Work continues to put controversial Erebus memorial in Christchurch
Sunday, 6 April 2025
Officials have scrapped plans for putting a memorial to the 257 people who died in the 1979 Mt Erebus air crash, in the capital.
And as efforts to build a memorial commemorating the country’s worst peace-time disaster enter an eighth year, it appears options to site it in Auckland are evaporating.
This has left a new initiative to put the memorial on Christchurch’s Port Hills, its city centre, or near its airport, as the most hopeful option for Ministry for Culture and Heritage (MCH) officials who have overseen the tortuous and controversial process.
This is despite a survey of victims’ families and others associated with the disaster favouring Auckland over Christchurch by a 2:1 ratio.
The Government has promised a national Erebus memorial since 2017, which was supposed to be in place for the 40th anniversary of the Antarctica tragedy.
However, strong protests at the proposed site in Parnell’s Dove-Myer Robinson Park stalled progress, and MCH eventually abandoned it due to concerns about land stability.
The other favoured Auckland site, adjacent to the Michael Joseph Savage memorial at Bastion Pt, remains tied up in discussions with Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei.
Further proposed sites have been rejected by those involved with them.
These include the Botanic Gardens, where the Friends of the Auckland Botanic Gardens didn’t support a memorial.
The group’s president, Viv Canham, said it felt the gardens were “a place of joy and pleasure”, and there were concerns about somebody coming across families mourning at a memorial.
Moreover, it didn’t fit with the park’s long-term plans, she said.
“We don’t want to be NIMBYs, but we can think of some more appropriate places.”
However, further Auckland options may be difficult to find for MCH.
In emails obtained by the Sunday Star-Times under the Official Information Act, Auckland’s council indicated more than a year ago it is reluctant to use its land for the memorial.
“Council’s position is of course that the Ministry should as a first step seek to locate any memorial on Crown land rather than council’s,” land use manager Darren Cunningham told MCH in 2023.
After the RSA objected to MCH’s proposal to put the memorial at Pukeahu National War Memorial Park in Wellington, and families largely rejected the location, MCH has effectively abandoned the capital as a potential site, also.
This leaves Christchurch emerging as the most likely option, with a site selection process already underway.
In a recent email to Erebus families, MCH outlined a detailed process of “high-level assessment”; a working group of council, MCH, and mana whenua representatives, led by a landscape architecture academic; then a “detailed assessment of sites using the refined site selection criteria”, before a report to Christchurch council “decision-makers” to get their support.
MCH will then consider these potential Christchurch sites with any sites still on the table in Auckland.
The Star-Times asked MCH a number of specific questions about this current situation, including why no Erebus family representatives were involved in the site selection process; why so much effort was going into finding a site in Christchurch when the clear majority of families still wanted it in Auckland; and if it had informed Erebus families that Auckland Council preferred its land wasn’t used for a memorial.
MCH did not answer any of these questions.
Instead, it issued a general statement from Deputy Secretary of Maori Crown Partnerships Glenis Philip-Barbara saying no decisions had been made about sites for the Erebus memorial, and Auckland remained a potential location.
MCH had received an invitation from Christchurch’s mayor to consider the city, but Philip-Barbara insisted whatever location was chosen, the memorial and Erebus families had to be warmly welcomed.