MY SISTER, CLAIRE, WASN’T EVEN BORN WHEN OUR grandfather died, and yet 25 years after the Erebus Disaster she found herself standing on the steps of Archives New Zealand, sobbing, trying to pull herself together, trying not to be late, not to be noticed.
‘I was walking to Archives New Zealand for the twenty-fifth anniversary exhibition, and it felt like I was going to his funeral.’
It was 2004, and both Claire and I remember this exhibition as the first time we had ever been to ‘anything Erebus’. The archivists had worked hard to prepare an exhibition to commemorate the anniversary of the disaster, and it included footage and photographs of the crash site, airline programmes and advertisements, information from the Royal Commission of Inquiry, the names of the victims, the book of memories and letters from their family members and many other documents. (Well, the documents that hadn’t ‘disappeared’, anyway.)
Most of the Christmas family had gathered from around the country and, true to form, the day was one big drama after another. My mum became obsessed with carpooling and parking. Eileen had a panic attack and collapsed in the toilets. The commemorative book of letters that had been collated five years prior was out on display, and I read something that angered me—I can’t now remember what it was. The room was littered with the Big Blue Men of my childhood, and I was so overwhelmed I couldn’t remember afterwards who spoke (Stuart Leighton and the then Minister of Foreign Affairs Phil Goff). I remember hovering above the gathered crowd, watching from afar, focusing on my heartbeat, wondering if all this would break me in two.
Stuart remembers being spat on by a family member who blamed him for not recovering the body of their loved one. Both he and Greg Gilpin, who was also there, later told me that the exhibition had recorded incorrect place names, dates and descriptions of photographs and, because it was important to them that the information be accurate, they had pointed out the corrections to the archivists. For both of them, it was significant to be invited to an Erebus event with families present. ‘That really was the first time we’d met any of the relatives,’ says Greg.
It was also the first time that the role of the police in the recovery operation was publicly acknowledged, and the first time they heard the collective experiences of the families and could answer our questions. It was the first time my family could stand with these men and feel awe and gratitude and connection, that we could express our thanks for what they’d done.
My mum remembers Greg well. ‘Claire was standing beside me crying. We were looking at this photo and she was saying, “How can people say this is such a beautiful place?” and Greg was standing there. He never looked at her. He just looked straight ahead at the photograph of Erebus, and said, “You know, it really is a beautiful place. That’s just what it looks like on a clear day. It’s white, it’s peaceful, it’s beautiful.” He was so gracious. I thought, You lovely man.’
He then invited Mum to contact him at work, saying he had a grid he could show her so she could see where her dad’s body was found, and he’d be happy to answer any questions she had. From that point on, Greg’s name was spoken with reverence at our dinner table. He had attained hero status. Meeting him helped Mum put to rest some of the concerns and questions she had, and cemented a connection with someone who had ‘been there’—a connection no government official or airline representative could sever.
After the exhibition, one of my aunts got drunk at the Backbencher pub in Thorndon. In my wisdom, I decided to join her.
It was all so bloody overwhelming.
That was the day I realised the Erebus story was much greater than my family. Seeing those men, hearing their voices, helped me to understand that the disaster had touched more lives than just ours. Until the twenty-fifth anniversary, I had never thought about the other families or the recovery team, or how Erebus might have affected any of them.
When my family comes together for an Erebus event—and there have only been two that we can recall—we retreat into this dark place inside ourselves, adding to each other’s nervousness, feeding off each other’s grief and stress. We drink, or run away, or obsess about the parking, or roll our eyes. We are rude and tearful and angry and fragile. Some of it’s not even about Erebus.
When I ask Claire how she remembers that day, she grows quiet, then her voice begins to quaver as she speaks. ‘Thanks to what Greg said about Antarctica [being so beautiful], I don’t think of Poppa as tarnished or physically different any more.’
That beautiful, pristine landscape was, after all, the main reason our wanderlust grandfather wanted to fly there.
The twenty-fifth anniversary exhibition at Archives New Zealand ran for a little over two years, and over 2,000 people signed the visitors’ book. Until then, the role of the recovery and identification staff in the Erebus Disaster had not been recognised in official circles, but that tide was turning.
In 2006, as the exhibition was drawing to a close, Greg Gilpin approached the then Minister of Police Annette King seeking recognition for those who had been involved in Operation Overdue. He had recently seen his colleagues promptly and justifiably honoured for their work in the 2004 Boxing Day earthquake and tsunami clean-up in Thailand, and he thought it only fitting the Erebus recovery workers be acknowledged. ‘Up until that point, we had been treated like a dirty secret. No one wanted to talk about it.’
