

The muster when we arrived was larger than the day before. Cars blocked the roads, a steady stream of protesters arriving by the minute. People who saw each other most days of the week nonetheless embraced. I met Dean Dunbar, whose seventeen-year-old son had died on his first day in the mine; Rick ‘Rowdy’ Durbridge, father of a missing son; Sonya Rockhouse, who lost a son too (his brother was one of only two people to escape the fatal first blast). Her friend Anna Osborne, whose husband had died, was ill that day and couldn’t come; she and Sonya were forces in the movement. On the back of a truck, breakfast was being prepared: sausages sizzling on a portable barbecue, home-made chocolate muffins, strong hot coffee. Flowers and wreaths were placed in front of the men’s pictures: a handful of roses, yellow chrysanthemums with two fabric monarch butterflies hovering over them. Weka emerged from the side of the road and tried to carry off these bright trophies. I shooed some away as I talked on my cell phone to various media outlets, while the people stood gathered behind me. When I went out live on Morning Report, the broadcast was being relayed on a speaker; hearing my own voice gave me the strength to say some of the things I believed about this situation. I said that I had some messages for Mr Key. I said that governments rise on promises, but fall if they break them. When the interviewer suggested that the prime minister had only committed to trying to get the men out, I said that there was still time to try harder, and that I hoped that he would.

There were hugs all round after that. The trucks arrived, the police moved in. This had been at all times a peaceful protest led by responsible people. There was no violence on this picket line, just determination on the faces of people in despair of being heard. Eventually the trucks were allowed through, although there were raised fists as they passed. We stood there for a little longer. Some announcements were made and then over the speakers a song boomed out. It was ‘Brothers 29’, written by local journalist Paul McBride, who was there that day too. He had composed it and sung it for the first memorial service; it had become an anthem for the Pike River families.

Some of the protesters considered staying on to stop the trucks leaving, so the drivers could see what it was like to be locked on the other side. Not that they would leave them there for the weekend. That was not their style. As Dean told me, ‘They should be able to go home at the end of their day’s work. Our men couldn’t.’ Joseph, his son, just a kid, had dreamed of going into that mine.

On the drive back to Greymouth, Bernie Monk stopped at the side of the road so that we could walk quietly among the tributes on the farmer’s land. As we did so, Bernie told us about some of the men who had died. His own boy, Michael, had worked with a building contractor; he was not a regular mine employee. The fresh face and wide smile in his photo, the broad shoulders, suggested his father’s build. Bernie is a rugged Coaster, with a shock of white hair and a barrel chest. He’s the owner of the hotel at Paroa on the outskirts of Greymouth, where we had stayed the night before. It’s a family business, has been for generations: another son, Al, works there, and a daughter, Olivia, was working in the kitchen at the time (she now owns a café in Greymouth). Kath is the quiet matriarch, a Coaster to the bone from further down south, a big Catholic family. The pub, with its low-ceilinged, timber-lined bar and restaurant, stands at the edge of the grey and green rolling Tasman.

Ian and I tramped along the white stony beach in the afternoon before catching a ride back to the airport, wondering if we had made any difference. As we walked back to the hotel, I glimpsed Bernie, wearing an apron and standing behind his pub counter, an energetic man stilled for the moment. From the beginning of the nightmare at Pike River, he had been the stalwart, fronting the media over and again, speaking in his earthy growl, supporting family members even when his own and the family’s grief threatened to overwhelm them all. Earlier that year he had been made a member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for his service in this time of crisis. I remember his face that day, caught in repose – set, stoic, a look that said we will never give up.

Someone got in touch with me after we had travelled to the barricade to say, in justification for sealing the mine, ‘that the men were lying in a beautiful place’. They are not: they are entombed in a mountain in the wreckage of a mining disaster. In a country that has a tradition of respect for its dead, whether here or in war graves on the other side of the world, that attitude seems peculiar to me. This is something I return to often when I think of Pike River.

In the week that followed, support surged from many quarters. In Auckland, Alexandra Dumitrescu, a writing colleague of mine, began an online petition asking the government to stop the sealing of the mine from going ahead. It quickly gathered several hundred signatures. Damien O’Connor, the West Coast Labour MP, advised us to get the petition into Parliament the following week, before the Christmas recess. It was essentially Alexandra’s petition but she volunteered to put my name to it, given that I had made the public stand. The credit was hers.

