BILL MANHIRE: Well, my name is Bill Manhire and I’m from Wellington, New Zealand, and I’m a poet. But I was born in Invercargill in 1946, which is probably why I’m interested in Antarctica. I figured Rudyard Kipling visited Invercargill and called it the last lamppost in the world and if, you know, if you get in a row boat and row straight south, you’ll eventually hit the ice many, many, many weeks later.

The poem I want to read is called ‘Erebus Voices’ and it’s a poem I wrote, not when I was in Antarctica, but towards the end of 2004 and I was…it was odd the way the poem came about – I got a phone call in Wellington from the Dean of Christchurch Cathedral saying that they were going to Antarctica for a 25-year commemorative service for the victims of the Erebus tragedy, which is the…that’s how we refer to the horrible, disastrous event in which an Air New Zealand plane carrying 257 people – 20 of them crew, the rest passengers – flew in white-out conditions into the slopes of Mt Erebus and everybody died.

REPORTER: 257 people were killed instantly when Air New Zealand flight 901 slammed into Mt Erebus on November 29, 1978.

BILL MANHIRE: I was invited to write something for Sir Edmund Hillary to read at the service – for the commemorative service for the victims. And so I decided to try and give a voice, first of all, to the mountain which seemed to me to not have been part of the discussion, and a voice to the dead who I felt, I think, that 25 years had gone by and the way in which memory works the dead could now be remembered as they were rather than as a whole lot of distressing body parts inside the debris trail. So I wrote this poem made up of two voices and the first voice is the voice of the mountain.

I’m here beside my brother Terror.
I am the place of human error.
I am beauty and cloud.
And I am sorrow.
I am tears which you will weep tomorrow.
I am the sky and the exhausting gale.
I am the place of ice.
I am the debris trail.
And I am still a hand, a fingertip, a ring.
I am what there is no forgetting.
I am the one with truly broken heart.
I watch them fall and freeze and break apart.
And then the dead say, “We fell yet we were loved and we are lifted.
We froze yet we were loved and we are warm.
We broke apart yet we are here and we are whole.”