8.

Antemortem, Post Mortem, Reconciliation

WHEN HE WAS LOCATED ON THE CRASH SITE, MY grandfather was given a temporary identification number, or body tag. This number records where he was found, who found him and when.

It is burned into my memory like a tattoo: 15.3 / 2 / 4.

It eventually became the victim identification number, the police file number, the grid reference number, the coroner’s file number and Archives New Zealand’s file reference. Every person—every body—on that ill-fated flight got one.

All those people, all those stories, contained within five digits.

This morning I am travelling to Christchurch to find out more about the middle number in particular, the 2, which links Frank to the recovery team who located and retrieved his body. I have read about these men, I’ve seen them interviewed on television and listened to them speak at events across the country. They are the Big Blue Men of my childhood, my heroes.

I’m worried my heart won’t survive the day. I need to keep myself afloat, but I have to get the story, and I also want to say thank you—with words? A gesture? I still don’t know. So I decide to enlist some help. I ask photographer Shar Hays to accompany me to the interview. I’m hoping she’ll capture the tender moments that I will no doubt overlook as I work to shield my heart from the full story, to remember to ask more questions, to take it all in and say thank you.

But, as we descend into Christchurch Airport, the plane suddenly pulls up and turns away from the runway. I grip the armrest, and steal a glance at Shar. She is calmly looking out the window.

The captain comes over the intercom, apologising for the sudden change in altitude, explaining that there was ‘something on the runway’. A siren—whoop whoop—echoes in the background, and my heart begins to pound in my ears. This manoeuvre is called a ‘go-around’, and it’s a common enough event, but hearing that cockpit alarm as I’m flying to interview the very man who recovered my grandfather’s body reminds me of that November night, of the voice recording from the cockpit as our loved ones perished on the slopes.

Today, of all days.

I wipe my eyes, and calm my breathing. Shar is none the wiser. We eventually land without incident.

Outside the airport, by the International Antarctic Centre, a car pulls up. A face I recognise walks towards me: retired police inspector Stuart Leighton.

We shake hands, then we hug. We were once at an Erebus event together, and I have seen him interviewed on television, so he feels familiar, but this is a feeling greater than just recognition. It will take me many months to understand what passes between us in this moment.

On our way out, he drives us past Antarctica New Zealand, the government agency charged with carrying out New Zealand’s activities in Antarctica (formerly known as DSIR). He points out the departure terminal for Operation Deep Freeze. A Hercules C-130 stands guard on the tarmac, waiting to be loaded with staff and supplies for the 4,000-kilometre trip south. The plane towers over us, standing dormant in the fresh Canterbury morning, and I can’t help but wonder if this is the same aircraft that discovered the fate of our loved ones all those years ago.

As we start the drive north to Rangiora, Stuart tells me he joined the New Zealand Police as a cadet when he was seventeen, and served for 42 years in Wellington, Hamilton and Christchurch before retiring.

He confirms what I’ve read about his involvement at Erebus. In 1979, as ‘a young fella’ aged just 22, he’d volunteered for the local disaster victim identification (DVI) training squad. The squad had been formed earlier that year in case a big earthquake should ever hit Wellington. On 28 November 1979, when he got ‘the call’ that he was going to Erebus, he had only just finished up his DVI training. He telephoned his parents, spoke to his brother, and said goodbye to his girlfriend, Clare (who he would later marry). He remembers rushing about, packing, the excitement and the nerves. The unknown.

Erebus would be the biggest case he would ever work—so big it would nearly end his career—but he had no idea about any of that just yet.

When I thank him for agreeing to meet me, to answer my myriad questions, he just smiles. Then, he begins his story.

As Stuart puts it, ‘Erebus is the big elephant in the room of New Zealand. Always has been, especially for families, and for us as police officers. The issue is [that] 257 people got on a sightseeing flight to Antarctica and never came back, and while everyone knows what happened, no one can truly visualise what actually went on. And, if you don’t have that knowledge, well, it’s very hard to put it to bed.

‘And it’s not just the families, and not just the recovery and identification teams that were grieving, but the whole nation. The effects of this permeate every level of our nation. It affects our people, our memories, how we interpret our history, how we understand our culture, how we grieve, how we run the country and manage disasters … It’s massive.’

After Erebus, New Zealand led the world in DVI practices and mass trauma response. However, by contrast, we were unable to support the people at the centre of the disaster—and this is where the wound began to fester.

‘It didn’t help that the company responsible for the crash was doing its best to minimise its exposure and to cloud the issue, so people don’t fully understand what caused the crash. If you’ve ever read the Chippindale Report, you’ll see it was pretty … suspect.’

For those in the know, this is something of an uncomfortable in-joke. You had to be there. Frustration and disbelief often accompany any discussion of Ron Chippindale’s infamous ‘findings’. In his report, the chief inspector of air accidents cited pilot error as the number one cause of the crash. What’s more, despite Justice Peter Mahon’s request to the contrary, Chippindale’s report was published in June 1980, three weeks prior to the first sitting of the Royal Commission of Inquiry, swaying public opinion and forever traumatising the families involved. With Muldoon’s support, the Chippindale Report was officially tabled at Parliament, and remains on public record to this day. Given what we know now, I’m not the only one who finds Chippindale’s conclusions ludicrous.

