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Strangely, of all of the terrible and terrifying images and reportage from Samoa this week, it was a simple, matter-of-fact paragraph of words that moved me as much as anything. Opening the front page lead in Thursday's New Zealand Herald, Vaimoana Tapaleao wrote:
"Salamasina Taufua was basking in the sun yesterday and happily watching her three young children playing on the sand when a tsunami appeared and swept all three youngsters away."
Just like that. Within seconds a mother had lost her three children. You could not have written that more simply. In its simplicity is everything that happened. It did not need to be complicated. That is what happened. In those few seconds everything for that poor woman and those children changed forever. In those few seconds of disbelief and incomprehension the tsunami had done its work.
I cannot imagine a tsunami. I have gone on YouTube this week to find videos of them, mainly videos shot by survivors of the Indian Ocean tsunami of Boxing Day, 2004. The most incredible footage is that taken as the giant wave approaches. You look at it with a sense of wonder, of growing consternation and fear. You can hear it too, in the rising tension of those taking the pictures high up in the relative safety of hotel rooms, aiming their cameras over the tops of the palm trees out to the burgeoning blue ocean, as the boiling, unbelievable wall of water approaches with its phenomenal power and speed, its power compressing as it reaches the increasingly shallow water towards the beaches before unleashing itself at everything in its path.
Poor Samoa! Poor Samoan people! The stories of family and loved ones lost this week, of livelihoods lost, houses lost, the sheer scale of it all, have been heartbreaking.
As it was on Boxing Day five years ago, it took hours on Wednesday before we began to understand that another major tsunami had taken a lethal toll. That is the thing about tsunamis. They take everything in their path. They destroy everything and everyone in their path. On that famous Boxing Day, despite this being the age of instant communication, it took a good 12 hours or so before the world began to realise the magnitude of what had happened round the rim of the Indian Ocean and the numbers of people who had lost their lives. Three hundred thousand people died that day and unofficial estimates put the number at high as one million. I will never forget TVNZ's Asia correspondent at the time, Charlotte Glennie, telling me of the haunting, hideous stench of rotting human bodies.
The tsunami is a truly gigantic natural event. When I went to Wellington in 2003 to receive my CNZM, the Governor General, Dame Silvia Cartwright, invited a few of those being honoured to dinner at Government House the night before. One of those at the table was the artist Robyn White who was about to be appointed a Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit. For many years, about 18, I think she said, Robyn lived and worked in Kiribati. Kiribati, in colonial times known as the Gilbert Islands, is an extraordinary nation, a mass of very small, very low-lying atolls spread over 3.5 million kilometres. For some reason Robyn and I started talking about tsunamis, which was weird, really, because the great Indian Ocean tsunami was still a year away and I cannot think of why I would have brought the subject up with her.
Robyn said that in her many years in Kiribati, there were several tsunami warnings, but because the islands are merely the steep summits of vast under-sea mountains they provided no real obstruction for the tsunamis moving at 800km/h through the ocean, past them and around them. All you would notice, she said, was a violent rippling of the sea as the tsunami passed through the islands. Ships at sea, of course, will pass through tsunamis and hardly notice anything. It is when the tsunami meets a vast obstruction like a significant land mass that it becomes a monumental force of destruction. All of the energy of that water has to go somewhere.
Well, I have never experienced a tsunami and I do not want to, although you would have to describe tsunamis as the rock star of the natural world, judging by the numbers of people who flocked to our east coast beaches on Wednesday in the hope of seeing one come in.
But I have experienced a couple of bad earthquakes and you never forget an earthquake, and that was some earthquake that struck last Wednesday morning a mere 18km under the seabed of the South Pacific Ocean.
In 1968, I was upstairs in my room at Weir House, then the all-male boarding hostel at Victoria University. It was just after lunch. Suddenly the whole huge building was shuddering and wrenching. For some awful moments we thought the entire building would topple and fall down the hill into the city. This was the quake we remember as the Inangahua earthquake, which caused considerable damage in northern Westland.
As a matter of fact, down at Parliament at that very minute, Parliamentary Press Gallery journalist David Inglis was interviewing Keith Holyoake about the prime minister's recent trip to South Vietnam. I have somewhere the tape of this critical moment.
Keith is waffling on about the importance of our involvement in the Vietnam War when suddenly there is an almighty roar. Then silence. Inglis, stunned, can be heard to say, "Christ!" After a few moments, Holyoake, cool as a cucumber, says: "That sound is very much like that which I experienced recently in Saigon."
One spring, some years back, I took a week off and went to Hawke's Bay to Mana Lodge on my own. Our two years of landscaping works were coming to an end. The olive trees were so small as to be barely visible across the farm, but the grass was up and becoming lush and in the gorgeous afternoon light, I looked out from the kitchen window at our field of lavender across to the green hills in the distance. It was about 4.30 in the afternoon. The quake started as a deep thundering roar out of nowhere. Then came the massive jolts, as if someone was trying to thump the house from way under the ground. Then came the fierce vibration and a deafening noise, which, I suppose, was that of the house being shaken savagely or it may have been the great sheets of glass in a new room we had built. In the first second or two I thought I was having a stroke. Then it stopped. Instantly. It had lasted a mere four or five seconds. It was four or five seconds to last a lifetime.
So, we do not like earthquakes and we do not like tsunamis. We are nothing to them. They are monsters. They take it all, in the blink of an eye. The mother watching her children playing on the beach suddenly has no children. Suddenly, her children are gone forever.
Samoa is going to need good friends right across New Zealand. And as a nation, New Zealand has already reached for her with caring hands, to comfort, to offer hope and to help rebuild.
How you can help
Pacific Cooperation Foundation
Deposits can be made at at any Westpac branch. All the money raised will go to the Samoan Government
Red Cross
- Make a secure online donation at redcross.org.nz
- Send cheques to the Samoan Red Cross Fund, PO Box 12140, Thorndon, Wellington 6144
- Call 0900 31 100 to make an automatic $20 donation
- Make a donation at any NZ Red Cross office
ANZ bank
Make a donation at any ANZ bank branch, or donate directly to the ANZ appeal account: 01 1839 0143546 00
Oxfam
- Make a secure online donation at
Oxfam.org.nz
- Phone 0800 400 666 or make an automatic $20 donation by calling 0900 600 20
