![]() ![]() ![]() In New Zealand and in many other Western nations, both the sky and the white continent were once regarded as frontiers which needed to be ‘opened’ by risk-taking adventurers. ![]() The sorrowful reticence with which New Zealand writers have responded to Erebus contrasts with an earlier cultural tradition of noisily celebrating, and in many cases glorifying, the dangers of Antarctic exploration and of flight. How, we perhaps want to ask, could a culture like ours have produced an event as strange and terrible as Erebus? We seem to struggle to connect the extraordinary, unheralded event that was the Erebus disaster to the ordinary lives its victims had led, and to the ordinary, and fairly orderly, pattern of New Zealand life in the last quarter of the twentieth century. The Royal Commission of Inquiry headed by Peter Mahon collected thousands of pages of documents, and did not fail to apportion blame for the Erebus crash, and yet a sense of mystery which cannot be dissolved through the recitation of facts or the repetition of expressions of sorrow clings to Erebus. A similar sense of bewilderment seems evident in other responses to the tragedy. In poems like Bill Manhire’s ‘Erebus Voices’ and in prose works like Chad Taylor’s fine novel Departure Lounge, Erebus is presented as an essentially ineffable event, hostile to interpretation and generalisation. Though these literary responses to the disaster vary in form and perspective, they share a tone of bewildered grief. Brown’s poem is only one of a number of treatments of Erebus by Kiwi writers. As James Brown observed, in ‘The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain’, large numbers of New Zealanders ‘can remember/exactly where they were’ on the night the news emerged that an Air New Zealand DC10 had failed to return from a sightseeing trip over the white continent. The commemorations and recriminations that marked the recent thirtieth anniversary of the Erebus crash showed that the disaster remains a painful subject for many New Zealanders. In the gray sea and impure ice vowed in the name South from us, again south from them false pacific In the earliest stories, those tales of the brown or white You recognise is quite rarely what you may have With our women assures success where skill is Had we wished to know or had they thought to say ![]()
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