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The series of events which led to the sinking of the Wahine in Wellington Harbour on 10 April 1968, and the tragic loss of 51 lives, is well documented in at least three books, various archives, and in displays and film at the Museum of Wellington City and Sea. The magnitude of this shipping disaster has, however, tended to overshadow the fact that for many people living in the southern or higher suburbs of Wellington the storm was an extraordinarily frightening event, so much so that nearly 40 years later they can still clearly recall it. Marion Findlay was one of those who saw and felt the storm in Island Bay.
The storm was predicted; after an unusually warm March, tropical cyclone Gisele formed near the Solomon Islands on 6 April and was tracked as it moved south-east towards New Zealand. It was supposed to weaken as it moved across the north-eastern North Island and out to sea, but instead it joined a depression moving up from the south, strengthened, increased speed and swung south. Though Wellingtonians are used to southerly storms, this one caught everyone by surprise, for its low temperatures as well as for the force of its wind.
9 April was a fine warm day with a fresh northerly; I accompanied my 5-year-old daughter on a school trip to Wellington Airport and remember the conditions well. The wind dropped that evening; Robertson Street resident Heather Packer recalls playing bowls at Ōwhiro Bay School on a calm starry night and finding the prediction of a big storm hard to believe. The wind began to blow from the south around midnight, gently at first but slowly increasing. Heather Packer's house was sheltered from the direct force of the wind by the high hill behind it, but she woke to find the power off and to see houses across the road shedding tiles like autumn leaves. The wind was unusually noisy and added to this was the crashing of sheets of iron from the Bata Shoe factory across the valley. A transistor radio gave her news of damage to houses in Kingston and of giant waves sweeping the southern coast; she phoned the local school and was advised to keep her 10-year-old son home. Her husband and sons went to work via Island Bay as the coast road was impassable with rocks, logs and high seas; a large pohutukawa tree flying past them up The Parade demonstrated the force of the wind even at ground level.
Sheila Natusch, above Ōwhiro Bay, woke to a loud steady booming but thought it a regular storm until her husband returned, streaming wet, with the milk and warned her against going out that day. She cooked some breakfast before the power went off, and, after her husband left to catch the bus, lit the fire and waited for daylight to see just how bad it was outside.
For my family, perched on a hillside above the Island Bay shopping centre, uneasiness came with the early disintegration of the two old builders' sheds on the south-eastern side of the house, followed by radio news of storm damage and the Wahine hitting Barrett's Reef. But the power supply was intermittent and so were news bulletins, and the problems of how to make breakfast and get my daughter to school seemed much more pressing. A neighbour at the foot of the hill took her by car, along with her own children, but they soon all returned home, at the school's request. In the light of subsequent events it was highly irresponsible to send a five-year-old to school, but she was one of many who went to school and to work that day, all over Wellington, which demonstrated how slow we were to realise the magnitude of the storm. By 9am there was no doubt. Reports were coming in of serious damage all over Wellington, but we were reassured that the Wahine was anchored and riding out the storm. As our house was very exposed and we were warned the storm was getting worse, I took my two children down to my neighbour's and we spent the next four hours listening to news bulletins on her transistor through the howl of the wind, trying to keep warm, and eating cold food.
We watched houses through driving rain as they lost chimneys, roofs and even become total wrecks. At one stage my mother-in-law arrived. She had set off by car from her comparatively sheltered house in Roseneath to drop her husband at Clyde Quay School, decided to see how we were coping and only realised the ferocity of the wind when she encountered sheets of corrugated iron blowing from the stand at Athletic Park. I cannot recall precisely when we heard that a child had died in Northland after being told to stay in bed for safety; flying debris had smashed open the corner of the house. As mothers of young children we were very moved and upset by this.
Heather Packer spent the morning listening to the radio while wrapped in her candlewick dressing gown to keep warm. She used water from her hot water cylinder to make warm drinks and to warm some baked beans for lunch. She saw the playcentre shed at the foot of her street blow away along with all the playcentre toys, and thought how the local mothers had worked all year to raise funds with raffles and cakestalls. A great wall of sea foam like soap suds blew up the valley.