While that was unfolding, there was a shock announcement on 5 December, three days after our trip south: John Key had resigned. Nobody seems quite sure why he did this. I believe it was coincidence. But a shiver ran through me when he was asked by a journalist if he had any regrets. He shrugged, as he was wont to do, brushing it off with his apparently affable, yet steely-eyed smile. ‘Oh, I’d like to have got Pike River done,’ he said.

I was racing against the clock, preparing the petition that now had more than five hundred signatures. Bernie suggested I contact the PR people who had been helping to put the case before the public.

It wasn’t a very satisfying meeting, as I was repeatedly asked to explain myself and my intentions. I sensed, in the uneasy atmosphere, a desire for ownership of the situation. But then, I thought, it would be easy for someone new to undo or undermine the work that had been done, to make mistakes.

Ian and I rushed through the corridors of Parliament House on the day of the deadline, urged on by MP friends from the left. The petition was presented with fifteen minutes to spare before the recess began. Afterwards, a flash mob of supporters gathered on the edge of Parliament grounds. Bernie had come up from the Coast, along with other members from the family group. Someone got me a soapbox and we took turns addressing the crowd that had gathered in the street.

Six days later it was announced that a select committee, comprising politicians from both sides of the House, would meet in February to hear and consider the petition.

The royal commission of inquiry report in 2012 had found that Pike River Coal failed in its management, and that its health and safety systems were inadequate. Mines were overseen by the Department of Labour, as it then was; the Minister for Labour in the National government, Kate Wilkinson, had immediately resigned her portfolio when the report appeared. In the wake of the inquiry, Key had offered an apology to the families. While the royal commission made it clear that the fault lay with Pike River Coal and, by implication, its executive director, a man called Peter Whittall, Key also agreed with the findings that the regulatory environment in the mine had not been effective for a long time. This should have been the responsibility of the Department of Labour, now known as WorkSafe.

In its report, under the heading, ‘The Families of the Men’, the commission had stated that the recovery of the remains from Pike River now lay within the control of Solid Energy and other parties to a July 2012 recovery deed. This had defined the new owner’s obligations in relation to body recovery and contained mechanisms that enabled the government to exercise some oversight.

But here it was, six years after the disaster, and no attempt had been made to recover the men’s remains. Solid Energy had said that the re-entry was too dangerous and that any attempt would further endanger lives. Had this been true, it would have been fair comment, but plans for a safe re-entry had been put forward. The mine was being sealed up at the behest of the government, thousands of litres of concrete poured daily.

Throughout that summer of 2017, I toiled over the statement to be made in support of the petition. Ian ran the household while I dealt with piles of information. The PR people and I came to an understanding of sorts as they fed information into the document. Most of it I wrote. It was a relief to know that technical issues would be addressed by Tony Forster, who had been Her Majesty’s principal inspector of mines in Britain for twenty-five years before being recruited by the New Zealand government to be the chief inspector of mines here. Following the Pike River explosion, he had stayed in the role for three years before returning to England. He was also a board member of the International Mines Rescue Body. He would be sitting alongside me when we headed into the select committee hearing. Tony was also the brains behind the re-entry document. On his other side would be Bernie, there as spokesperson for the families.

In the background, another scenario was playing out. Earlier, Anna Osborne and Sonya Rockhouse had taken a case against WorkSafe for accepting a payout to the families from Peter Whittall’s insurance company, in exchange for dropping negligence and criminal nuisance charges against him and Pike River Coal. The two women argued that this was unlawful and that nobody had been brought to account for failures in the mine’s management. The courts were not showing a lot of sympathy, but Anna and Sonya were preparing to battle the case all the way to the Supreme Court. They had been supported in their struggle by Helen Kelly, President of the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions, the young warrior woman who had fought many battles on behalf of workers. Helen had died two months before Ian and I entered the fray.

The night before the hearing our team met at the headquarters of the Public Service Association to rehearse our opening speeches. Earlier in the day, Key’s replacement as prime minister, Bill English, had made a concession, perhaps seeing the way things might go. Work on sealing the mine would stop. However, he said that under his watch nobody would ever enter the mine. The media was already heralding this as a victory for the Pike families, but we all knew it was a concession, not a victory in terms of what was really needed: a thorough examination of the site.

The next morning, we gathered again at a hotel room on The Terrace, up the road from Parliament. We stood around nibbling takeaway breakfasts and drank a lot of very strong coffee. At eight we made our way en masse down The Terrace, the yellow ribbons signifying our link with Pike River pinned to our lapels. The committee room was packed with family members and the press gallery was seething too. Seated down the left side of the room were four members of the National government; on the right, three members of the Labour Opposition, Damien O’Connor for the West Coast, Andrew Little, the Opposition spokesperson for mines, and Clayton Cosgrove, plus Winston Peters from his right of centre New Zealand First Party.

