Wattie Thompson s Grave
By TOM ISERN
© Plains Folk
The little cemetery of Tarras, Central Otago, New Zealand, has been spruced up a bit by the Women's Division of Federated Farmers. A lovely stone fence fronts the burial ground, with a dedicatory plaque dated 1993. Shrubs are drip-irrigated, and there are plans for a rose garden. Sheep graze in paddocks all around, which is fitting, since the plaque says the place is "dedicated to the early runholders and pioneers of the Tarras district."
This sort of place makes me feel at home 10,000 miles away from home. The people of these high, dry grasslands of New Zealand have the same reverence for pioneers we do in the grasslands of North America. They place historical markers right in among their livestock. They make gardens in the grass.
And they are people of legend, who invest their country with story. Right there in the middle of the Tarras cemetery is a marker of legend — the grave of Wattie Thompson, a legendary character if there ever was one.
Wattie's marker is a big native stone set on a base of concrete and mounted with two brass plaques. The first informs us that he was a veteran of New Zealand Forces, infantry, who died in 1979, age 70. The second bears the text, "Wattie — For Over Fifty Years Gold Miner and Prospector in the Lindis Pass and Bendigo Area — Killed on Mount Erebus."
Mount Erebus — that name doesn't connote anything in the States, unless you're an Antarctic geography buff, but it evokes much in New Zealand. This peak in Antarctica was the scene of the greatest air disaster in New Zealand history, when on Nov. 28, 1979, ANZ Flight 901, a sight-seeing flight out of Auckland, crashed into Mount Erebus, Antarctica. Among the 257 people killed in the crash were 200 New Zealanders. Two hundred thirteen of the dead were identified from remains. Among the New Zealanders, and among the identified, was Wattie Thompson. So some part of him was shipped back to Tarras for interment.
This led to a little confusion back home. The remains were shipped to a neighbor, John Perriam of Bendigo Station, who was busy with his flocks at that season. He received notice that a package had arrived for him at the Cromwell post office, 20 some miles away, but he had no idea of the contents, and so he waited a couple of weeks before picking it up. He was, to say the least, surprised when he signed for the package.
Wattie was an impoverished local character all his life, so it seemed, a fellow people called the last of the gold miners, who kept working played-out diggings to extract a few flakes, the value of which often washed away in a local pub. He was capable of saving money for what he wanted, however. He actually had taken a pervious sightseeing flight to the Antarctic a couple of years before the tragic one and been disappointed that he had not had a window seat. So he tried it again, and got his window seat, what proved to be his fatal wish.
Wattie's association with this great disaster was not the reason for taking up a collection and erecting a marker for him, however. He was a legendary character who people loved to tell stories about and who, somehow, helped them define something about their community. Those stories will be another column.