When daylight came Sheila Natusch found the rollers in Owhiro Bay were enormous; whereas normally in a big sea there were perhaps four at any one time between the mouth of the bay and the beach, in this gale there were only two, hollow backed, with massive heads of solid water blowing across beach and road. She could not see across the bay, as sheets of rain and sea water obscured the other side, but through it she could still make out a great whiteness spreading and charging up the beach and over the road. Her plan to spend the day safely at home swiftly changed when her husband returned to get materials to help secure a roof blowing off a nearby house. She used her fire to make some coffee and food and fought her way over the hill to help; they then checked on some other neighbours and went to observe conditions at the waterfront, but found the wind too strong and retreated home to dry out.
In the late morning the wind decreased, and early in the afternoon died away completely. The sudden silence was eerie and also somewhat scary; was this just the eye of the cyclone, and - were we about to get full strength winds from the north? I walked up the hill to check on our house and was relieved to find it largely undamaged, except for some missing lengths of plastic guttering and some water damage where rain had forced its way inside closed windows. We were lucky that we were sufficiently high above other houses not to be struck by their flying debris, but flying vegetation was another matter. Our white house had turned a strange greenish-grey colour from leaves mashed and ground into the paint, and no amount of subsequent scrubbing could remove it; it took months to fade. My neighbour and I decided to drive down to the beach to see the waves. I recall my amazement at seeing the central sections of the Island Bay seawall, a massive concrete affair, leaning backwards at an angle of about 30 degrees, and seeing several vehicles lying on their sides at Waitaha Cove.
When the wind eased Sheila Natusch and her husband again went down to the beach, and found it continuous to the fences, a great heap of logs, kelp and smashed boats. Garages were smashed, and the basement of a new house had the beach inside it. She also found a great grey petrel huddled in muehlenbeckia, and, after feeding it mince for several days, was delighted when it took off to face the elements once more.
Heather Packer also seized the calm to go down to buy her bread, and was shocked to see the damage to local houses, the roofing iron and the extraordinary piles of seaweed, particularly bull kelp. She was bemused, too, at seeing on her concrete path the weeds she had removed from her front garden the previous day, still lying there while on the other side of the street neighbours had lost roofs, fences, gardens and trees. She recalls with pride how the Happy Valley community formed working bees to make temporary repairs, to waterproof houses with tarpaulins and to give help where it was needed. The building trade, where her son was an apprentice, had been suffering from a lack of work and suddenly was provided with more than it could handle, and building regulations were tightened up when it was shown that considerable damage had resulted from shoddy work. She also recalls how her wedding day, 15 February 1947, had been called Wellington's worst storm in 50 years until it was surpassed by 10 April .
Most people had assumed when the wind dropped that the Wahine would be OK and it was a great shock when we returned home to hear for the first time that it was in serious trouble. The unfolding tragedy eclipsed all but immediate concerns about property damage for days to come. It was news throughout the world. On Wednesday 10 April 1968 Island Bay resident Pendreigh Brown was working in Cleveland, Ohio, USA and watched grainy pictures on TV news of the foundering of the Wahine with over 700 passengers in the storm outside the Wellington Heads and its sinking inside the harbour with loss of many lives. He found the descriptions confusing and the pictures sobering. Later he was saddened to learn that his pianoforte music teacher, Miss Veda Marshall of Derwent Street, was one of the 51 who died that day.
His brother-in-law, who drove buses for Wellington City Transport, described how bus 385 was driving along the Esplanade by Siren Rocks on that morning. Firstly, strong winds lifted up the windscreen wipers making them useless. Then, the big red bus was surrounded by a huge wave and lifted up onto the inland footpath. Fortunately, no one was injured. The home where Pen grew up, in Derwent Street (between Humber and Ribble Streets), had a roof of Marseilles tiles and a brick chimney that had survived the June and August 1942 earthquakes, but not the Wahine storm. The 50 year old double stack brick chimney was blown over onto the tile roof, with widespread water-damage. His brother, a joiner and quantity surveyor, came home early and did emergency repairs with tarpaulins and wooden battens. When Pen bought his first house, in Bristol Street, in December 1968, the sellers emphasised the sound construction by proudly pointing out that it had survived the Wahine storm without damage. But it was sheltered on the south-east side—the most forceful direction of the storm.
Buildings were slowly repaired, but more lasting scars were made in the skyline as pine trees, despite being well used to southern gales, toppled all around Wellington – on Tinakori Hill, on Mt Kaukau, above Shelly Bay on the Miramar peninsula and on the hills between Brooklyn and the Karori Reservoir. There were also emotional scars; it was over a year before I could face the onset of a southerly storm without fear that perhaps this time we would not be so lucky.
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