Michael Batson

The West Coast of New Zealand’s South Island has some of the most stunning scenery to be had anywhere on the planet. The life of Coasters is shaped by the rugged beauty of its landscape which contains a lethal legacy clearly illustrated by recent events.

 

To drive the coastal road of the West Coast is to privilege one of nature’s wonders. Breakers roll into the shore from such distance and volume that the spray given off creates an aeronautical hazard. The bluffs that form the western edge of the Southern Alps descend here precipitously, the road clinging precariously to the terrain. Yet people build their homes here, some basic constructs barely recognisable as worthy dwellings, almost makeshift, eclectic, or transitory, and yet others architectural wonders where envy, from every view point, abounds.

 

People and engineering here hangs tenaciously on. Threateningly nature could claim back its territory seemingly at will. One great wave, a powerful earthquake or mine explosion, and it will be all gone, and those on the Coast have seen them all, the latter most recently.

 

Where people venture in, they do so with trepidation. The sailor battered by high Tasman seas and the relentless waves, finds solace in the sight on the horizon, of this natural phenomenon rising seemingly out of the ocean to both greet and to threaten to seas’ travellers and its survivors with its keel-busting bluffs.

 

Primary industry is paramount is this domain; forestry, farming, and mining, primarily that of coal and to a lesser extent, that of gold. It rains here, come and you’ll see and experience downpours only replicated in tropical climes.  The town of Hokitika once received an astonishing 18,000 mm of rain in a single year.

 

It’s this juxtaposition of primary industry and spectacular scenery that leads to a clash of wills on the Coast. One the one hand there are the environmentalists, the “Greenies” seeking preservation, and on the other, there’s the need for employment and income, which invariably leads to exploiting the natural environment in some form.

 

The West Coast is a land of isolated tight communities built around the income that they can generate from the land, and distinct from the rest of New Zealand and central government – a land apart.

 

Not surprisingly in such rugged country with its unique way of doing things, the Coast has had its fair share of rogues and characters, many earning their living off the land. “Boomer” Daily was a hunter. He had a distinct aquiline profile and sported a full beard. He had fathered about a dozen children to about as many different women up and down the Coast, and by many accounts, had abandoned them all. His hunting partner was the brother of legendary Kiwi bushman and author, the late Barry Crump.

 

Boomer got his nickname allegedly, on account of having blown some poor fellow up with a stick of dynamite; what became of the victim is not clear. Despite the rugged nature of his work and life, Boomer was rather fastidious when it came to his appearance, often presenting with his hair permed. He and Crump would disappear into the mountains on hunting expeditions for days on end, emerging with pelts and boar and deer carcasses filling the back of their utility. Trips were celebrated in the Collingwood pub, or other watering holes on the Coast by jugs filled with Jack Daniels and Lemon & Paeroa – soft drink mixer “world famous in New Zealand.”

 

New Zealand inherited an attitude to alcohol consumption from Victorian England, a well-documented land of putrid gin swillers, in the travel zone of those times, light years away. Identification with the “home countries” led New Zealand to almost out do the English, that of the colonial cultural cringe. The Coasters however, never quite subscribed, it was “if you do that bugger off, we’ll do our own.”

 

The “six o’clock swill” became a New Zealand institution, where pubs shut at 6pm in an effort to deny alcohol consumption, ironically resulting in a binge-drink culture with connotations to this day. You get it in you while you can, real men can drink more. Pubs on the Coast were infamous for “lock-ins” once the bell for last orders was called. In reality, pubs stayed open for all hours, until everyone went home. Law enforcement wasn’t an issue as the local policeman was likely to be amongst the punters.

 

While rugby union, the game of the ruling class in England took hold in New Zealand, the colonisers adopting the practices of the colonising elite, the Coasters went for the working class version of rugby, Rugby League. Inherited from the mining and working class towns of northern England where the game took root, that of Widnes and Warrington, or the smaller industrial towns (by British scale) of St. Helens and Wigan. 

 

Such isolation can breed as much wariness for outsiders as it does hospitality. Friends with origins in northern England coal mining towns found a warm welcome in Ross, a West Coast small town built with similar resolve. Travelling with a German couple, all were given board at the local hotel.  

 

In Germany such sights were called “millionaire’s views” yet backpackers had access to them in New Zealand for free, something that dumbfounded the visitors. Plates of complementary oysters were produced by the publican for consumption by the visitors, both foreign and local. In New Zealand, and on the West Coast, such produce by it’s accessibility to source can be had by a broader population base. In Germany, the visitors reported such delicacies sold for exorbitant prices.

 

When bus loads of tourists arrived at the hotel, they were welcomed and challenged to drinking competitions, with the loser buying the next round. The locals naturally won. When it was over, the tourists re-embarked, albeit light in the pocket and slightly inebriated, and the locals went back as they were. It was life as we know it, on the Coast. 

