He talked about meeting the prime minister at the public memorial service for the 29 men. He called him ‘Keys’. He said, ‘I said to Keys, “Don’t think you can give me a flash memorial and bring all those dingoes in to shake my hand and then walk off.”
‘We’ve saved the mine from being sealed off twice. We’ve had bullshit after bullshit.’
Cath said there had been Pike families in that night, eating dinner at the hotel: the families met every Wednesday at the Holy Trinity Church. She talked about the night of November 19. ‘We were going to have a pot-luck dinner at our house: a lady from work was leaving. I rang Michael to put the chicken on. Of course he never answered.’
She put her hand on Bernie’s hand. She said, ‘I never read any papers or saw the TV news all that time we were waiting because they might have said he wasn’t alive. You had to believe he was alive, didn’t you?’
She gripped Bernie’s hand, put her other hand to her face, bowed her head. ‘But anyway in a split second it’s all over.’
Friday night at the Paroa Hotel in the republic of agony with no end in sight. The recovery of 29 men from a toxic underground mine remains indefinitely postponed.
What happens after one minute and 36 seconds of the most unforgettable film in New Zealand history is that all hell breaks loose. It really does: it’s not a metaphor. Hell breaks loose from the Pike mine and shows itself. For one minute and 33 seconds, the underground pressure wave travels two and a half kilometres through the black mine, killing all or some of the 29 men (‘concussion … thermal injuries … acute hypoxia’) who were at their jobs on a Friday afternoon in early summer. The piece of plastic tape – that seemingly innocuous rag attached to a rib bolt on the inside wall of the cave opening – anticipates the explosion. It stirs suddenly, and swings towards the tunnel, only for a moment, and then swings back with even greater speed in the opposite direction. Hell is on its tail.
Hell arrives. A white flash fills the screen, a dazzling shaft of light that bursts again, and again, and again, dancing. It is stone dust, ripped off the sides of the tunnel. The blast lasts for 45 seconds. Throughout the crisis of the next six days, the mine will often be referred to as ‘the barrel of a gun’. The film is the gun firing, but it looks more like a volcanic eruption from a crater tipped on its side, ejecting white-hot lava.
The blast goes on and on. The violence is all the worse for being on a silent movie: you have to imagine the noise. The scaffolding shakes, the roof wobbles; dark objects spit from the tunnel; a sheet of metal tied to the inside of the cave is flung forward, and bangs against the walls – it’s a speed sign, advising vehicles the limit is 25 kilometres per hour, in which case the explosion is breaking the law.
The force, finally, is spent. There’s one last white flash: the stone dust travels through the open air, hits the stand of native bush, and the impact lights up the screen. The trees shake, and then settle. For the last six seconds of the film, the plastic tape reverts to normal – it follows air into the mine. Once more it’s a lovely afternoon, sunny and calm.
The weather was like that three weeks later when the public memorial was held at Greymouth’s picturesque Omoto Racecourse beneath the Paparoa Range. An estimated 11,000 people attended. There were courtesy buses from Blackball, Dobson, Paroa and Karoro. Some people came by boat. There were picnic rugs, sun hats, chillibins. The service ended with the national anthem. The loudest cheers were for a haka by the Blaketown Rugby Club. Families of the 29 men placed ferns on 29 tables. Personal items were added – a surfboard, a cricket bat, ski boots, a cloth with Egyptian patterns. The mourners were piped out by bagpipes. A little boy held on to balloons on a string. He let them go and the bright colours rose against the tender green of beech forest that surrounded the racecourse. He looked up and waved, and said, ‘Bye-bye, Daddy.’
Collingwood
Lenny, Denny, Buttons and Tink
Buttons was there. Gorsey was there, Brighty was there, Tink was there. In short, everyone was there. It was Friday night. The wood burner was roaring. Len, long-haired, 60, was in top form, talking rapidly about gold, milk, good bastards he had known, and how the thing about Collingwood was that it was a one-pub town.
‘Mate,’ he said, ‘we don’t stuff up in this town.’ ‘Mate,’ he said, ‘I’ve never once witnessed a single punch.’ In Tākaka, he said, there were factions, and the town had two pubs. ‘Well, three,’ he said, ‘including the one for dope smokers.’
Collingwood Tavern was about to host the annual pig-hunt prize-giving – $150 for heaviest boar and $50 for longest tusks, children’s prizes of $20 for heaviest hare and heaviest goat. The fat of the land was soon to be dragged out of the hills of Golden Bay, that amazing Eden at the top of the South Island, up and over the marble and rock of Tākaka Hill. The central fact of life in Collingwood, pop. 250, was Tākaka Hill. The rest of New Zealand lay over it.
On one side was Aorere River, radiant with trout, whitebait, gold; on the other side was the Tasman Sea. When the tide was in, it licked the shore. When the tide was out, it went way, way out, leaving a parched mudflat as far as the eye could see. One of New Zealand’s most extraordinary postcards shows Collingwood at low