Thanks to the work of Justice Mahon and his investigation team, supported by the ruling of the Privy Council, the pilots were fully exonerated. But it wasn’t until August 1999, almost 20 years after the crash, that Mahon’s Royal Commission findings were officially recognised and tabled as an official report into the causes of the crash. Now, both documents sit side by side, one in direct contradiction to the other, as the official record of what caused the Erebus Disaster. It appears our public records are wrong, simply because no one has had the courage to change them.

‘I’ve met with a number of families to date, because I can help you understand an aspect of it,’ Stuart explains. ‘I bet your family didn’t talk about it too much, and a lot of families didn’t because they didn’t know a lot about it. They knew the result, and of course the grief was there. But they had no real knowledge, therefore no way to process it—and processing is the most important part, because otherwise people can’t move on. It’s natural to lose, say, your parents—people die—and you grieve and you never forget them, and it’s normal and natural. When you can process it, you eventually begin to move on, but with Erebus … People can’t process it, because there are so many impediments.’

Like me, so many of those touched by Erebus can easily rattle off these impediments, but the question lingers. Why do these barriers remain, even after all these years? And how the hell are we meant to remove them?

‘People think they’re being respectful by not talking about it, but that’s ridiculous. If you can’t vocalise it, how can you process it? That’s the issue a lot of families have, but it’s coupled with a lack of knowledge. Some of the bodies that were recovered were just … indescribable. It was just sinew. It was just … you couldn’t have identified a thing from it. But other bodies were perfectly preserved. You could look at them and say, “Yes, I know who that person is.” A lot of families believed that, because their loved one was killed in a plane crash, they must have been mutilated, and were told by well-meaning people not to view the body, to keep the casket closed. But one of the first parts of accepting that someone has died is seeing them dead. That starts the letting-go process.’

Stuart is telling one of my family’s stories. We weren’t allowed to view my grandfather’s body, and the casket was kept closed. This sparked a mountain of pain, and the biggest untruth in our family story: that Frank must have been badly burned, so that’s why it took so long to get his body back, and that’s why we couldn’t view him. When I later found out this was untrue, it was too late. We’d already filled the gap with vivid images and worst-case scenarios—my mother spent years believing that perhaps her dad had suffered, and my aunt Pauline told me she remembers staring at the casket and wondering if he was really in there, whether he was really dead. All that pain, and it could have been so easily resolved with the removal of a coffin lid.

‘Many families have told me exactly the same thing,’ Stuart confesses. ‘Some well-meaning person didn’t want to upset them and thought it best they didn’t view their dead. And that began the cycle of “we better not talk about it”. Then there are all those questions. Did they die instantly? Did they all die together? Did anyone survive? I heard utter rubbish after Erebus—that there were people found huddled in blankets in the tail fin, all that type of thing. It was all rubbish. Everyone died instantly. No one felt a thing. It really helped me, knowing that no one suffered.’

He clears his throat, rewinding the spool of tape to draw on the information contained within his own black box, and lays his hand out flat like an aeroplane to illustrate his point.

‘The plane belly-flopped. It didn’t crash and crumble. It bounced. The mountain was at a fourteen-degree angle, and they know [from the black box data] that the plane was at about the same angle nose-up. The pilot wasn’t getting the communication he was expecting, so he made the decision to climb out, and the nose of the plane was at the same angle as the mountain so it just belly-flopped.

‘I can show you photos. Coming to a sudden stop was what killed everybody, because of the shockwave. If you slowed it down to milliseconds, you would see a ripple go through the plane, and this snapped their necks and their feet. People’s feet were hurt, because they were in contact with the ground. And then the plane disintegrated after that, but everyone was already dead.

‘Some people were intact, but their internal organs were a mess. It was all over before they even realised the brakes were on. It hadn’t even registered in their brains, it was so sudden. There was no plane falling out of the sky or people screaming or any of that. It was very sudden. No pain, nothing. And, if you listen to the CVR [cockpit voice recorder] on the flight deck, even the pilots didn’t realise. There was no panic, no rising sense of tension.’

Stuart is well read on the subject—his way through the nightmare is to intellectualise what he saw on that mountain in order to understand how it happened without the complication of emotion. And yet, even though he has spoken about this many times, there are moments when he finds it difficult to separate the spoken words from the images. In these moments, his vulnerability and his compassion show themselves.

In the back seat of Stuart’s car, Shar has her head down, her attention concentrated fully on her phone. Usually quite chatty, she is silent now.

I wonder how she is coping with all the information that is swarming around us.

Many months later, she will confess that she was texting her husband, asking herself what the hell she’d walked into. It was hearing how everyone died that changed the game for her.

Erebus wasn’t just a story. It had become a living, breathing thing. Real people. Real consequences.

