Lime was poured on the whales’ bodies after they were put in the grave, to aid decomposition and deter plundering. It’s not known what effect that and time would have had on the remains, but if any bones were exposed by erosion, then the appropriate hapū would be involved in decision making for the next steps, the spokeswoman said.
However, it’s likely any remains would be unrecognisable all these years later.
Department of Conservation ranger marine reserves Jamie Quirk agreed.
He said that in 1970, at the time of the stranding, there was no legal protection for marine mammals, and in some ways this event was the catalyst for the creation of the Marine Mammals Protection Act 1978.
The ownership of the whales was not previously transferred to local iwi because there was no legal mechanism to protect them.
As the erosion begins to impact the site, it’s timely to reflect on the tragic stranding that cold and stormy morning on March 18, 1970.
The first of the disoriented whales began to come ashore overnight and were spotted by a local resident who informed local radio reporters.
Ranging between five and 10 metres in length, the whales were strewn along 800m of shoreline. Some flailed helplessly in the shallows while others drowned in their own blood as they were bashed against rocks on the nearby headland.
There was no Project Jonah-style response of the type we’d see nowadays. Instead, the seething scene that stained the water crimson in parts served as a ghastly fascination, drawing large crowds and endless lines of traffic.
By 10am, the tide was receding and any hope of survival quickly ran out for the whales. Later the situation degenerated as looters began taking to the animals — many of them still alive — with chainsaws, axes, and knives, after their teeth, flesh, and bones.
There were school children who witnessed it, who are apparently still haunted by the memory today.
It was a dishonourable end for such majestic ocean beings.
Some local Māori believed the pod’s stranding was a major sacrifice to protect humans from the tragedies that historically occurred with Royal tours of the type scheduled to land in Gisborne that weekend.
A decision was made to treat the whales as “tangata” (human) and that their grave should have the same reverence as a human burial site. Māori church leaders prayed over the whales.
Ministry of Works staff were tasked with the gruesome job of moving an estimated 18,000 tonnes of quickly putrefying remains into a mass grave that measured 152m
long, 9.1m wide, and 4.6m deep.
It took workers operating two bulldozer over four days to make an access way into the dunes and move the corpses into the grave. It was a race against time as the whales became harder to move as they started to decompose.
To make the job more bearable, workers wore gas masks and sprayed deodorant. The whales were
cut open and covered with lime in the hope of aiding decomposition and deterring any further plundering.
Gisborne photographer and writer Gray Clapham witnessed the stranding as a 16-year-old schoolboy. In an article for a Wainui Beach Information Guide (in about 2008) he said: “We heard (about) it on the radio and Dad drove me out before school.
“This was in an era before people were super-sensitive about whales and their survival, but it was still a heartbreaking thing to witness. There were mothers, babies, and full-grown males.”
It was a “sorry sight in the sandy shallows” with “scores of the floundering, hulking, black mammals rolling in the breakers, blowholes expelling stale air, flukes flapping, tales flapping”.
“There was nothing anyone could do to turn them back. At 8am others were still coming in.”
Many of the pod hit the jagged rocks of the headland. There “the sea was red, blowholes ejected crimson plumes — a scene from Dante’s Inferno”.
Mr Clapham remembered The Gisborne Herald’s newspaper coverage of the stranding, which remained a feature of the front page for three days until being bumped off by the Queen’s visit.
Strandings are a natural phenomenon that have been happening for millennia but are still not fully understood.
Apart from the Māori spiritual belief that the Okitu whales were a sacrifice, there’s never been any categorical scientific finding for their stranding.
However, Mr Clapham noted research that showed up to 90 percent of strandings between 1712 and 2003 happened when there was high solar activity, which likely interfered with the earth’s magnetic field that whales rely on for navigation.
The Okitu stranding was preceded 11 days earlier by a much-publicised total eclipse of the sun.
