Erebus memorial mired in disagreement as controversial new site revealed

Sunday, 21 July 2024

Seven years after it was promised, and 45 years after New Zealand’s worst peacetime tragedy, we still haven’t been able to build a memorial to the 257 who died in the Erebus disaster. Now, officials want to put it at a war memorial in Wellington, leaving victims’ families distraught and walking away. Mike White investigates.

After the crash, after the shrieking engines and cataclysmic rending of metal had stopped when the plane hit the snow, there was quiet.

Silence too when air traffic controllers tried contacting Flight TE901, the Air New Zealand sightseeing trip to Antarctica, which had disappeared from their screens, late on November 28, 1979.

But from the time the DC-10’s wreckage was sighted on the slopes of Mt Erebus, there have been scant moments of calm in the story of the tragedy, which killed all 257 passengers and crew aboard.

Nearly 45 years on, the country still hasn’t even been able to build a national memorial to mark what happened that day.

Now, the latest suggestions of building it at Wellington’s national war memorial have flummoxed exhausted and still-grieving families, who feel an unsuitable location virtually nobody wants is being forced on them by bureaucrats.

Some have begun to walk away, despairing they’ll never see the tragedy permanently recognised.

But how on earth has it come to this?

How has New Zealand not managed to create a memorial to our worst civil disaster, after so long, and so much pain?

What happened on Erebus has always been viewed as an uncomfortable passage in our history, rife with accusation and cover-up.

It took until 2019 for the Government and Air New Zealand to apologise for what happened, admit the pilots weren’t responsible, and humble themselves in front of the victims’ families.

Two years earlier, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern had committed to building a national memorial to those who died in the Erebus crash.

But what’s happened since, has merely torn open the wounds for many who lost loved ones on Erebus.

The proposed memorial site in Auckland’s Dove-Myer Robinson Park attracted extraordinary opposition.

An occupation followed, picketers blocked entrances, and the controversy became wholly ugly.

In early 2023, slips near the site caused the Ministry for Culture and Heritage (MCH) to abandon the location, and re-start the process of finding a home for the Erebus memorial.

A year later, a list of 37 possible sites has been whittled down to two.

But now the Sunday Star-Times can reveal one of MCH’s preferred sites is not in Auckland, where the Erebus memorial has always been planned and promised.

It’s in Wellington, at Pukeahu, the National War Memorial Park.

The other option is at Auckland’s Bastion Point/Takaparawhau, near the Michael Joseph Savage memorial.

For the Erebus families, there’s a sense they’re no further ahead than when the bitter and bruising seven-year process began.

And now they feel they’re being asked to swallow an unsuitable solution, just to make them go away.

Philippa Lewis truly wonders if she’ll ever see a memorial built.

The 85-year-old lost her brother, Jon Broad, and 21-year-old niece, Philippa, who was named after her, on Erebus.

Jon’s body was never recovered.

Philippa’s ashes were returned to Antarctica and spread on Mt Erebus.

Lewis says all the Erebus families want is somewhere quiet they can visit, see their loved ones’ names together, remember them, and feel some peace.

Instead, they’ve had years of argument and disappointment.

“It’s nearly 45 years, for goodness sake.

“It was mired in controversy from the very beginning, and it hasn’t stopped, it really hasn’t.

“You mention the word Erebus, and immediately people get suspicious and say, ‘Not in my backyard, thank you.’”

Lewis, and many others spoken to by the Star-Times, feel they are being railroaded into accepting a monument at Pukeahu in central Wellington.

“I’m very much against Pukeahu. I’ve walked through it - it’s a war memorial!

“They didn’t go to war - they went on a sightseeing trip. And it’s totally inappropriate to have it there.”

At the last meeting between families and MCH, Lewis says there was “very much not” anyone supporting Pukeahu.

“In fact, there was a deathly silence that spoke volumes.”

After seven years, there was a feeling MCH just wanted something, anything, built, to make the problem go away.

“But I don’t want that,” says Lewis. “It’s not appropriate.”

