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Excerpt from Buntine Chapter (2)

28 November 1979 – The Day My World Stopped

Muscles (No.38/8.5 vans) and I (No.40/9.5 vans) were dispatched to load cattle from Idracowra Station’s homestead yards, 260km south of Alice and 60km east of the Stuart Highway. Our delivery point was the standard gauge railhead at Chandler SA, 270km further south on the Stuart.

 

We started loading at 4pm. With the ringers branding and drafting the lively bunch of bullocks straight onto the trucks, it took us until 8pm to load. By this time a couple of animals had lain down in my road train, putting them at risk. While Muscles dealt with the paperwork, I went and gave the recumbent beasts a wake-up call with a cattle prod. Keep in mind I’m standing on the ground alongside the truck, poking the prod through a gap in the side boards about 300mm above the deck - a height which happened to match my eye level. Unfortunately for us both, I touched a beast standing near one of the downers; he expressed his displeasure by lashing out, hoof catching the hot end of the prod and poking me in the face with the other. Result: instant black eye, and another lesson learned.

Formalities completed, Muscles and I set off for Chandler. About 20km from the yards we came to the boundary gate, where we lit a fire in the middle of the track to boil the billy and have a feed. While we waited, Muscles turned on his truck’s wireless to catch the ABC Radio News. The lead item on the broadcast was that an Air NZ tourist flight to the Antarctic was missing, presumed lost. Air NZ had been out of contact with them for several hours and by now the fuel supply would have been exhausted.

It sent a cold shiver down my spine.

Mum had worked for a travel agent in our hometown, Whangarei, from 1960-1977. When she retired the firm gifted her a double ticket for the popular tourist flight. She chose to take her younger sister Nancy as travelling companion, my dad having declared that he was ‘done with travelling’ after WWII and 20 years with the Royal Marines. The 150km drive to Auckland had been the outer limit of his travels since. Mum, in one of her recent letters, had told me her Antarctic trip was all set for November 28th. 

With no other information available, Muscles and I pressed on to Chandler, finished unloading at 5am, then started on the road home until the first ABC News of the day came on at 6am. By then it had been confirmed that the flight was lost but authorities didn’t know where, exactly. Confirmation of location came by the time we arrived back in Alice. At the eight o’clock radio schedule I asked Denis to ring my brother, Dick, in Auckland to see what he could tell me. The calls went unanswered because, as I found out later, Dick had gone to pick up our father from his home 150km away. It would be late on the 29th before he and Dad arrived back in Auckland and I could talk to them.

Getting home was an ordeal, and not just because of transport stuff-ups and rough, packed flights. I felt like I was in some kind of netherworld, struggling to comprehend the situation while trying to focus on the logistics of travel from outback Australia. I was, and am still, grateful for all the help and support from Muscles and the rest of the crew at Buntines, during and after the event. They looked out for me for as long as I needed it. With the NT cattle-carting season drawing to a close and no other work available, I had been booked to come home for Christmas anyway, and got a boost when Denis Buntine said to me, “You are coming back, aren’t you?”. I stayed in New Zealand until February 1980, family leaning on each other, and returned to the Buntine fold in time for the new season to kick off.

Mum and Nancy’s memorial service in the second week of December felt surreal. Whether having them physically there would have made any difference to allowing the terrible facts to sink in, I’ll never know. Operation Overdue – the recovering of bodies and the gathering of evidence – was completed by the truly heroic recovery team by 10th December, but it was many more weeks before identification processes were finalised. Our family was more fortunate than some, in that eventually Mum and Nancy’s bodies were returned to us; there was hardly a mark on them. In stark contrast, there’s a mass grave at the Waikumete Cemetery in Auckland that contains sixteen caskets of unidentifiable remains. In all, 44 passengers were either not recovered, or could not be identified.

Stoic though Dad usually was, and having come through unspeakable suffering during the war, losing Mum in this way nearly broke him. She was his rock for 44 years; it left an indelible mark on The Old Boy. Dick, too, was a changed man - as was I.

Naturally enough, we all wanted answers; they were a long time coming. It transpired that much of actual flight is directed automatically by preset flight plan. ‘Someone’ in Air NZ had modified the auto-flight plan without notifying anyone on the crew, sending the plane on the wrong course. It slammed into Mt Erebus; 257 lives lost in an instant.

Leading a Royal Commission of Enquiry into the crash, in 1981 Justice Peter Mahon (in)famously concluded that the extensive arse-covering by Air NZ (at that time wholly owned by the NZ Government) and others amounted to “…an orchestrated litany of lies”. He stated that the mistake was “…directly attributable, not so much to the persons who made it, but to the incompetent administrative airline procedures which made the mistake possible”. The authorities, supported by Prime Minister Robert Muldoon, went on the attack; Justice Mahon was forced to resign and the powers-that-be continued to deny any culpability, placing blame squarely, and unfairly, on the pilots.

In 2019 I attended the 40th Anniversary ceremony in Auckland, where the government finally admitted responsibility for the sequence of events leading to the crash, and exonerated the flight crew who had copped the blame for 40 years. Let me say that again – forty years! The admission and apology, delivered by then Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, did nothing for me, but I was glad for the crew’s families.

As I write this, on 28th November 2025, the sad saga continues. The families of Erebus victims have been waiting now for 46 years for a public memorial. Over a million dollars of taxpayer’s money has been spent without so much as a site being secured. A strong, loving, smart, and practical woman, Mum would not be impressed at either the waste of money or the emotional toll on so many people from decades of faffing around.

Margaret Bell Carr was the best mum a boy could wish for. She taught me how to make the most of any situation, how to laugh at myself, how to love and be loved. She was my biggest fan, my cheerleader, protector, and along with Dad, the provider of my moral compass. There are no words to describe her loss, and I doubt a memorial will make any difference to me. I’m fortunate not to need a place to go to remember her; she lives on in my heart and mind, in who I am. But I do feel for those who desperately want somewhere, especially those whose loved ones weren’t returned to them. I’d like to think the memorial might happen by the 50th anniversary, that some of us will still be alive to see it. 

I’m not holding my breath.

 

 

End of Buntine Excerpt (2).