Leigh Hart: Loss of innocence

These sad days have become a punctuation mark in the history of the West Coast, a loss of innocence, many people will say. Photo / Herald on Sunday

"Christ, not again!" That was the immediate response of an old timer upon hearing about the Pike River tragedy. That old timer is my father.

I have never really thought of my father as an "old timer" before but, according to much of the media covering this tragedy, that is what he is. Old timer or not, fortunately he was one of the men lucky enough to walk out of the infamous Strongman disaster in 1967. Nineteen other men, all of whom he knew personally, were not so lucky.

The Strongman disaster occurred three years before I was born and has been, to most of the country, just another historic event. But to him, it still seems like yesterday.

And this week, they have been forced to revisit that yesterday. My uncle Terry celebrates his 70th birthday in Auckland this weekend. He is another old timer and was part of the mine rescue unit. Another birthday, a milestone, but no doubt a celebration that has already been gatecrashed by the tragic events of the past week.

Mum and Dad will be up to help him celebrate. Conversation will turn to Pike River and how, in 2010, "with all the technology we never had, we are still blowing up pits".

I have talked to Dad a lot over the phone this week - curious of course for his take on what was going on with the search.

Like many of the old timers, I suspect he had a very real understanding of what would be going on in the mine and - though he never gave up hope - a chillingly realistic view of the slim odds of a heartwarming-ending like that in Chile last month.

This was never going to be another Chile. The uneducated comparisons were no doubt frustrating for both rescuers and old timers alike. The Pike River incident had more in common with a bomb going off in a tube station or a supermarket than with most mine or tunnel collapses.

Then, on Wednesday, a second large explosion at Pike River. Again, I am on the phone to Dad. He told me that, for him, it took away all conjecture. That now, as painful as it would be, the families and those directly involved could begin to grieve - as they had back in 1967. Recovering the bodies as soon as possible would be a major part of this process.

Pragmatic realist he may be, but Dad did admit he had a tear in his eye for much of the day on Wednesday - an admission, perhaps, that even he still held out some hope for a miracle.

Yet the connection I feel to this tragedy is not so much through my family's underground experiences as through the small town that has been rocked by both these tragedies.

Runanga is a small coal mining town just north of Greymouth, and it is my hometown.

It is a proud town that has always punched above its weight. A town that has boasted an obscene number of Kiwi rugby league players (Dad could count 18 when put on the spot) and there have been many other New Zealand sporting representatives including Dave McKenzie, a Boston Marathon winner.

It is the birthplace of trade unionism in New Zealand, and of the Labour Party.

To be precise - and believe me, if you ask Coasters it is important - my father's side of the family is from Runanga, while Mum's is from Dunollie, another small coal mining town less than1km away. They say love is a neighbourly thing, but Dad might argue he married out of the district. By all account's Mum's mother certainly thought that she had.

I left Runanga with Mum and Dad when I was young but it has remained my spiritual home. My father continued with a career underground but now it was tunnelling as opposed to coal mining. This took us all over the world to the likes of Peru, Indonesia and Sri Lanka.

Over the past 45 years Dad has seen a number of lives lost underground. And in the late 80s, while working in Sri Lanka, he lost his leg below the knee in a tunnelling accident. I am sure Mum was always far more aware of the danger than I ever realised. Then, in the early 1990s, Dad got my brother and I jobs on the Channel Tunnel, a project he was working on at the time.

But the Coast, Greymouth, and specifically Runanga, were always home. I have occasionally been asked whether I thought the Coast has shaped me at all.

I don't really know. I know it has shaped my parents but, in my case, I can only hope so.

Though the Strongman tragedy occurred a few years before I was born, I have been acutely aware of this event for as long as I can remember. That sad day has become a punctuation mark in the history of the West Coast, a loss of innocence, many people say. This latest tragedy at Pike River has already taken on the same significance.

It will be the Pike River tragedy and the names of the men lost that day that will take over as this sad reference point for the future generations, just as Strongman took over from Brunner.

To me, though, Runanga is simply where my brother and I would go to visit grandparents and other family on school holidays and for Christmas. The distinct smell of coal burning from every home is what I immediately think of when I think of Runanga. And if you have ever been there, you will know exactly what I mean.

I have many childhood memories of Runanga. Looking for eels below the railway line, walking through the bush at coal creek falls, and trips to the wild Seven Mile Beach.

But above all it was just seeing my grandparents at their home in 23 Ranfurly St with its complimentary ton of state coal heaped outside beside the wash house.

My brother and I would regularly travel back to the Coast from Christchurch with our band, and play many of the West Coast pubs - wild days indeed.

Part of the thrill was doing what my father had done many years earlier with his band in the 60s, though I suspect a few more people may have shownup to their gigs than did to ours, but he played in the Coast's heyday and, besides, rock'n'roll was far newer. It was also great meeting many of the names and faces from the past I had heard my parents talk so much about. Many a gig was closed off with Ray Jones - "Jonesy" the local butcher - crooning a powerful medley of Elvis numbers.

We played the Dunollie Hotel, an old haunt of the grandfather I never met. He died at the mine in the early 60s, years before I was born.

If I might name-drop a little more, we even got to play in the historic Runanga Miners Hall, which I have since learnt was designed by my great-great- grandfather George Millar.

As I got older, it tended to be funerals that brought me back to Runanga and Greymouth. In the case of my grandparents they were, of course, sad funerals but inevitable ones. In the case of my two younger cousins, Toni Lee and Terry who were both killed prematurely in separate vehicle accidents, they were gut-wrenching, heartbreaking and extremely emotional - funerals that can be described only, for lack of any better word, as wrong.

But Coasters know about funerals like that.

I asked my mother about that sad time back in 1967. She recalls the eerie scene when word of an explosion reached the towns of Dunollie and Runanga. "Women just stood there motionless, outside just about every house in town, and nobody talked."

They were waiting, of course, for news of their loved ones. We saw the waiting again this week - but this time it would go on for days.

Mum, a nurse, rode up to the mine in Runanga's black-and-white St John ambulance, which now sits at Motat. She assisted where she could, and I caught a glimpse of her in some newsreel footage on TV a couple of nights ago.

The emotional impact of this black-and- white footage has clearly been softened by the passing of time, easy to watch compared to the real-time colour footage of the grieving families on Wednesday after they received the news of a second explosion.

Mum and Dad, like so many other Coasters alive in 1967, recall the mass funeral in Greymouth Cemetery when it rained.

Numbed by the scale of the disaster many people just recall how terrible the weather was on that particular day, the worst day in all respects that Greymouth had seen.

There has been a lot of talk about the resilience of West Coasters, their sense of community and their ability to soldier on in times of hardship, and I have no doubts that this is true. That and their sense of community will help in the coming weeks and months.

But when I asked Mum how she thought people would cope she was more matter of fact: "They will cope because they have to - what choice do they have?"