She was overwhelmed.

‘If you think about it, what a way to go,’ Stuart says, some of the heaviness lifting from his face. ‘You’re on the trip of a lifetime, you’re walking around, looking out the window, there’s no tension, no panic. It’s absolutely beautiful. You would have had a belly full of food, champagne—even if it was “Marque Vue, make you spew”! We found bottles of the stuff on the crash site. There was no reason to be concerned. Then—’

Click. He snaps his fingers.

‘Lights out. If we put it in that context, well, I can think of worse ways to go.’

It’s hard not to picture it all in graphic detail, to marry his words with the photos and the coroner’s report—details indelibly imprinted on my mind. I don’t want to falter, so I tell him that when my family speaks about Erebus they don’t often mention my grandfather. Instead, they mention their place in it, or the actions of Air New Zealand, or what happened at this anniversary or that commemoration.

‘That’s because it was too painful,’ Stuart says. ‘They only know [Frank] went to this mythical place where you can’t go—just like Antarctica. You can’t go to the scene of the crash. You can’t go to the roadside and put a white cross or a bunch of flowers there and start processing it, because you can’t get there. And that’s the start of the dysfunction. There’s no place you can go to acknowledge it. You can’t see it or smell it or grieve there. That’s why I’ve released so many of my photos to the website [erebus.co.nz]—for people to see where it was, and what happened. There’s no central memorial place, nowhere to go at an anniversary and meet others like yourself. Anniversaries are poignant, and they’re part of the processing of death, of grief.’

I once heard that there is hardly any new snowfall in Antarctica, that the continent is too dry, a desert, so each new snowstorm is just old snow being transported to another place. I think of Frank’s last breath as it was pushed from his lungs, as it turned to frost and fell to the ground. If these stories of Antarctic snowfall are true, then Frank’s breath still survives somewhere on this windswept frozen desert, in a place I cannot visit.

‘I was once invited to a funeral in Hamilton of a sister of one of the victims,’ Stuart recalls. ‘The sisters had been very close. I’d never met the woman who died, but the family asked if I could be present in the church, because for them I was a connection to the sister who died on the mountain.’

I’m starting to understand how Stuart fulfils the sense of duty he feels towards the families of Erebus. Sitting in a church or a hall or a car, he opens himself up to the pain of others. Sharing his own story is an act of service, a way in which he endeavours to heal what has happened, both for those listening and for himself. The shadow of the mountain lifts, and I realise a deep truth about Stuart Leighton: he is holding this place for people, like a … well, like a conduit. I wonder, how does he feel about that?

‘I’m very open to it. I feel as if I have a duty to do so, because I have the knowledge and the power to do so. And I feel an obligation, an inner drive. It’s part of the role that I took on when I recovered the bodies. This is just another aspect of that role. If I can’t help people discover what happened, then who will?’

When the car pulls up in front of Stuart’s home, I step out and am cloaked in cherry blossoms and the warm Canterbury sun. I spy his campervan parked underneath the trees, christened RDO4EVA—rostered day off forever—in honour of his retirement.

Clare, Stuart’s wife, greets us with a warm smile. Another sunny lady amid the shadows of the past. She welcomes us in for a cuppa and some home baking, then she excuses herself. As soon as she leaves, the energy in the room changes. It’s as if someone has taken their finger off the pause button.

Sitting in Stuart’s home, I am starting to doubt my questions and my right to ask them. I am concerned about his ability to cope with my presence, about his willingness to dive back into that well of emotion and trauma. I wonder how Clare feels about my visit. Here I am in her living room, yet another reminder of her husband’s painful past, talking about the story that never goes away. I want answers, but I don’t want to leave a trail of further devastation behind me. It must show on my face, because Stuart cuts right to the chase.

‘Some of the things I’m going to show you might be shocking and hard to hear, but I believe in telling the truth because people can deal with the truth. What they can’t deal with is not knowing. Sometimes it’s better to turn the light on, then you know where everything is. Even if it’s not particularly pretty, at least you can process it. So, ask me anything you like, and I will undertake to give you an honest answer.’

He then offers to show me photos of the crash site to give me context, to show what the recovery team dealt with so I can understand their headspace, and to mark the evolution from where he was in 1979 to now. He says he has detailed information about where my grandfather was found, about the process of getting him off the mountain and back home.

So, Shar and I follow Stuart into his home office, and it’s there that he begins to explain the DVI process as a foreword to his time on Erebus, a way to outline people’s roles on the mountain and in the mortuary.

At the time of the Erebus Disaster, DVI processes in New Zealand were relatively new. No one really expected that they would need these skills, and certainly not on the side of a mountain in Antarctica. In fact, the DVI process was so new that the police response to Erebus was still being refined as they flew down to the ice. Even so, everyone on board was clear about what they needed to do: process the bodies in a systematic way, and preserve any evidence for future identification.

