EERIE MUSIC NZ has a legacy of deadly disasters. The whole party seemed to fall at once. Praying to God, cos I wanted to survive. Scary. Bloody scary. Disasters that shaped this country. Where I'm standing is where my grandfather got involved in the battle with the Turks. Two yachts were lost forever. The worst motoring accident in NZ history. Seven well known NZers retrace our darkest days, bringing history alive... YELLS: Help! ...through the eyes of descendants. It stayed with me. Probably always will. It was something that we will never ever forget. All of us. Copyright Able 2015 MARK SAINSBURY: On warm summer's afternoon on the 7th February 1963, a bus with 35 passengers and their driver were making their way south from celebrations at Waitangi, where the Queen had been attending. All went well until they reached the Brynderwyn Hills between Whangarei and Wellsford. Then, halfway down the steep and winding road, driver Harold Parker suddenly announced to his horrified passengers the brakes had failed. Harold fought to control the bus down the treacherous road, but within sight of the bottom, and safety, the bus missed the final bend. It plummeted 30m over a steep bank. RATTLING CRASH! 15 dead and 21 more injured. The bus' wooden body disintegrated into thousands of pieces at the bottom. Many years ago, before I got into journalism, I drove buses, and what any professional driver will tell you is your biggest fear was harm coming to the people you were responsible for. But even back then, I had no idea, had never heard that our worst-ever road accident in fact involved a bus. It was right here, at the foot of the Brynderwyns. 15 lives lost. I'd never heard of it; most people I know had never heard of it, but that accident back then on the 7th of February 1963 remains to this day the worst-ever motoring accident in NZ history. DRAMATIC MUSIC The 1963 Waitangi celebrations were going to be a very special occasion. Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II was attending. 20,000 people were expected from around the country. For Maori, it was a highly symbolic occasion. This was their time to be recognised. So representatives from all the tribes from all the districts around NZ were there to be presented to their monarch, Queen Elizabeth. The country was brimming with pride, and a large media contingent was dispatched cover the event. I'm in the archive of the Northern Advocate, and these are the records of the papers on the 7th of February. I say papers, because it's like a lot of newspapers of their day ` they would do a first edition and then a second. The first edition is all about the royal tour. Even the ads talk about... READS: 'Her most gracious Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 'is the revered and beloved leader of a mighty empire.' And here in the second edition, the first report of that dreadful accident, and it's on the same day. It's the 7th of February. And you have to understand, more than 50 years ago, to get that story in, to stop the presses was a huge, huge task. That story was written by cadet reporter Kevin Ball. The Northern Advocate had sent their senior journalist up to Waitangi to cover the Queen's visit. And all the troops went up there, and they left young Kevin minding the shop. And I was sitting in the reporters' room, doodling, killing time. It was mid summer, and Bill Crawford, the editor, came through, and he said, um, 'Kevin, there has been some sort of an accident down the valley. 'Do you want to grab a photographer and go and check it out?' Kevin and staff photographer Warren Spiers drove to the Brynderwyns, but there were no signs of an accident on the steep and winding road. Up the Brynderwyns, nothing; down the Brynderwyns, nothing. We were almost at the bottom, one corner short of the bottom, and there was a hole in the fence. Oh. There was no markers, no cops, no emergency services, nothing. Just a hole in the fence. So we stopped and wandered over and looked down, and I can see it as clearly today as I did then. This bus had exploded into a thousand pieces. First thing we saw was a row of white shrouded forms on a bank. And, uh, yeah, that` that really shook us. Can you remember what went through your mind when looked over and saw that? Yes, I can. Um, I thought 'story'. That sounds awfully callous, but that was my thinking. I was a young, ambitious reporter, and all of a sudden the big story had jumped up and hit me in the face. Warren was extremely brave, started taking photos, and you can imagine that at scene like that, the shocked, distressed people, and the sight of a newspaper man taking photos. And people started getting quite agitated about him doing that. Kevin, how long since you've seen the photos from that day? I haven't seen them since the time of the crash. Lord, look at that. Even looking at them now, I can't imagine how anybody got out alive. 