 

The Pike River Coal Mine is New Zealand’s largest, but few outside of the industry or the West Coast were familiar with it until Friday 19 November 2010, when news of an explosion from inside the mine was reported to authorities. Emergency services followed by the media then descended on the mine site and the nearest centre Greymouth, the West Coast’s biggest town. Twenty-nine miners were missing, trapped 160m down and up to two-and-half kilometres inside the mine.  

 

Two miners escaped the explosion and raised the alarm. One, driving a digger, had been late for his shift when the blast, likely caused by a build-up of methane, literally blew him off his machine and 15 metres back down the main access tunnel. Emergency services, coordinated by the highest ranking local police officer, the district commander, hoped that not all had been killed by the initial explosion.

 

The mine had not collapsed. Air was blowing freely throughout the tunnels indicating that there were no obstructions to survivors leaving the mine.

 

Ominously however, there was neither sight nor sound of survivors as relatives hoped, no tapping on pipes or calling for help.

Contrasts were made with the high-profile rescue of the Chilean miners high in the Atacama Desert, a feat reported worldwide, and the rescue of another 29 miners from a coal mine in China, where mining is notoriously dangerous and conditions by comparison are appalling. Surely, the Pike River miners would also be rescued.

 

In all 350 miners have been killed at work in New Zealand and the West Coast is no stranger to mining tragedies. In 1896, a suspected gas explosion killed 65 men in the Brunner mine, also near Greymouth. In 1926, an explosion killed nine men at the Dobson mine, and in 1967, not far from Pike River, another gas explosion killed 19 men at the Strongman mine. New Zealand has suffered other mining disasters at Kaitangata near Dunedin in 1879, and two disasters at mines near Huntly in the Waikato, in 1914 and in 1939, where explosions and asphyxiation killed 43 and 11 miners respectively.

 

However, there was, nor has there been any rescue attempt at Pike River to date. Initially, efforts were organised with the objective for the search and rescue of survivors, hence the police coordination, but subsequent events led operations to focus on that of recovery (of bodies) following the huge second explosion.

 

Later there were third and fourth explosions, followed by the ominous site of clouds of smoke billowing from the air ventilation ducts, a sign that the explosion had ignited the coal seam. The miners’ bodies may never be recovered, and if they are, then identification will by way of DNA. The mine is still not safe, methane is being released and fire continues. The combustive possibilities remain.

 

Inevitably, questions have been raised about safety at the mine, charges defended vigorously by the mine’s chief executive, Peter Whittall. Whittall, with 30 years experience underground, became the public face of Pike River in the aftermath of the disaster fronting up twice daily at press conferences and briefing the families. A task made all the more difficult, as Whittall had personally hired all the missing miners, and knew them all personally, some were close friends.

 

By contrast with the Strongman mine disaster in 1967, where a marathon search and rescue effort was able to be started almost immediately, Pike River 29 has been deemed too volatile and dangerous for rescue teams to go in. The cause of the Strongman disaster was an explosive used to break up the coal had blasted through to gas which had gone up in a massive fireball which, had a roadway not been wet to extinguish it could well have killed many more of the 240-odd men underground that day.

 

Survivors of the Strongman disaster talk about the dumbing down of safety measures in the mines since then. Back then, miners elected a check inspector. This was a go-between position between the company, or in the case of the Strongman mine the state as it was state-owned, the workers and the top independent, all-powerful position of the Chief Inspector of Mines.

 

If the men had safety concerns they could go to him and he could go to the chief inspector who could shut the mine. The crucial part was the chief inspector's independence, no corners could be cut. One former miner said of this arrangement, "[the] management couldn't get away with anything and the men couldn't get away with anything. The inspectorate itself could be called on by either side or he could come in on his own and say I want to have a look at this section."

 

However, the positions of both check inspectors and chief inspector don't exist any more. New Zealand as experienced a barrage of deregulation since the 1980s, started ironically enough by the then Labour Government; the Labour Party having it’s origins on the Coast, principally from among the mining communities.

 

One or two geologists have said New Zealand mines had fallen behind international mining standards in some areas, and could benefit from a specific regulatory body, perhaps the reinstatement of a Mines Department.

 

Today, New Zealand has two safety inspectors for four mines and 450 miners, a situation that will form part of a Royal Commission of Inquiry into the tragedy however, the findings of such as Inquiry, to be chaired by a former High Court judge himself a Coaster, will take months if not years to be made public. Meanwhile the families of those lost wait on.

 

The tragedy has called into question the future of mining in New Zealand. Economically, coal is vital to the prosperity of Coasters. Last year New Zealand produced 4.6 million tonnes of coal and it’s estimated that remaining coal reserves are worth hundreds of millions of dollars. For every one miner there are dozens of contractors and businesses dependent on the money that mining brings to the community.

 

New Zealand coal is of a high quality, much in demand by the burgeoning economies of India, where the Pike River coal goes, but also China, which between the two giant economies are virtually underpinning the demand for Australia’s vast mineral wealth.

 

For a relatively small country like New Zealand, and in particular the tight-knit communities of the West Coast, two such disasters in one lifetime is almost too much to bear.