On a piece of scrap paper, Stuart draws three circles and labels them antemortem, post mortem, reconciliation. There’s an almost audible whirr as his internal black box begins to tick over, connecting his knowledge with his experience, matching data with due process and instinct, calling upon years of police work and the training of others.

‘This is the three-stage process of DVI.’

He points his pen to the first circle on the page.

‘Antemortem relates to the pre-death information. So, for the Erebus Disaster, it meant ascertaining who was physically on board the flight. The police obtained a copy of the passenger list—the flight manifesto—and set about proving that each person on that list was also on the flight.

‘Also at this time begins the gathering of evidence about each person. For example, fingerprinting items they owned. Nowadays, this would also include collecting DNA. We collect photographs, dental and medical records, we get a description from next of kin about the person’s appearance [hair, scars, tattoos, etc.] or what they were wearing [clothes, wigs, prosthetics and engraved jewellery].’

Stuart then moves his hand to the second circle, and underlines post mortem.

‘Then come the post-mortem inquiries, and that’s what I was involved with [on Erebus]. This happens after death. You send people to the scene, which in this case was Mount Erebus. We dealt with the bodies in a systematic way. We gave them a temporary identification number, or body number, when we located a body. We then photographed the body in situ, then again after it was dug out of the ice. Under other conditions, we would normally protect parts of the body for the processing and gathering of evidence—like perhaps gloving hands for fingerprints—but there was no point on Erebus, as all the bodies were totally frozen and many hands were actually damaged.

‘We fill out a special form capturing all these details, and that form accompanies the body all the way through. We fill out the top half, and the mortuary staff fill out the second half. The mortuary is also part of the post-mortem phase. They’re relying on us to have done a good job so they can do their part. They take the body, which already has its temporary identification number. The forensic pathologists work on discovering more about the person—they measure and weigh the body, record the sex and approximate age. The forensic dentist examines the teeth, and makes notes about extractions and crown work and so forth. They usually photograph details in more depth, especially watches and rings and clothing. They gather all the information they can on the body, and start to build a picture of who this person could be.’

He moves his hand to the third and final circle.

‘And then the most important part is the reconciliation phase. Someone at the mortuary in Auckland looking at your grandfather’s body would have gone through the list of passengers on their blackboard, they would have eliminated all the crew from the search because of the uniform, then all the females, then identified the number of men of about 60 years of age, then looked at any defining features, like teeth and scars and so forth, and worked hard to find a match. But you can’t identify a person on only one match. Back then, you would have had to have about three or four matches, but nowadays it’s much easier with DNA testing. You have to be able to declare that this body with this temporary identification number matches the evidence we have for this [missing] person before the coroner will sign it off and the body can be released to the family for burial.’

I think of the coroner’s file on Frank. His identity was confirmed by clothing and hair and dental records. The remnants of his altered trousers (which my grandmother was so reluctant to hand over), his dental records (obtained from Mr Wallace over the road), a few hairs (taken from his brush). And those photos.

Next, Stuart opens a slideshow on his computer. He has delivered this presentation to colleagues and families many times over the years, and it has been censored for my viewing. I wonder if the list of people who have seen it includes the board members of our national airline.

The slideshow opens with an airline brochure, the front cover a splendid landscape of rich blue sky and stark white snow. It is advertising a sightseeing round-trip flight from Auckland to Christchurch via Antarctica.

Stuart clicks the mouse, and up comes a photo taken a few weeks before he left. It shows a happy-go-lucky young guy on holiday in Australia. He clicks again. A newspaper clipping of him and a few of his colleagues boarding their flight from Wellington to Christchurch appears. He points out the men in the photo, explaining how the recovery teams were created—each of the four teams required a DVI expert, a search-and-rescue expert and a photographer. Due to logistics and bunk space, the police couldn’t bring enough staff to fill every role, so the Americans at McMurdo offered four photographers from their own programme. They were then attached to each of the four recovery teams.

There also weren’t enough mountaineers on the ice to cover all the work that had to be done. Besides the four recovery teams, there were air crash investigators and other visitors to the site who needed to be managed and kept safe. So Scott Base approached the Americans again for help. The American mountaineer assigned to Team 2, Stuart’s team, was Brian Vorderstrasse, who had already trained with the New Zealand field-safety guys. With two police officers, an American mountaineer and an American photographer, Team 2 was now ready for action.

Stuart then shows us a photo of a Hercules C-130 coming in to land on the sea ice of Williams Field. There are also shots taken from the windows as the plane flew home, with Erebus in the background.

Stuart takes us to Observation Hill, where we look down to the helicopter landing pad and Scott Base, Scott’s Hut, then behind to McMurdo Station. I can see the memorial cross that faces the South Pole, commemorating all those explorers who never made it back, with huskies and a flag at half-mast.

Then there is a shot of the wreckage. All I can see is ZK-NZP—the registration plate of the plane—surrounded by charred debris and bodies buried under snow and marked by flags.

At this point, Stuart pauses. He offers to stop if I am finding this distressing.

I am trying to harden my heart, to muffle the images and stories, but the part of me that desperately wants to know the details, to hear the truth for a change, is much stronger than the discomfort I feel.