With the minister’s support, and thanks to Greg’s persistence, the New Zealand Special Service Medal (Erebus) was instituted on the twenty-seventh anniversary of the Erebus Disaster. It would recognise the service of those New Zealanders and citizens of the United States of America and other countries who had been involved with the extremely difficult, unpleasant, hazardous and extreme circumstances associated with the body recovery, crash investigation and victim identification phases of Operation Overdue. It was awarded to the mountaineers, police officers, embalmers, pilots, crash investigators yes, even Chippindale) and many others who served at that time.
The first medal presentation ceremony was conducted at Parliament Buildings in March 2007. I watched it unfold on the news later that night, feeling proud by proxy, wishing I could have gone if only to shake the hands of the people receiving this honour, pretending it was my grandfather pinning the medal to their chests.
Several other ceremonies followed, both around the country and in Washington, DC. Minister King was fervent in her support:
‘The work of personnel involved in the Mount Erebus phase of Operation Overdue far exceeded the boundaries of what could be expected in the course of normal police, search and rescue, or air accident investigation duties. The medal also recognises the traumatic demands faced by those who worked to successfully identify 214 of the 257 victims. Their complex work was exhaustive, painstaking and innovative, setting a world standard for victim identification.’
My thoughts settle on the men I have sat with and cried with and drawn a little closer to during this past year. When I spoke to each of them, I asked about this medal, so that I could understand its significance. But faced with such a grand gesture of our gratitude, such a regal acknowledgement of their duty and service, each of these fine blokes struggled to verbalise their sentiments at receiving the honour.
Some felt proud. Some felt angry. Most mention the cost.
The medal allowed Rex Hendry to start speaking about it, to feel proud of his role in our largest peacetime disaster. He states very clearly that it was important to him to be recognised for the role he played, but he didn’t want the limelight that public recognition afforded.
‘Like the Vietnam War before it, Erebus was the “dirty secret”. You didn’t talk about having served in Vietnam, just like you didn’t talk about serving on Erebus, particularly if you were a civvie [civilian], but I think the minting of the Erebus medal changed that,’ he told me. ‘The role of the mountaineers was highly important. Each of those police recovery teams and crash investigators were accompanied by a mountaineer, many of whom were volunteers, and these men had a vital role to play in the survival of every person on that crash site. Hugh, Keith and the others had been on site five days before the police arrived, setting up camp and flagging the site for bodies and crevasses. Most of us are still working through it. We find it hard to talk about.’
Rex casts his mind back to the letter requesting his presence at the ceremony.
‘I had to go to Wellington. I contacted Air New Zealand to see if they had put on a special rate in acknowledgement of what we’d done, but they hadn’t. So, in order to receive the medal—and it was thirty-odd years after the fact—I had to fly to Wellington with less than three weeks’ notice and at my own expense. My tickets were about eight hundred dollars so I told them to get stuffed. There’s no way I’m paying Air New Zealand eight hundred dollars to fly me to Wellington to receive a medal that only came about from their own inadequacies!’
Rex asked them to put the medal in the mail.
He mentioned that it would have been nice to catch up with some of the guys and have a meal together (he rattles off their names without hesitation), but he later learned there was no reception afterwards to formalise the ceremony. They simply got their medals and left. This was the only time the mountaineers’ contribution to Erebus had been formally recognised and Rex felt it was a bit token.
US Navy helicopter crew chief Joseph Madrid, who flew backwards and forwards to the crash site for the length of the operation, told me he felt the same. Initially, he was proud to be acknowledged for his role by the New Zealand Government, but he soon realised ‘everyone got one’—there was no separate recognition for those who had risked their lives on a daily basis. And, to add insult to injury, he would have had to pay for his own flight to Washington, DC, to receive it. When he contacted Air New Zealand to see if they would fly him out there, they told him ‘we don’t do that kind of thing’.
‘And I was thinking, you know, after all I did for them, and they won’t do nothing for me.’
It left a bitter aftertaste.
‘I always felt in my heart we earned the medal, but the helicopter crews, the mountaineers and the policemen should have got something more, only because they diluted it by giving it to anybody who was there. It was a horrific sight. That’s all there is to it. It’s burned in my mind and in my spirit forever, and I left a piece of me there. All those others who got the NZSSM, they didn’t have to do what we did. They didn’t have to see the things we saw, the things we will carry with us forever.’
