The ballad and betrayal of Wattie Thompson

Sunday, 23 November 2025

Wreckage from the Air New Zealand DC-10 spread across the slopes of Mt Erebus.

Mike White is a senior writer and columnist.

OPINION: Wattie Thompson lived in the hills.

He was almost mythical, but as grounded in the soil as anyone could be.

The last goldminer of Central Otago’s creeks and gullies, Wattie was a local identity and elusive enigma.

He began prospecting the hills near Tarras before volunteering for the Army during World War II.

Captured in North Africa, Wattie spent three years in an Italian prisoner of war camp.

When he returned, Wattie went back to mining, following intuition and old-timers’ tales of where the gold lay.

He built a hut in a tight canyon high in the Bendigo hills: no windows, just a door, and wood fire for warmth.

Visitors recall Wattie showing them a jar of gold nuggets, but claimed Wattie lived a spartan life, cashing little of the treasure he sifted from the streams.

At some stage, Wattie got God. Maybe he’d always had him, but in 1964 he took to the road to warn the unfaithful the end was nigh.

Carrying a sign that read: “REPENT. Remember the Saboth, witch is Saturday to keep it. REPENT”, Wattie set off.

In later years, Wattie Thompson mined Luggate Creek. His tractor ended up in the creek so often, locals dubbed it the Yellow Submarine.

He walked from Bluff to Cape Reinga. Then he came back, walked back to his hut in the hills, and carried on mining.

Spelling aside, people spoke of his wide knowledge, gleaned from listening to international radio stations that reached the shortwave radio in his hut, when local frequencies foundered in the remoteness.

But nobody knows where Wattie’s fascination with Antarctica originated. It seemed so perplexing for someone whose life was spent in dry and dun hills.

In November 1978, Wattie paid $299 for a ticket on an Air New Zealand sightseeing flight to Antarctica.

The weather gods denied him that day, their clouds obscuring views. So Wattie booked another ticket.

On November 28 1979, Wattie boarded Air New Zealand Flight TE901.

Hours later, it crashed into Mt Erebus, killing all 257 passengers and crew aboard.

Wattie Thompson’s grave at Tarras Cemetery.

Wattie’s body was brought back from the ice to blazing Central Otago in summer.

A local farmer, who’d known Wattie for years, selected a quartz boulder near Wattie’s diggings, and erected it in the Tarras cemetery, where it stands as his headstone.

This Friday is the 46th anniversary of the Erebus disaster, and Wattie’s death.

Air New Zealand will mark the event with an informal event at its head office in Auckland.

There will be no formalities, but there will be light refreshments.

Air New Zealand stresses it is committed to the families of those killed on Erebus.

But something it seemingly isn’t committed to in the slightest is transparency over its role in the disaster.

One of the cruellest elements of our country’s worst peacetime tragedy is that mourning was mixed with acrimony and accusation about who was responsible: The pilots, or a mix of catastrophic Air New Zealand failings.

Air accident investigator Ron Chippendale blamed the pilots for descending too low and being uncertain of their position.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern addressing Erebus victims’ families at Government House in 2019, on the 40th anniversary of the disaster.

But a Royal Commission led by Justice Peter Mahon concluded Air New Zealand was at fault for altering flight coordinates without informing the crew, and accused the company of colluding in a “litany of lies”.

Air New Zealand reacted indignantly, challenging Mahon’s findings in court.

And for years, people have continued to take sides, and damn those who could no longer speak for themselves.

But in 2019, then-Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern made the government’s position clear.

“The pilots were not responsible for this tragedy, and I stand here today to state that again.”

However, when Air New Zealand’s chairperson spoke, she acknowledged only the company’s failure in its “duty of care” to the passengers and crew, and for how their families were treated in the aftermath.

It has never publicly exonerated the pilots, or taken complete responsibility for what happened, allowing the slur to the names of Captain Jim Collins and First Officer Greg Cassin to continue.

The Sunday Star-Times recently asked Air New Zealand a series of simple questions about this: Whether it accepts the pilots weren’t responsible. Whether it accepts Peter Mahon’s findings. Whether it accepts it alone was responsible for causing the crash. Whether it would make a full apology for what happened.

Wattie Thompson, gold miner, and Erebus victim.

With the dismissiveness of a haughty corporate, a communications functionary wished us well, and conveyed they had “nothing to add to your story”.

When the Star-Times asked why it wouldn’t answer legitimate questions of national importance, the company, with the indifference of an engorged enterprise, simply didn’t respond.

Your banal questioning is beneath us, their non-reply signalled. We are too important, too busy, too superior to be publicly accountable - despite being 51% owned by the public.

After 46 years of attack, accusation, avoidance and arse-covering, perhaps Friday would be the time for Air New Zealand to unequivocally state its position on who caused the Erebus disaster - for the sake of everyone, including Wattie Thompson, who died on a mountain.