Stuart flicks through slide after slide. The images show maps of the Southern Ocean, Antarctica, the proposed flight plan, Ross Island and the ice shelf that connects it to the mainland, Scott Base, McMurdo Station. One quiet mountain.

Then he comes to more photos of the plane. ‘The plane your poppa was on when he was killed.’

Stuart names its parts with clinical precision. ‘This is the fuselage. See that open door? It’s the only large part left. All the rest has disintegrated. There’s a row of seats. That’s one of the wheels. Here’s the stabiliser, and the tail fin—that’s where the engine fits inside it. And the koru—you’ll recognise that.’

A motley bunch appears on the screen. Three abominable snowmen standing in the glaring Antarctic sun. These are the three other guys that made up Team 2—Stuart’s colleague Constable Bruce Thompson, Brian Vorderstrasse and American photographer Tom McCabe. They were nicknamed ‘the baby team’—Stuart, Brian and Tom were all born in 1957, so were only 21 or 22 years old at the time. As for Bruce, he was only a few years older. Team 2 was overseen by the site coordinator, Sergeant Greg Gilpin, a police officer with an impeccable reputation and plenty of experience. He’s someone I have yet to meet.

These men spent two weeks together on the ice, working, sleeping and surviving under the most horrific conditions. I have seen so many photos of them over the years, each highlighting a different facet of their experience. Standing by the wreckage. Cooking their dinner. Lifting, writing or photographing. Surveying the site. Checking for crevasses. Taking a quiet moment to absorb the views over McMurdo Sound. Collapsed in exhaustion. Toasting a job well done. Many of these photos, I now learn, were taken by Stuart.

In one photo, Stuart is wearing a red balaclava that he had brought from home and a woollen jersey that his brother had managed to borrow from a mate to supplement the clothing provided by the DSIR.

Stuart points to another photo. ‘This yellow stuff is unburned aviation fuel. It was everywhere, and the smell of it … These stalagmites and stalactites were formed by burning fuel that would melt the snow, and it would run over the crevasse wall and refreeze in these long icicles.’

In yet another, Team 2 are boarding the American-supplied Huey headed for the ice. As the youngest, Stuart was the last to get on and therefore the first to get off. Being seated by the door, he also managed to photograph the crash scene as they arrived, all 600 metres of devastation. He points out the top of the crash site. The middle of the aircraft sits there in plain sight, having been forced up the mountain by the tail-fin engine and ridden over everything in its path.

‘It had completely disintegrated.’

Stuart pauses, but he can’t clear the lump in his throat. As he leaves to get a drink, the words of Rex Hendry echo in my thoughts. Incomprehensible. Astronomical. What the hell?

When he comes back, Stuart shows us a picture of the entire crash site. It is as though we are in a glass-bottomed boat floating over the mountain, looking beneath us at the destruction. It is as if someone has trailed a cigarette across white tissue paper. Crevasses litter the landscape.

Then Stuart brings up the very first photo he has of the crash site. It is taken from the bottom of the slope, before it was covered in grid flags and body stakes. Before the nightmares, before the Commission of Inquiry, before the truth came out. It shows the point of impact: a perfect imprint of the cigar-shaped body of an aircraft, two wings and two holes made from two engines. A perfect stamp of an airplane franking the mountainside, clearly visible in the pristine snow.

‘That’s where the plane hit the mountain. That’s where your poppa died.’

The first reports from the crash site came courtesy of Rex Hendry’s SAR colleagues Hugh Logan, Daryll Thomson and Keith Woodford. After assessing the scene, the men had returned to Scott Base and confirmed that, at that stage, about 50 or 60 bodies could be recovered. If this tally were shared between four teams of police officers who were split into two twelve-hour shifts, it amounted to approximately fifteen bodies per shift. Of course, we now know this estimate fell far short of the reality. Many more bodies were buried under debris and snow, scattered across the crevassed mountain slope, invisible to the naked eye.

When I ask Stuart if he had any idea at the time how badly the job would affect him, he chuckles without smiling.

‘No, but I remember thinking, Oh, god, I hope it doesn’t. I knew it had the potential to do that. And, if we had been treated the way they treat police officers now, I don’t think anything would have happened to me. What they do now is incredible. They already knew what to do [back then]; they were just negligent. And there were so many dangers. Not just the crevasses. There were oxygen bottles scattered all over the crash site. They were kept in the seat, not overhead like they are now, so every single seat became a potential bomb. We just had to carefully work around them.’

One photo shows the volatility of the weather, black flags cracking and aluminium debris and snow whipping past. Zephyrs came down all the time, Stuart says, and the debris flying about could have taken your head off. It was pure luck no one got hurt. If we want to experience it, Stuart tells us, we’d need to visit the wind tunnel at the International Antarctic Centre, but it’s only set to about –20°C so we’d need to double the intensity to gain a real appreciation of what the conditions were like.)

