Documenting a dark day for NZ

Koru-painted wreck in an icy expanse brought the Erebus disaster home. Photo / NZ Herald

Eighteen hours after an Air New Zealand DC-10 smashed into the side of Mt Erebus, killing all 257 people on board, Nigel Roberts hovered over the crash site in a helicopter.

It was November 29, 1979, and Roberts was in Antarctica as New Zealand's information officer/photographer, on a four-month break from his academic day job.

"There was no evidence anyone had lived for even a fraction of a minute afterwards," recalls Roberts, now a professor of political science at Victoria University and the face of TVNZ's election coverage.

Sent to photograph the scene, he caught a flight with a team being dropped off to set up a camp for New Zealand police. He remembers a scene of "utter devastation".

"The crash site was well over a kilometre long ... clearly part of [the plane] had exploded. It was a long, long smear on the snow."

The emotional impact was delayed. "It's like a surgeon who specialises in cancer: you just have to do the job rather than get involved in the emotion of it ... when I looked at it at that stage I wasn't conscious of any bodies. But when I was developing pictures, there were quite clearly bodies around the wreckage."

It was pre-digital and Roberts knew there was no room for mistakes. He used an Olympus OM1 and black-and-white film, because if he'd used colour he would have had to send the film to New Zealand for developing. "They didn't want pictures of the tragedy falling into the wrong hands," he explains.

"When I went back to my darkroom at Scott Base and saw the photo of the tail of the DC-10 and the koru sign on the snow of Mt Erebus, I knew then that was the picture that summed up the whole tragedy."

nicola.shepheard@hos.co.nz