15 people died in that accident. We weren't focused on the survivors at that stage. That came later, but, um, that's absolute devastation. It's like a bomb, isn't it? And if you look there, right in the middle of it all was this perfect little ukulele, and you could just picture... these` this happy group of people heading south from Waitangi, singing, ukulele going, and then the bus driver stamps on the brake pedal, and there's nothing there. And... that one. That moves me so much, that photo, because it sets the scene. These were a` these were a religious group. They were lead by a minister, um, and the prayer over the dead bodies. That is just... It's 51 years since I saw these scenes. It's amazing. It still brings tears to my eyes today, to be honest. 15 people lost their lives that day in February 1963. Another 21 were injured. Tangi were held and families grieved, but in the national consciousness, this tragedy was soon forgotten. The story of the Brynderwyn bus crash has never been fully told. Who were these people, and what really happened to them on that ill-fated journey? SHIP HORN BLARES When it was known that Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II would be attending the 1963 Waitangi celebrations, a huge task lay ahead organising transport for the thousands of people wanting to attend. Almost 100 buses were booked, and a bus warden or passenger representative was assigned to each bus. The passenger representative on the ill-fated bus was Peter Tapene. I don't really recall the last time I saw Dad. I don't know whether he gave me a cuddle, gave me a hug. You know, I can remember things like him lying in his bed, reading the paper and me sneaking in, hopping into the blankets with him, lying there quite comfortable, and then he'd hide his paper and 'Bah!' and scared me, and I jumped out, and I ran away. I can remember that. Peter had been chosen to be a passenger representative because of his standing in both the Pakeha and Maori communities. His language, culture and people were of huge importance, and he understood the significance of the Queen's visit to Waitangi. It was the place where Maori were going to be formally welcoming Her Majesty the Queen. So he put things in place ` not a few weeks before; months. Literally about a year and a half before, he started organising things. And he didn't want just any bus; he wanted the best, because it wasn't just about him. It was about the people he was taking. He wanted them to feel good too. In the meantime, Maori Affairs had contracted a Port Waikato company to provide a bus. But when it arrived, it was old, noisy and didn't appear capable of making the long journey to Waitangi and back. When this thing turned up, um, Dad came up and got on the phone, and he was on the phone for a long time. PHONE RINGS No, he'd paid the deposit. That wasn't the bus that he'd paid for. This isn't the one I ordered. Why was it there? It was` It was a bit` It was a heap of rubbish. So there's absolutely no question over that. There's no question of this ` the bus that turned up here at your home was not the one your dad` It was a year ahead of time. The booking was done over a year before, and it was done for an intention. 'We are going to go and see the Queen. 'We're going to go up, and we're going to be decked to the nines. We're going to do that.' It's not just a 'turn up in your jeans'. They went up to be formally presented to the Queen, them going up and formally presenting themselves, saying, 'Here we are.' That was the occasion. That was what they were going there for. So, yeah, it was a big thing. We remember a lot of the discussion after, even with Mum, after the accident, that there had been a lot of concerns about the bus. 8-year-old John wasn't on that bus to Waitangi. He never saw his father again. Our mother was a damn good mother; she was a poor father. For my older brother, myself and my two younger brothers, we didn't have a father. Dad wanted us to grow up in the Pakeha world, gain the knowledge of the Pakeha. When it's time, he would give us our Maori ` great idea, but something happened. ARCHIVE: This is the sky of Northland above the beaches at Waitangi. As a journalist, I have covered Waitangi Day celebrations throughout my career. It's always been a place where people have come to celebrate and to protest, but what is undeniable is the unique place it holds in the psyche of all NZers. For Maori in particular, it's an occasion where they could remind their Queen and country of the rights bestowed on them when the treaty was signed on the 6th of February 1840. This must be a lot different from '63? Oh, mate, yeah. The main thing I remember is all the people that were here. Yeah? Kapa haka. There was just a massive amount of people that were in the kapa haka group alone. And Joe Public. There was just people. We were going to perform for our uncle, Uncle Clarkie Wiapo. He was going to be presented to the Queen. An excited 15 year-old Pirangi and his brother Louis from Rewiti, north-west of Auckland, had saved hard to go on the trip. Along with their mother, sister, niece and other