The delay in building a memorial had inevitable and distressing consequences: in June, Jon Broad’s wife, and Philippa’s mother, Margaret Broad, died, never getting to see a memorial with her husband’s and daughter’s names together.

The continued controversy left Lewis wondering why New Zealanders couldn’t accept the need for a memorial.

“It’s disappointing, it’s frustrating.

“I’m not running out of steam because I just feel it’s got to happen.

“But when, and if I’ll be around, I have no idea.”

Sarah Myles, whose grandfather, Frank Christmas, was killed on Erebus, says feelings among affected families stretch from fatigue and frustration, to desperation and despondency.

MCH’s suggestion of putting the memorial at Pukeahu smacked of a quick fix by officials, the easiest option, because they controlled the land.

“It does feel like, ‘let’s get rid of it and finish it.’

“To be honest, I distrust some of what we’re being told.”

Myles, who wrote the book Towards the Mountain, about her grandfather’s Erebus journey, says Pukeahu didn’t meet the families’ pleas for somewhere peaceful, where the memorial was the focus.

It is bordered by three lanes of traffic on the road running from Wellington Airport to State Highway 1, is beloved by skateboarders, and already has numerous other memorials related to wars.

The families’ disappointment is such they are now coming up with ideas they previously wouldn’t have considered, Myles says.

These include asking Air New Zealand to purchase land and gift it to MCH; putting the memorial near Christchurch’s Antarctic Centre; or the families taking control of the process, and establishing a memorial themselves.

“I think it’s one way to move a stuck elephant out of the mud.”

MCH says its process has been transparent, but it has attempted to keep the proposed memorial sites secret.

While it has informed Erebus families via regular meetings, it has refused Star-Times’ requests for official information and internal correspondence, despite this being a national memorial, funded by taxpayers, administered by public servants, and potentially sited on public land.

It also warned family members not to speak to the media.

Despite this, many frustrated families have spoken out, though some fear repercussions.

One family member says it feels like Pukeahu is being foisted on them, even though it’s the opposite of what most of them want - somewhere peaceful, in a park-like setting, in Auckland, where most of the victims lived and the plane departed from.

“Pukeahu is just all about war. I don’t understand why you’d stick an airline disaster in with that.

“It’s a take-it-or-leave-it fix, that’s all it is.

“It’s a box-ticking exercise: ‘Job done, we’re done, we’re out of here.’

“They’ve got the money. They’re in control. They’re calling the shots. We can’t do anything about it.”

Pukeahu was so inappropriate it shouldn’t even have been on the original longlist, the person says, and they would rather there was no memorial, than what is proposed there.

It left families feeling like they were a problem, and to make them go away, they were being offered a sub-standard solution.

“How does our social fabric get to this stage where we can’t get a memorial in a park? I just can’t understand it.”

Glenis Philip-Barbara, who is leading the Erebus memorial project for the Ministry for Culture and Heritage, insists a memorial will get built for the families.

“I apologise regularly for how painful this is for many of them.”

However, she says good process has to be followed if they are going to get a site where the families feel welcome, and others welcome the memorial.

But it seems the spectre of what happened at Dove-Myer Robinson Park may have made others wary of taking the memorial, fearing protests and tent towns and picketers, as happened in Parnell.

Two other potential sites in Auckland that were on the final shortlist of four, Cornwall Park and Monte Cecilia Park, were withdrawn by those overseeing the sites.

So now, Philip-Barbara says, only Pukeahu and Bastion Point remain in contention.

But Bastion Point would need Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei to reach consensus on permitting the memorial on their land.

“And that will take as long as it takes.”

(Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei declined to comment.)

Pukeahu could likely be built much more quickly, Philip-Barbara says, given it’s on Crown land already overseen by MCH.

The idea of Pukeahu came from “outside-the-box” thinking, that an exisiting site of national remembrance in the capital city could be appropriate.

Philip-Barbara stresses there is support for Pukeahu, despite universal condemnation from families the Star-Times spoke to.

“I’ve had as many people contact me to say, ‘Please build it at Pukeahu so we can get it built, and it can be at a nationally significant place.’”