There was a storm when they first arrived, during which they almost ran out of food. These storms can last for two weeks, so Stuart pondered how they would survive if supplies didn’t arrive in time. Thanks to the same weather pattern, they also ended up stranded for a few days at the end of the recovery operation. They were completely isolated, and even though they had all had enough, they couldn’t get off the mountain.

‘Any time we’d hear the digga-digga-digga of the helicopter, it was salvation,’ Stuart remembers. ‘It meant supplies or a way home.’

Stuart then takes us through the crash site. ‘See the stabiliser? That’s the cockpit—not like you’d normally expect. It’s been flattened. That’s the middle part there, and one of the wheels, but as you can see there’s nothing left.’

For scale, he shows us three guys standing by a wheel. Three porcelain dolls standing against the backdrop of Erebus, insignificant in comparison to what lies scattered around them.

He points out a snow cave they built to house the toilet—‘People always ask.’ The loo was dug into the snow and lined with plastic, and came complete with perfume borrowed from the flight and a view out over Lewis Bay. But it was so cold—‘You didn’t drop your trousers and read the paper.’

Until now, the crash photos have been almost devoid of colour. Black against white, shadow and light, with an occasional hint of airline blue. But, as we move through Stuart’s memories, we start to see yellow polar tents, and flags of red and green and black.

He points out a photo. ‘Here’s Greg Gilpin and Inspector Bob Mitchell and me. I know you can’t see it, but there’s bodies scattered all the way around here [under the snow].’

Four days after the crash, surveyors Colin Fink and Peter Hall had the arduous task of gridding the crash site, supported by the mountaineers. Some bodies had been thrown clear of the wreckage upon impact and, due to the momentum of the plane, now lay above the crash site. Black flags on bamboo stalks that stood 1.8 metres in the air were used to mark out the grid. Each square of the grid was 30 metres by 30 metres, and they were in four columns of 23 rows that ran all the way up the crash site from the point of impact to the top—to the last trace of debris. To the last trace of debris. Calculations were made so the grid could be extended if necessary. The bottom square in the left-hand corner of the crash site was numbered 1.1, then moving left to right they were 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4. Row two was then 2.1, 2.2 and so on, all the way up to the top right-hand corner, 23.4.

The mountaineers worked alongside the surveyors to mark dangerous crevasses with red flags. The recovery team wasn’t allowed in those areas, unless they were accompanied by a mountaineer, although Stuart tells me that the two police officers who had mountain rescue training did descend into several crevasses to recover bodies. Any visible bodies were marked with green flags, so that if a storm passed through and covered the site in snow the bodies could still be found. Any new bodies that had been uncovered during a storm were also flagged.

Sergeant Gilpin instructed the teams to work methodically grid by grid, recording the position of each body and part-body located within each square. This information would then be surveyed by Fink and Hall after each grid had been cleared. Stuart’s job was to record the body information on his clipboard. (By the end of it all, his writing was almost illegible—he had hit a wall.) Tom McCabe photographed each body in place, then again after it had been chipped out of the ice; each body was photographed twice with two different cameras to ensure that evidence was collected accurately. Stuart is quick to point out that, even though the Americans like Tom and Brian had specific jobs, they weren’t ‘just the photographer’ or ‘just the safety mountaineer’. These men did the same heavy work as their New Zealand Police colleagues—chipping and digging, lifting and recording, recovering each victim. They all worked together as one organised unit. Looking out for each other, living in the same conditions, leaving with the same nightmares.

Then we come to photo 79: a shovel, two ice axes, a bamboo stake with a green flag, a clipboard, clear plastic body bags, twine, two green tags, a metal camping peg of sorts and a white photo plate. The tools of the trade. For the recovery staff, the rules were simple: locate, tag, photograph, bag.

The shovel is obvious, but the ice axe had a double use—not only was it used to chip bodies out from the shallow graves that peppered the mountainside, but it was also there for ‘self-arresting’ if you went into freefall on the ice. Dig it into the slope, Stuart explains, and you’d come to a stop … eventually.

The bamboo stake carried the green flag that signalled the location of a body.

The clipboard was Stuart’s—he was the recorder. It was his job to complete the DVI form for each body by assigning a body number based on the grid location, the team assigned to the grid, and the sequential number of the bodies dealt with in that location. Each number—just like the person it was attached to—was unique.

The clear plastic bags were for the bodies and part-bodies. (The same bags that would torture Rex Hendry throughout the winter to come.)

‘The bodies all froze how they landed, some with arms extended or legs askew, or bent in half, so they weren’t easy to chip out of the ice. It was a bit of archaeology, too—you didn’t know how much of a person was under there until you began chipping away, and more would be revealed. Or not.’

Since the bodies were frozen, their posture couldn’t be changed; they stayed the way they were discovered. The recovery teams quickly found that the regular-sized body bags that had been supplied were useless if a body was in a position that meant it wouldn’t fit, so a second lot of larger bags were made and flown down to the ice within a few days.

After the bodies had been located, the recorder would fill out a white photo plate with the body number on it, then place it next to the body before it was dug out. The body was then photographed, and the whole process repeated once the body was extracted from the ice.