relatives, they patiently waited for their bus to arrive. We started off from Rewiti, and it was one of those new railway buses. Had a skylight roof. Whoa, we got a brand-new bus! Awesome!' Well, to us it was brand new. But the boys' excitement didn't last long. When they reached Helensville, they had to get off the flash one and wait for another bus that was yet to arrive. And it was something out of a` out of a horror story, because it was a real old-looking` It was just an ugly-looking bus, you know? It was just an old truck that had a body built on the back of it. But you could hear the bus going over the railway bridge as you just come into Helensville. And my mother said, 'We're not going to go on that bus.' And she just couldn't believe that they'd actually sent this bus up from the Waikato to go right up to Waitangi to here and pick us up on the way. But... everybody, sort of, encouraged her and talked her around, and we ended up going. WAIATA The celebrations at Waitangi were a success, so the following day, the 7th of February, it was time to return home. We hopped on the bus, because it got us here, and everybody, we accepted it. ENGINE STARTS It got us here, so we hop in. We're going home. Finding a seat towards the back of the bus, Pirangi and Louis joined in with the singing on the trip south. All went well until they reached the twisting downhill section of the Brynderwyns. They then became aware of the bus' alarming speed. We were trying to size up the situation. 'What the hell's going on?' You know? It was just getting faster, and people were saying, 'Run it into the bank, run it into the bank.' But being the Brynderwyns, there's rocks and things sticking out of the banks, and an old wooden bus like that, it would have just demolished it, you know? Harold Parker was saying, 'Well I, you know` I'll be able to do it. I can do it, I can do it.' TYRES SCREECH And that last corner was one of the sharpest in the Brynderwyns. TYRES SCREECH The feeling of going into space. You can feel yourself. I can still feel it, you know, um... SOMBRE MUSIC CRASH! I can still see it. 15 Maoris were killed in a bus accident. SLOW PIANO MUSIC VOICE BREAKING: Like, it wasn't... It didn't even say 15 people. It was 15 Maoris. (SNIFFS) 50 years later, that still hurts? It does. (SIGHS) Yeah, it certainly does. Like, I'm proud of who I am, and I don't need nobody to tell me that I'm a Maori. (SNIFFS) Both Pirangi and his brother Louis survived the crash, but they lost a grandmother, mother, sister and niece. Even though many of the victims and survivors were from different families, they were now forever connected by the disaster. DRAMATIC MUSIC 1 Another survivor from the 1963 Brynderwyn bus crash was John Tapene's sister Valma. She was travelling with her father, Peter, and her cousin Annette Hopapa. On the journey home from Waitangi, the bus was full. With no spare seats, Valma's father sat on an apple crate near the driver. Dad was fine, and as we got to the top of the Brynderwyns, he stood up and said, 'Mimi stop.' After that short toilet break, the journey continued down the Brynderwyns. The bus started, and it was going so slow. I looked out the window, and I said to Annette, 'I can run faster than this bus.' And I remember seeing the bus driver, his feet moving, and I just thought, 'Oh, that's strange.' Um, it was making some sort of noise. Valma also recalls her father trying to help the driver, Harold Parker. They tried together to slow the bus down using the gears. I can still hear the crunching of those gears. Then the bus started to gather speed, and I think people realised that there was something wrong. I could hear them praying behind me. Dad just leant over the bus driver, and he said, 'Drive the bastard!' And sitting in the front, I could see the traffic coming towards us, and the bus went left, did that left to the right turn, and it just went straight over. I remember hanging on to that rail. And I saw the cabbage tree, and I remember thinking, 'Oh, that's a cabbage tree.' And that's the last thing I remember. CLATTERING I woke up. Um,... I was in so much pain. I thought` I thought Annette was on my feet, and I kept kicking out, because my whole body felt as if somebody was lying on me. And then Annette obviously came to, because she said, 'I'm not on your feet, I'm not on your legs.' And I kept saying, 'Someone's on my legs,' because I just... they didn't feel as if they were there. I think she asked me can I see her. And I said no. And she said, 'I can't feel my feet.' Annette's spine was broken, leaving her paralysed for the rest of her life. Valma had pestered her cousin to swap seats on the bus. We spoke about it only once, when I was with her. And when she brought it up, we both had that same thought, because Annette ended up in a wheelchair. She spent her whole life in wheelchair, and` and when she said it, I know we were both thinking the same thing. Mm, that was hard. How did you feel about, say, the people, the bus driver, the