Stuart Leighton agreed that it was too little, too late. Erebus had messed him up, and while he was certainly grateful to be acknowledged, a medal was no apology for that. Stuart proudly acknowledged Greg’s role in the institution of the medal, that it had been eating him up that there hadn’t been any recognition after such a long period of time. ‘He asked, and he bloody got it.’
One of the highlights for Stuart was meeting Pip Collins, the daughter of Captain Jim Collins. She snuck into the ceremony in order to meet him and Greg. ‘She was delightful.’
Greg also remembered her at the medal ceremony. ‘A woman approached me, and it was Pip Collins. She said she’d always wanted to meet me, and I’d certainly wanted to meet with her family, too. It was after this that I went to Auckland and told the Collins family the whole story of our role on the mountain, and our efforts in respect to the ring binder. Unbelievably, this was the first time they had heard a first-hand account. It’s like we’re part of the family now. It’s amazing really. They’ve been so appreciative of what Stu and I have tried to do. It took 27 years for those involved to be recognised. It was an incredible operation under extremely trying and traumatic circumstances, so why did it take so long? We deserved better.’
Peter Strong told me that the medal didn’t have any particular significance for him, in the sense that it came so many years later and he would have worked to a high standard regardless.
‘The Funeral Directors Association contacted me and told me that the government were going to issue this medal. I thought, That’s nice … thirty years after the fact. It sort of lost its oomph when they included people who weren’t there at the coalface. It reduced the impact. Yes, there was a group who were keeping an eye on what we’d done. It’s not infallible. Sometimes it needs tidying up. But it’s almost as if they handed it out with gay abandon. And then the arguments: “Why wasn’t I invited to Parliament to receive my medal?” I was the only one invited, but that’s what they decided—I’m philosophical about it. I don’t think I’ve ever worn it. It was a hell of a long time later. I went to Wellington at my own expense.’
Detective Mike Charles has worn his medal several times, and showed me a photo of him and his wife attending an Armed Offenders Squad commemoration event. He had the medal proudly pinned to his dinner jacket, alongside his other military and police medals.
Truck driver Dennis Duncan never received a medal. Given the nature of his role in Operation Overdue, and the rather long list of recipients, I was surprised his name wasn’t included so I contacted the New Zealand Defence Force in October 2018 to ask about it. The staff officer in charge of the Erebus medals, Jack Hayes, told me he had been waiting for the ‘truck driver’ to come forward. Dennis hadn’t been overlooked; they just didn’t know who he was. At long last, his contribution can be officially recognised and he will receive his medal and a citation in 2019, four decades after his service.
The uniting sentiment between these men was the desire for acknowledgement. To have it confirmed that their contribution mattered, that it came at great personal cost, and that the people of New Zealand were grateful. Unfortunately, after such a long period of time, and with the dark cloud that has hung over the whole disaster and its aftermath, making these men feel like the ‘dirty secret’, it appears this acknowledgement came too late.
For those who saw too much, who risked their lives, who had to deal with bodies and crevasses and storms, the medal was also a bitter pill. What’s more, they had to pay for their own flights to attend the ceremony and, more often than not, the only carrier was Air New Zealand. Then, within an hour, the ceremony was done and dusted and everyone went on their way again.
I asked Greg if he could explain why they became the ‘dirty secret’, and he harks back to 1979. They were given a monetary gift for being away from home, paid in US dollars for use at McMurdo, only to find upon their return to New Zealand that this ‘gift’ had been taken out of their Christmas pay. The police refused to pay for dry cleaning the clothing the men had worn for more than a week—clothing covered in fuel and grease and human remains. The ‘remote allowance’ paid to officers on search-and-rescue teams was only paid to cover the time they were on the mountain, and not the entire length of their deployment, because McMurdo wasn’t considered ‘remote enough’. For years, there was no recognition. Colleagues who were deployed to other disasters—who didn’t have to live right there on the scene, who were able to return to their hotel room at night and wash their bodies and change their clothes—these colleagues, who Greg respects immensely, received recognition within months of their return, but the Erebus guys received nothing.
Those sorts of things hurt.
It was a sign of the times, probably.
But to have our work and our experience validated is to feel we matter. The truth matters.
I wonder, What might make this better? How can we help these men find peace?
A still from the footage of Frank on board Flight TE901, taken by a fellow passenger. The film was recovered from the crash site by NZ Police. (Photo courtesy of Archives NZ.)
