Pillows of the Dead

Photo: Karen Harris

On Christmas Eve 1953, a lahar from Mt Ruapehu came rushing down the Whangaehu river and swept away the Tangiwai railway bridge, at 10.20 pm, just as the Limited Express was crossing it. The engine and the first six carriages went into torrent, at about the very moment as my parents were filling our pillow cases with Christmas presents, 60km downstream.

We woke up mum and dad just before 6-o-clock on Christmas morning to show them what Father Christmas had brought us. And dad turned on his bedside radio to see how many runs Australia had scored overnight in their Test against England for the Ashes.

Instead, he heard the announcement "A passenger train has been swept away in a flood at Sulphur Creek." He and mum left us to our toys and went out and across the road to the cliff above the river. When they got there they could hear a roaring noise up river and coming closer. Then a huge wall of liquid mud, 10 feet high, swept into view.

When I joined them a few minutes later, I was struck by all the pillows being swept down by the torrent. Passengers on the Limited Express used to pay two shillings to hire a pillow, kapok filled, with a freshly washed white pillowslip on it, to make their overnight journey more comfortable. There were dozens and dozens of these white pillows floating past. But my dad had noticed that some of the 'pillows' were the naked backs of dead passengers . . .

The Lions Display at Tangiwai In this display there are several photos showing large teams of Army soldiers collecting bodies with stretchers and placing them inside 4-wheel drive ambulances for their discreet and respectful removal. The display then claims the locals downriver assisted the police for the next several days. This gives a totally false picture. The police and army spent only 3 days collecting bodies on the flat land near their Waiouru camp, washing them with fire brigade hoses and placing them in coffins, and later assisted locals who were recovering bodies from the easily-accessible coastal river flats. My mid-river community of Mangamahu-ites, between Mount View and Ngaturi, spent four weeks recovering 40 bodies from out of difficult and dangerous terrain, without any assistance at all from ether the police or the army. We received no assistance or equipment from the army or police at the time, no thanks from the railways or government afterwards, and my elders still get no recognition on the Lions extensive displays for their heroic work.

In March 2001, I was talking  to an old Mangamahu farmer, Geof Addenbrooke, who was involved in  recovering the bodies which were washed 150 kilometres down the Whangaehu river and into the papa gorges at Mangamahu.

The old police constable who came out from Wanganui that Christmas morning put away his police notebook and went back into town again after after seeing how far down the bluffs were the first half-dozen bodies.

"Just bring them up yourselves, and then bring them to us in town."

One of the easier bluffs below Polson's Top Place where young men had to piggyback bodies up to the roadway.

After carrying each girl to the farm gate the young farm worker then had to return to catch up with his work-day, leaving her lying alone by the roadside, covered only by his black singlet, until my father could make his daily collection trip. Geof Addenbrooke said his wife had to burn several sets of his stinking, maggot-infested clothing. "One of then I recovered," recalled Geof Addenbrooke, "Had only her roll-up girdle still on  her."

Almost as hard to cope with," said another Mangamahu farmer, Reid Kellick, when I was talking to him 30 years later, "Were all the Christmas toys. All those teddy bears and koalas, soaked with mud and with their legs torn off. I couldn't get them out of my mind."

Kowhai roots, bottom left, were used to reach the body of a young woman on the rocks belo. Click to enlarge

Later, on January 3rd, a methodical search was organised, with teams of civilian volunteers led by locals working their way along both sides of the river, from bridge to bridge. A couple of days beforehand my dad had asked me to paint some signs identifying all our bridges for the outsiders who came to help in the search. "The White Bridge, Cox's Cage, McDonald's Bridge, Mangamahu Bridge, Rush Flat Cage, Garland's Bridge, Harris's Bridge, Bakers Bridge, Aranui Bridge, Polson's Top Place." Often, guided by the smell, they dug for an hour, and found only a dead sheep.

Local farmer John Polson had been a fighter pilot and then a flying instructor at Ohakea during WW2, and after about 10 days he obtained a liferaft from the air-base there. John then took young Garry Harris with him looking for the Tangiwai victims who had been initially buried in the mud, and had then floated to the surface as their bodies swelled.

I was a 12-year-old at the time, living in the middle of the Mangamahu village. My dad was the local carrier. In the middle of each day, my dad would collect the "bods," as they were referred to, lie them on the back of his truck and bring them to our lorry-shed, right beside our house. Over the weeks of those strange school summer holidays, dad had to store 40 bods in our shed. My mum and a couple of other ladies would wash the mud and blood and maggots off them and cover their bodies decently. My mum's guiding principle was 'What would people think?'

"What would people think if we sent their sons and daughters back to them looking like that?"

Only the head and torso of body I saw on the back of dad's truck was covered, by a jute wool pack. A green leather sandal was still strapped onto the body's protruding left foot. It took me years to figure out the green sandal was what made me know instantly a teenage girl was lying on the back of dad's truck.

Memorial at Karori Cemetery.  Suzanne Kennedy was the daughter of a farmer in the valley next to us.

Every evening, Des Fromont, another good Catholic carrier, would come out from Wanganui and take the day's collection into town on the back of his road-metal truck with raised sides, with a tarpaulin covering the truck's deck. In Wanganui, the washed and decently laid out bodies were handed over the the police there. The police never supplied any of the rescuers with protective clothing, and Des got blood poisoning from having to handle the bodies with his bare hands,

We never saw a policeman at Mangamahu during the whole of that period, and Geof Addenbrooke said the thing that most upset the young Mangamahu rescuers was that grateful relatives of the dead victims had donated many bottles of whisky to the Wanganui police, but the police shared not a drop of it to those who had done the actual rescue work.

The searchers at Mangamahu generally found victims whose bodies were mostly intact, and consequently who would float. But they also reported that they often saw viscera hooked up on the willow branches, an indication that many victims had been ripped open, and consequently remained buried in the mud. Some were also found with arms, legs, or even their heads missing.

About a year after the train disaster, Geof Morris found a mummified body  in the eroding silt at the river edge, and he informed the police. Then possibly to compensate for their absence a year earlier, they came out en masse and did a big "possible murder" investigation, making a huge fuss, with Geof as their prime suspect.

All the locals were very upset by this, so in the following years when other Tangiwai remains have been found, they have just quietly reburied them higher up from the river bank.

All that stuff you read in books about the Tangiwai disaster, about all the resources of the army, navy, public works department, NZ railways and police being used for the next three days to recover bodies downriver from the wrecked train, all that was nothing compared to what the Mangamahu people did all by themselves further down the river, for weeks on end, and which never got reported.

Those Mangamahu people were heroes.

John Archer

Contact me about how the Tangiwai disaster affected you.

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