Lahar Meets Locomotive: New Zealand’s Tangiwai Railway Disaster of Christmas Eve 1953

Authors

Abstract

New Zealand’s worst railway disaster occurred on 25 December 1953 at Tangiwai in the central North Island. 151 people died when a lahar from Mount Ruapehu demolished the Whangaehu River bridge ahead of the overnight Wellington–Auckland express. New Zealand’s railways had long experience with floods, but lahars were little understood. This tragedy highlights the class dimensions of environmental disaster, with second-class passengers comprising almost all the fatalities. Tangiwai’s legacy endures within New Zealand’s collective memory: survivors never forgot the sulphuric, muddy torrent, while the environment’s perceived caprice has stimulated a small corpus of works wrestling with mortality.

Author Biography

André Brett, University of Wollongong, Australia

André Brett is a University of Wollongong Vice-Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow in History, currently researching two major projects: colonial separation movements, and an enviro-economic history of railways in Australasia. He is the author of three books, one on the creation and demise of New Zealand’s provincial system of government and two co-authored with Stuart Macintyre and Gwilym Croucher on Australian higher education. He suspects he might be unique in claiming descent from survivors of both of New Zealand’s worst railway disasters: Tangiwai survivor Ted Brett was his grandfather, and great-great-grandmother Mary Frater survived Hyde 1943.

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Published

2018-12-17

Issue

2018

Section

Autumn

License

Copyright (c) 2018 CC BY 4.0 André Brett

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.