Day Nine: 6 December 1979
At 11.15am, the first transport flight of bodies from Antarctica to New Zealand arrived at Hangar One in Whenuapai, near Auckland. On board were 114 bodies and 27 part-bodies.
Day Ten: 7 December 1979
Whiteout conditions prevailed on the crash site, suspending recovery efforts for the day.
This same day, two Air New Zealand representatives—New Plymouth branch manager Roger Okeby and branch travel agent Coreen Wilson—arrived on Eileen’s doorstep with flowers and heartfelt condolences. Coreen was 24 at the time, and had felt privileged to accompany Mr Okeby, because it was a very tough situation to walk into—a family struggling to come to terms with what had happened.
‘Mr Okeby did most of the talking and I was really only there for support, for your grandmother and him, I’m sure,’ she recalls. ‘As the manager, he felt particularly responsible, you know?’
In provincial New Plymouth in 1979, it wasn’t so much a matter of ‘everyone knew someone’ as it was ‘everyone knew everyone’. Coreen mentions her colleague, Maryanne, whose husband at the time was a local police officer—the very same Maryanne who, earlier that day, had been running with fingerprint specialist Graeme Blackbourn.
‘It was a Wednesday, and once Maryanne heard the update she drove her car to my place, even though it was her carless day. Maryanne remembered it as a defining moment. She felt she wanted to be with a colleague. I remember at work the next day we were all pretty subdued. Nothing like that had ever happened before. We were all like a family, really, so we worked to find out who we had made a booking for—and, yes, it turned out that Les [Purdy] had made a booking for your grandfather, and it came to light that there were two others as well. One was that policeman who won the raffle [Trevor Maskelyne].’
Following the visit to Eileen, Okeby wrote to Don and Juan Humphries, thanking them for assisting Eileen ‘during the anxious period’ that followed ‘the loss of our DC-10 aircraft in Antarctica’. He enclosed a cheque to reimburse their travel expenses back to Auckland, noting that he would have gladly offered them complimentary flights home if he had known earlier of their service to Eileen. Air New Zealand eventually flew our entire family to New Plymouth in the lead-up to Christmas and Frank’s funeral. At this point in time, the airline couldn’t have been more accommodating. We had no idea about what was to come.
Coreen remembers the airline’s advertising campaign in 1979—‘Nobody does it better’—which featured Alan Whicker. Staff wore a badge as part of their uniform, but after Erebus some no longer felt that they could. Air New Zealand stopped the ad campaign immediately.
My aunt Pauline can recall the visit from Okeby and Coreen. She shows me a card that was attached to the flowers they brought, the words faded but the sentiment still strong. She hands me a branded metal luggage tag that Coreen gave to Eileen, eerily reminiscent of the body tags used by the recovery team on Mount Erebus. Brett was given one, too.
My grandmother was always active in the community, and often said she did it because of the kindness she was shown during the years after Frank died—kindness such as that shown by Coreen and Okeby.
‘After that, I had a nice friendship with your grandmother,’ Coreen says. ‘She would often come in and I’d hear about the children. Eileen was such a sweetie. I booked many of her trips over the years, I got to know the family, and it became a friendship, not just a relationship.’
I feel grateful to Coreen and to Okeby for sitting with my grandmother, for holding her hand as she wept on the couch, for speaking my grandfather’s name out loud. For saying, ‘I am so sorry for your loss.’
This is how we honour the living.
Day Twelve: 9 December 1979
Mum returned to Wellington with my baby brother in tow. She gathered Dad and me together and decided we would all return to New Plymouth as a family. We stayed with Eileen, Brett and Pauline in the Christmas family home. My brother was one, and I was three. We had no idea how long we would be there, how long it would take for Frank to come home, how long our grief would last.
Back in Antarctica, by late afternoon that same day, all ‘delta cargo’—which is to say, bodies—had been removed from the mountain. The campsite was dismantled and the final helicopter lift of personnel and equipment was made later that night.
The mountain stood silent once again.
Day Thirteen: 10 December 1979
In memory of the disaster, and to honour those who took part in the recovery operation, a wooden cross was constructed in the workshop at Scott Base. Each of the men who had been involved in the recovery then assisted in the construction of the cross, and most attended a dedication service at Scott Base once it was completed. The cross was then erected on a rocky outcrop adjacent to the crash site at Fang Ridge, Mount Erebus.
Scott Base staff members Garth Varcoe and Ted Robinson were charged with constructing this cross, and it would become the first memorial to be erected at the crash site.
An image I have seen at Antarctica New Zealand shows two burly men measuring and sawing and sanding, with off-cuts and sawdust and curled timber shavings lying at their feet. They used the same tools that Frank did—saw, chisel, plane, sandpaper—and put their time and attention into each cut, tap and stroke.
Stuart Leighton confirmed that, once the police returned from the mountain, they also got to participate, that their time and careful attention also went into the wooden cross’s construction. They, too, could sand it and touch it and work their pain into the grain of the wood.
This is how we honour the dead.
Day Fourteen: 11 December 1979
Two days after the last of the bodies were airlifted off the mountain, the second transport flight finally made its way home to Whenuapai, Auckland. This flight carried 219 bodies or part-bodies, and brought the body-recovery phase of Operation Overdue to a close.