I spoke at length. Pike River Mine, I said, was situated in a remote rural area, difficult for most New Zealanders to access. Greymouth, the nearest settlement, was 46 kilometres away, and itself a small town, far from the main centres, on the margins of the land. Although most New Zealanders remained moved and saddened by the disaster and its aftermath, it was difficult for them to offer much practical support. As time passed, I told the committee, the families had become increasingly isolated from mainstream concerns. The petition I had presented sought to raise awareness of the difficulties they faced in getting their alternative evidence heard, in the hope that there would be more support for a proper intervention.

Tony spoke after me, with eloquence and a wealth of detail about how a re-entry could be made. Then he said something very personal. ‘My family love me a great deal,’ he said, ‘and I love them. They’re constantly terrified of the work I do. But I can tell you unequivocally that I would go into a mine when the necessary work had to be done to make it safe. It would be a measured risk.’ He finished by saying he would have no hesitation about entering Pike River Mine. Then Bernie spoke for the families.

I rounded off our submission by pointing out that Solid Energy had sold its assets to three different companies six weeks earlier and that the sealing of the mine had begun just days later, suggesting commercial expediency rather than issues of safety. When I was asked what the motivation of the Solid Energy directors was, I said that I couldn’t read minds, but I thought it might be convenient if Pike River disappeared from the books and the problem went away.

The chairman of Solid Energy, a man called Andy Coupe, who is a professional director, had the opportunity to respond. He was on record in the Westport News as saying that he was fed up with criticism from the West Coast: ‘I’m a little tired of the pick, pick, picking away.’ He thought the region should be applauding the board and ‘frankly, the senior management, for what we’ve achieved and I’m never hearing a word about that. All we’re getting is negative, negative, negative.’

Now he turned his wrath on me. I have never been so flattered by abuse. I was, he said, ‘a woman with a total lack of comprehension of the complexities of the issues’. Ah, women, I thought, that’s the problem. I was, he added, ‘derogatory and offensive’ in suggesting a cover-up. It was an interesting turn of phrase. What I had actually said was that the crime scene, if indeed it was, should not be covered up, meaning, of course, that the mine should not be sealed from view. Finally, it was done. We felt a sense of quiet jubilation as we made our way out, pursued by cameras. It had gone better than we hoped and there was definitely a sense that we had Solid Energy and their supporters on the run. The government members had looked crushed and disorganised. The Labour team had been vigorous in their support.

We carried on to the Old Bailey, a pub on Lambton Quay in the heart of downtown Wellington. Bernie bought lunch and drinks all round. Bernie and his wife Kath, Ian and me, Tony, Anna and Sonya – there’s a photo of us all with our arms around one other, Tony a head taller than the rest of us. Dean and, as I remember it, Rowdy, wearing his trademark wide-brimmed hat, turned up. There was a sense of solidarity and togetherness. We would ‘Stand by Pike’, the motto that had emerged from the families and their supporters. There were hopeful tears, laughter, stories relived. It seemed as if we would be in it as a team forever.

October 2017 rolled around. After a bruising election campaign, Winston Peters had had the opportunity, for the second time in the country’s history, to anoint a government, after the result was too close to call. He had chosen to go into a coalition with Labour and the Greens, led by Jacinda Ardern. During the campaign Labour and New Zealand First had promised to do all that was humanly possible to retrieve the miners from Pike River Mine.

Ardern’s swearing in was due to take place towards the end of the month. On Labour Day, the 23rd, Bernie invited us to hear an afternoon concert in the Michael Fowler Centre, a ‘Cantata Memoria’ composed by Sir Karl Jenkins in memory of the children who died in the 1966 Aberfan mining disaster; it was also dedicated to the Pike twenty-nine. Three hundred performers, including an eighty-voice children’s choir, took part in the concert, which was conducted by acclaimed New York conductor, Jonathan Griffith. The music soared around us, moving from darkness to light, ending with the ‘Lux Aeterna’, part of a Requiem Mass, a movement that develops with growing optimism, as the word ‘light’ is sung in various languages.

Three days later, Jacinda Ardern was sworn in as prime minister. Ian, a lifelong Labour supporter, was euphoric. We both felt so full of hope.

On the following Sunday, Ian fell. He died the next day.

Bernie was in town for his funeral. I didn’t see him for a long time after that.