Each body received its own temporary identification tag—a bright green paper tag, which couldn’t be ripped or destroyed. The word DEAD was written across the tag in stark black lettering. The body number was written here too, along with the initials of the person who dealt with the body. The tag was tied with twine to the body, usually on the wrist or anywhere else it would fit, and stayed with the body all the way to the mortuary.

When I ask why these tags stated the obvious—that everyone was already DEAD—Stuart takes me back to DVI basics.

‘The tags are part of the DVI procedure. They’re bright green so they’re easily identifiable, and they’re attached to bodies and stay with the body all the way back to Auckland. In a disaster, triage teams looking for survivors can quickly evaluate a scene, and then attach these tags to dead bodies to show they’ve already been assessed. They say “dead” so those who come behind can move on to the next body. It was part of our DVI procedure, so that’s what we did, even though everyone was already dead.’

The body was placed into a plastic bag along with the green body tag and the DVI form, which also accompanied the body back to the mortuary for identification. The bag was then tied with twine and set aside for removal. Eventually, the bagged bodies were also buried under a cairn of snow until they could be airlifted off the mountain, in order to protect them from the voracious skua gulls that circled the crash site.

Stuart points to the metal stake with the loop in the top that’s reminiscent of a camping peg, and another bright green metal tag that looks a bit like a luggage tag. These are survey markers, used to record the exact position each body was found. The temporary identification number of each person was written in indelible pen on the green tag, and the tag was then hooked on to the peg, with the end looped over to secure the tag in place. When Stuart’s team moved on to the next location in the grid, these pegs remained behind in the ground for the surveyors, who followed behind and marked their grid with the exact location of each body. They then reconciled their work with the police list to make sure that no one was missed.

Stuart brings out a photocopy of the grid and unfolds it before me. Marked on this map is each recovered body and part-body. The tally at the bottom corner has been struck through: 339 is crossed out, replaced with 340. A far greater figure than the initial estimate of 50 or 60 bodies. A far greater figure than the 257 people on board. In total, 340 bodies and part-bodies were recovered from the crash site by four teams of dedicated men. Of those, 214 bodies were eventually positively identified. It was the highest success rate of its kind at the time, and well before DNA testing was possible. From the tally before me, I can see that almost everyone must have made it off that mountain.

What a task.

‘From your poppa’s temporary identification number, I can tell he was found in grid 15.3 by Team 2,’ Stuart tells me. ‘And I know he was the fourth body that we worked on in that grid, because his ID number is 15.3 / 2 / 4.’

Stuart points halfway up the grid at 15.3—fifteen grid squares from the tail of the crash, and three squares to the right.

‘We stayed there in that grid until every single piece of human remains had been recovered. We never left. And, when that was done, we could cross it off and move on to the next one. Some grids, we’d find maybe two or three bodies, and others none. In your poppa’s grid, there were 21 bodies or parts found there.’

He points at the grid.

‘Frank was found there.’

He looks at me before continuing.

‘And that’s why I agreed to speak with you—because, when you gave me that body number on the phone back when we first spoke, I knew I was in the team that recovered your grandfather.’

No amount of swallowing can stop my tears from falling. My chest is being crushed with the weight of what I see: it’s not just Frank’s number illuminated on the page, but hundreds of others scattered across the stark white landscape. Hundreds of victims, thousands of mourners, and a trail of grief and pain that spans 40 years.

The grid that Greg Gilpin drew on the mountain, which was used to record the location of the bodies recovered. The tail of the plane (the bottom of the crash site) is at the top of the page. Frank was found in grid square 15.3 by Team 2. (Image courtesy of Greg Gilpin.)

A ringing grows in my ears. I no longer hear what Stuart is saying.

Thankfully, at that moment, Clare calls us for lunch.

I excuse myself and head for the bathroom.

Later on, as we head back to the airport in Stuart’s car—Clare in the front passenger seat, Shar and I in the back—Stuart reflects on his experiences watching families go through disasters such as Erebus and the Canterbury earthquakes.

‘In every disaster, there will always be criticism of the police or the government because families grieve, and one of the first stages in the grief process is anger. Disbelief comes first, then very quickly turns to anger. I’m sure your family had negative energy they were focusing on during the weeks and months that followed on from Erebus, asking why this or that didn’t happen.’

I think back to all the dinner-table discussions, as recent as this past Christmas. I know exactly what he’s talking about. My family’s anger is still directed at people like Davis, Muldoon, Chippindale. And at the local police, because they were the only people to visit us in the aftermath. From our perspective, the police were responsible for getting information to our family—information we never received. After all these years, the refrain is the same: ‘We had no news.’ Days went by, then weeks with nothing. My grandmother’s house sat silent and cold under the shadow of the mountain, a splintered family surviving day by day in a den of grief. In the absence of information, anxious minds created their own stories about what had happened. It didn’t help that the media was broadcasting opinions from investigators and airline staff as if they were a given.