people who owned the company? He came around and apologised, and, I mean, I could see that he was... he was hurting. It didn't stop me thinking, 'It's your fault.' That wasn't the bus that should have come. That was not the bus my father was expecting. I... (SIGHS) We all lost something. Standing right here really really brings it home what happened, because it was this bend just up ahead of me where the bus came round, and this is the exact spot where it went over. TYRES SCREECH As we've heard, it sort of suddenly became weightless and descended down there < into almost oblivion. CRUNCH! Imagine the scene that would have greeted those people who rushed to help the injured. People like quarry worker Ron Mellis, who was first alerted by a chilling sound. This particular day I'd come down here from the quarry with a load of metal for the crusher, and I thought, 'Oh, 1.40, 3. Better have a cup of tea. Put the old thermette on to heat up, and when I get out of the truck, I could hear this women making a lot of noise. So I thought, 'What the heck is going on?' So I come out here to the gate, climbed up on the post, and I could see a wreck over there and a few people around, so I went across the road, over the fence and tore over there, and there it was. SOMBRE MUSIC All the people lying there. There were other people here helping, but it's just hard to visualise it all now, because everything has changed so much. The doctor was on the scene fairly quick, and he was an ex-army doctor from the war. And he said, 'Oh, don't touch that one,' or 'Shift that one,' or 'You can take that one now.' And so he sort of supervised it for us. People from surrounding farms and passing cars stopped to help, including a crew of roadworkers. They had a truck with drop sides on it, steel drop sides. They were quite strong, and they were just long enough to go across the creek. We got a stretcher over, and we put this one joker on. He was a great big fella. He was unconscious, and they had to shuffle across on the plank holding this stretcher and got him over to the ambulance that way. You'd remember this. Yes. Um, I don't know whether all the bodies are all there at that stage. I think they probably are. No body bags in those days. You were just on a stretcher or whatever they could put you on. And that's the horrible mess. So, all of this, this is all part of the roof and stuff, or what is it? Yeah, that's the roof. It just landed on its roof and flopped over, and all the people were jammed in here, and there was a lady here and the girl with the broken spine, and the bus driver was sitting over up near the front. Just sitting there in amongst all the rubble. Did he say anything? No. Never` He never said one word the whole time. Our Father, which art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name. People wouldn't have been used to seeing that number of dead bodies. Oh, hell no. What was the mood amongst the`? Well, I think a lot of them were like all of us. We were a bit shocked by it all, but you know, you're trying to help, and it's after that it gets you. Later on, you start thinking about it. You know, now and again it comes back into me mind, and different things bring it up. But it was just that woman, and she was saying, 'God be with us. God be with us.' I don't know where he was, but he wasn't there right at that moment for them. As we forgive those who trespass against us. It's stayed with me. Probably always will. SOFT MUSIC The Brynderwyn bus crash left a legacy of physical and emotional scars. These scars are still so raw, even today. I want to know what lead to such a catastrophic accident and, in turn, such profound grief. EERIE MUSIC Much of the anger felt by Maori since the Brynderwyn bus crash has been directed towards the Pakeha owner and driver of the bus, Harold Parker. Many felt he had been careless and dismissive of his passengers. But his son Dave has a very different memory of the man. My birth mother threw me into a home and advertised me in the Auckland Star as up for adoption. (CHUCKLES) So Dad came along and adopted me, and that was the start of my life. He never had much, but he gave a lot. In fact, Harold lived on this Port Waikato marae with his Maori wife. It would be very easy to pigeonhole Harold into the Pakeha driver and the Maori passengers, yet he was part of that community. > Very much so. I mean, he loved this community, he loved the people. He did what he could for them. I mean, there were very few Pakeha in this community in those days. Here we are at Tauranganui. This was home for you at one stage. Mm. We had a family home up on the hill behind, but in the whitebait season we'd come down on to the marae, and right over in the far corner there, 60 years ago it was, he would have three or four 4-gallon tins full of whitebait, full of whitebait. And in the evenings, the jet boats used to come up the river and buy the whitebait off him, and that was his initial income to buy his buses. This wasn't to make him rich. He` He