Currently, a detailed site assessment is being done by a third party for both remaining sites, concept designs are being drawn up, and MCH is carrying out “stakeholder engagement”.

However, given Pukeahu has been on the radar as a proposed site for nearly a year, and shortlisted for several months, it seems staggering the Returned and Services’ Association (RSA) has not been consulted.

Acting RSA chief executive Andrew Brown confirmed he wasn’t aware of the plan until contacted by the Star-Times.

He wouldn’t say whether the RSA supported it, but stressed Pukeahu commemorated more than 30,000 New Zealanders who died in conflict, and “is the national place for New Zealanders to remember and reflect on this country’s experiences of war, military conflict, and peacekeeping, and how these experiences shape our ideals and lives today”.

But Philip-Barbara says there is already another non-military plaque at Pukeahu, to the victims of the 1918 influenza epidemic.

However, one of the reasons the memorial was placed there was because of the epidemic’s connection with WWI.

The timeframe for finalising an Erebus memorial site “depends on everybody else’s diaries”, Philip-Barbara says.

Until discussions were held with relevant parties, a site selected, designs completed, and regulatory processes begun, she simply couldn’t tell family members when they might have a memorial to visit.

“Finding the appropriate site is far harder than most people realise.”

However, she was “passionately committed” to creating an Erebus memorial, and believed consensus was possible.

But Paul Gilberd, who lost his grandfather, Peter Tanton, on Erebus, questions whether consensus on something that’s become so convoluted and controversial, will ever be possible.

Increasingly, he senses division among Erebus families: between those desperate to get something built, even if it doesn’t satisfy their original ideas; and those adamant Pukeahu is the wrong place, and they need to keep exploring other sites, even if that means further delays.

Gilberd feels it’s too much to ask Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei to gift land at Bastion Point, given how hard it was to regain it, and the hapū’s priorities for its own members.

So a few days ago, Gilberd walked around Pukeahu with his wife and dog, and everything said it was a war memorial.

“And I couldn’t feel in my heart that there was an appropriate place there, because this wasn’t a wartime accident or tragedy. It was a civilian disaster.”

Gilberd says family members are increasingly asking whether this might be their last chance to get a memorial, and if they need to compromise, to get something before even more of their group died while waiting.

“We’re really profoundly sad, actually.

“Some have given up hope it’s going to happen. Because it’s traumatising every time this comes up, to put it bluntly.

“There are many tears when we meet as a group, saying, ‘What have we got to do? What’s our next move?’”

One option is for the families to go it alone, and take control of the process, Gilberd says, given that many sites on the original list remained viable.

To that end, he has contacted Auckland Council to see if it can expedite a suitable location.

But help there seems unlikely, with Mayor Wayne Brown dismissive of the group’s desire for a memorial.

“It’s not even on my list of top thousand things.

“I’ve got lots of other things to do at the moment - solve crime, solve roads, solve transport, solve endless things.”

Brown is scathing of MCH’s original location in Parnell’s rose gardens, the memorial’s design, and bureaucrats being unable to get a monument built in seven years.

“It just goes to show that if you pay enough tax to employ f…wits in Wellington, and allow them to form a group, they will waste it.

“And they’ve spent all that money to produce a hideous-looking concrete drain, which they were going to site in a place which immediately failed when the rain fell.

“It’s fairly hard to imagine a more efficient way to waste and lose money and annoy people, than what they came up with.”

Brown suggests a more worthy monument would be to the 15 people who died in the country’s worst road accident, a bus crash on the Brynderwyns in 1963. (A memorial was built there in 2003.)

“It actually took place in New Zealand.”

Brown says he doesn’t care if the Erebus memorial is put in Wellington.

“I always thought it should be at [Auckland] airport, to remind people it’s not entirely safe to fly on Air New Zealand.”

The insensitivity and insouciance, the opposition and obstacles to getting an Erebus memorial, continue to confound Paul Gilberd.

“I don’t get it. I just don’t get it.

“All we want is our people’s names all together in one place, as they were when they got on that plane.

“Surely that’s not a big deal, really, to make this happen?”

What do you think? Email sundayletters@stuff.co.nz. Please include your full name and address.