There are so many layers to the trauma around Erebus, from the initial crash to the lack of information. The weeks of waiting for a body or, for some, no body at all. The courtroom battles, the lies and the shame. The incessant media coverage. The well-documented struggles of the recovery and mortuary teams.

Throughout our day with him, Stuart has alluded to his own battles, to the lack of support for him and his colleagues post-Erebus.

‘The trauma happened straight away but it took a long time to manifest because I was told to be a man, suck it up.’

Fifteen years after Erebus, Stuart was interviewed for a documentary and up until that point he’d never spoken about the disaster. After he got home from that interview, ‘the genie was well and truly out of the bottle’ and he couldn’t stuff it back in. He had a breakdown. ‘The police had to step up and help me, and to their credit they eventually did.’

Going through this experience taught Stuart how to spot it in others.

‘When my own staff exhibited signs, I knew what to do because I could empathise with them. For a number of them, I could sit them down and talk about my own story, and then they would feel okay to open up and share whatever it was that they were going through. For the last ten years [of my career], I was a much better boss because I could see it in others a mile away.’

I can’t stop thinking about the image that Stuart showed us this afternoon of himself as a 22-year-old. I ask him what he would say to his younger self, if he could go back in time.

He glances sideways at Clare, then whispers, ‘Don’t pick up the phone.’

The whole car erupts with laughter. It’s a way to cope with the story that just won’t go away—nervous giggling becomes side-splitting, tearful laughter within seconds at the absurdity and tragedy of it all.

When I catch my breath, I ask him if he would really take it all back.

He hesitates before he answers. ‘Knowing what I know now? Probably. It really was that bad.’

I watch him in the rear-view mirror.

‘Don’t get me wrong,’ he goes on. ‘If I hadn’t done it, I wouldn’t be talking to you, and I wouldn’t have had any of the other positive experiences I’ve had. There aren’t many police officers who have had a documentary made about them [Erebus: Operation Overdue], one which can be handed down to your grandchildren and your grandchildren’s grandchildren so they can actually see what you did. That’s a wonderful thing.

‘But I don’t really know how to answer your question. Life happens. You can’t go back and rewrite the book of life, can you? These are the cards that are dealt. But I was certainly too young to go down there—there’s no question about that. That’s why they don’t send young people to those things any more—that was one of the lessons they learned.’

He’s right. Life isn’t fair. It’s about accepting what you cannot change. For example, accepting that a 58-year-old man can be killed instantly on the slopes of an active volcano 4,000 kilometres from home, and that his wife will outlive him by 37 years, only to wither away in the arms of her children.

That’s what Stuart has had to come to grips with. That shit happened to him and he can’t change it. That he can get as angry as he wants, but it won’t change one damn thing. Once he had the ability to process it all, and understand it for what it was, the only choice left was to accept it and move on. Forgive. Heal.

He’s doing better than I am.

As we pull up outside Christchurch Airport, I feel a deep sadness that our time together is coming to a close. Stuart is a significant connection to my grandfather, and through his actions our lives have become forever linked.

Stuart was the youngest police officer to travel to Antarctica on the Erebus recovery team in 1979. Along with the rest of Team 2, Stuart dug Frank out of the ice, attached his temporary identification number, completed the documentation, put him in a body bag and helped carry him to the helicopter that brought everyone back to McMurdo—the last stop before returning to New Zealand soil.

Stuart was the last person to see Frank on that frozen wasteland.

His contribution to the recovery operation cost him dearly. He has worked to heal himself, and now he works to help others just like me to understand what actually happened on that mountain. He is helping us to find our own peace in all this tragedy.

How can I possibly acknowledge how much his work means to my family?

Stuart has walked the road of trials. He has, in the words of Joseph Campbell, made the hero’s journey. Like the mythical archetype, Stuart’s story is one of transformation, one that I am humbled and grateful to have shared.

Stuart helped me to tap into the source—the biting cold, the crunching snow, the stench of jet fuel, the cracking flags in the Antarctic gales, the cawing skua, the aching and bone-deep tiredness, the spooling thoughts that won’t stop barraging him. The fear that comes with being trapped in a polar tent on a crevassed gravesite, on the side of a volcano in –40°C winds in 24-hour daylight, surrounded by flying metal debris, with depleted food stores and no way out, the bodies of our loved ones scattered across the gridded mountain.

Stuart has helped me to understand and put into words the emotions that creep up on me when I’m not paying attention, the grief that lingers, the anger that just won’t go away.

He has helped me to draw closer to my grandfather and to my family’s story. We share a sense of duty and compassion that is greater than our own separate selves, that compels us both to tell our stories. Through the telling, we can help others who wish to heal. Stuart shines a light on all that is beautiful and messy and real, on all that has been hidden or forgotten or overshadowed. He has taught me about sensitivity and truth, irrespective of how painful it is. He has taught me about the responsibility that goes with telling this story.

I feel spurred on. I know that I’m on the right path, despite the emotional exhaustion I feel.

I recognise a lightworker when I see one.