felt there was a need. Well, there was. There was no public service here. There was no facilities from Port Waikato to Tuakau initially, so that's what he did, and, I mean, if there's... if there was a need, he kind of provided it, and just talking to one of the local kaumatuas, they remember him for his generosity. In 1963, Dave was living in Auckland. After going to bed early on February 7th, he awoke from a bad dream, and unable to sleep, he switched on the evening news. RADIO: Earlier today, 15 people died when a bus left the road on the Brynderwyn Hills. First subject was there'd been a bus accident on the Brynderwyns. Uh, a bus had rolled over, rolled off the road. There were people suspected to have been killed, many injured, and the driver was European. So immediately I rang my grandmother, and she'd heard. The police had been in touch with her. I jumped in my car and headed north. Dave found his father in the acute care ward Whangarei Hospital. He was so badly injured, um,... and when he could speak, he told me that what he tried to do was to steer that bus down to the bottom of the hill and over the bridge at the bottom and ditch it on the way up, on the rise on the way up. He was in and out of hospital a long time. He suffered really badly from his injuries. But mentally he suffered too. He was distraught over the whole thing. Uh, and I remember that he tried to take his life a couple of times. Yep. Would Harold have ever taken shortcuts, David? No. Never. Never. An honest man. The Transport Department inquiry determined the Brynderwyn bus crash was caused by the complete failure of the service brakes. And this I think, Alan, is one of only three left in the country. Yes, they are becoming a rare model now, Mark. There's not too many of them around now. So I've called on the expertise of bus mechanic Alan Runciman, who found me the exact same model of Mack truck that the bus was built on. This is a Mack EH, Kiwi built one. The Americans brought them when they came to invade the islands, but unfortunately they weren't allowed to take them back to America at the end of the war. They just dumped everything. So, these are army surplus, most of these ones. Army surplus trucks. But this was a truck, not a bus. What would they've done ` this one obviously still is ` to convert this into a bus? They would cut the chassis in half, lengthen it and then built the wooden-framed bus body on top of that. So all of that there, that's just covering wood. Just covering wood. That's all it is. On the inside... Four months before the crash, the bus had been taken to a local garage to fix a brake problem, but only the front brakes only were relined. There's not much there, is there? There's not much there, not much more than your motorcar. The same month, the bus failed its certificate of fitness and was taken to a second mechanic at another garage. October, it failed on a number of counts. So another mechanic comes in here. Vehicle check sheet for the 15th, '62. Now, he says when he's checking it to do the work to get its COF, he found there was a brake shoe out of position. This is a brake that had just been fixed. Yeah. They also, when overhauling the king pins, noticed the front brake wheel cylinder was leaking brake fluid. And this is how long after the`? This is a matter of days after it was supposedly repaired. This is not very good, Mark. It should have been done when the brakes were relined on that Friday night. This is the second mechanic having a look, finding problems that were supposedly were fixed only days earlier. The back brakes were still not checked. Very bad, isn't it, Mark? Very bad. Then says in November, the next month, routine brake adjustment. Top up brake cylinder with a small amount of fluid. Yeah. And then again in January, more topping up of fluid. What does that tell you? Tells you it's got worn parts in the hydraulic lines, wheel cylinders, cups, brake cups or something hasn't been fitted correctly, been roughly assembled. If it wasn't faulty work by the first mechanic ` just say, by chance, more, as you said, more problems have cropped up. Yeah. I still can't understand why that wouldn't lead any of them to say, 'Let's take the back ones apart as well.' There's got to be a hydraulic leak in that brake line system somewhere. Somewhere. The final maintenance entry before the crash is on January 22nd. READS: Brake master cylinder topped up with small amount of fluid. Once again, there's got to be a leak. Same leak is still going on. Sure enough, the inquiry found a rubber seal in the right rear brake cylinder had failed. This one little bit, this one little rubber, is what keeps all of that going? Yeah, if that fails, you lose all your brakes being a single line hydraulic brake system. (STARTS ENGINE) They had to find where that fluid was going, they had to. It was imperative. TWANGY GUITAR MUSIC This is as close I can get to experiencing what Harold must've gone through. This is exactly the same layout as the bus, except, of course, this is still left-hand drive. But everything else is the same. This enormous wheel, and the first thing you feel is how close and around you this is. All this is hard metal. There's no` no padding, there's not safety belts. There's nothing to cushion any impact. He very very nearly made it. The last corner, he swings around that last corner, and it just didn't happen. And you can only imagine what he must have thought, what he saw through he screen as the bus plunged off the side of the road on that last bend on the Brynderwyn Hills. Harold Parker and his company do appear to have taken their bus maintenance seriously. Perhaps the blame is not all his. But the fact remains the accident was caused by the simple failure of a cheap rubber seal. For the community I'm about to meet, this changes nothing. 15 lives were lost forever. DRAMATIC MUSIC SOMBRE MUSIC Any community that suffers the sudden traumatic loss of a number of its loved ones will continue to grieve, perhaps forever. And for the Maori communities affected by the Brynderwyn bus crash in 1963, that loss was more than personal. WOMAN WAILS: Haere mai te whanau e. (SPEAKS MAORI) Haere mai! Haere mai! Haere mai! MAN SPEAKS MAORI Three days after the crash, a tangi was held here at Rewiti marae attended by Prime Minister Keith Holyoake. MAN SPEAKS MAORI And now, 60 years later, this is still a place of enormous significance and emotion for those affected by the crash. Every time I go home, I always go up to the urupa, up to the cemetery. See all my tupuna, my parents, my sisters. Just walk around, you know. It's quite a big area. It's one way I like to keep in touch, you know. And it's also a way to honour his mother. # Whakapono,... We were singing Hoki Mai. # ...tumanako. # Because we were in the kapa haka group, most of our songs were Maori. My mum, being the matriarch of our area, she made sure that we knew the words, the songs, the lyrics ` everything. She was a good teacher. And you still miss her? Terribly. MAN SPEAKS MAORI The kaumautua who died in the crash on the 7th of February were living archives of their people's history, language and heritage. With their deaths, that knowledge was lost. Les Noda's mother was also on that bus from Waitangi. All I got was that my mother was in an accident. And I waited, and then a message came back that said my mother was dead. But then another phone call came back and said she was alive. This happened three times. And I thought` In the end, my mother was alive, which was lucky for me. But my other cousins, my grandmother, died in it. My mother's sister, my cousins, they were` all died in it. The families that lost people, they've never been the same. I mean, it's lost our language for us, because the kaumatuas were in that bus. It's lost our togetherness. In fact, we're completely lost without it. It ripped us to pieces, you know. Different families affected different ways, and some of them have never recovered. Still sad today about it. And this, when we started to make this film, was the first time we had got together and actually talked about what happened. We'd never done it in all that time. So it just shows you. Nobody would talk. As one of my cousins said we were all suffering, and who did we go to? Because everyone else was suffering. No one would could help the other, because they were so in grief, you know. We didn't have any leaders for us, and, as I say, we were the young ones. The old ones had gone. When I first started working on this story, it seemed quite simple what it was ` it was a story about a bus crash. Yet, the more I've spent involved in this, the more I've realised it wasn't about a statistic, albeit the worst-ever crash in our history. This is a story about people, these people. It's about the effect, the impact that that crash more than 50 years ago had on a community and on their lives. It was a headline in a newspaper, which quickly faded. Less than a week after the accident in the Weekly News, the biggest publication in NZ, it summarised our greatest loss of life on the roads in one paragraph surrounded by comparisons to the Tangiwai disaster. So, yes, it was our worst-ever accident. Yes, it is a terrible statistic, but it's what it's done to the lives of the survivors, the lives of the people here that has had the greatest impact. They've struggled to deal with the aftermath, and the saddest thing of all, more than 50 years after Brynderwyn, is the fact that many still haven't healed. The inquiry into the Brynderwyn bus crash made numerous recommendations, including phasing out wooden-body buses, improving maintenance records, new rules for standing passengers, and, most importantly, the introduction of more sophisticated and reliable brake systems. These recommendations set new standards for passenger safety. Most are still in place to this day. DRAMATIC MUSIC Captions by Virginia Philp. www.able.co.nz Captions were made possible with funding from NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2015