Remembering NZ’s deadliest disaster
A hundred years ago New Zealand suffered its deadliest disaster, but it’s not commemorated the way it should be, writes Geoffrey Rice.
The Hawke’s Bay earthquake of 1931 is usually described as New Zealand’s worst natural disaster, with a death toll of 256.
Wikipedia distinguishes between natural disasters, caused by the natural processes of the earth (avalanches, droughts, earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, wildfires, etc), and environmental disasters, caused by human activity (wildfires caused by arson, nuclear leaks, toxic gas leaks, etc).
Wars form a category of disaster by themselves, in which human activity (or hatred) causes massive loss of life. New Zealand’s blackest day in wartime was 12 October 1917 at the Battle of Passchendaele, when the NZ Division suffered 3700 casualties, including 835 officers and men killed.
Accidents such as train or plane crashes obviously involve human activity, or the failure of technology. The Erebus disaster of 28 November 1979 has been described as New Zealand’s ‘‘worst peacetime disaster’’, with the loss of 257 passengers and crew when Air New Zealand Flight 901 crashed in Antarctica.
But there is another type of disaster that doesn’t quite fit any of these broad categories, and this one has killed many more New Zealanders than any natural disaster or accident to date, and that is the disaster caused by disease.
Disease disasters should perhaps be counted among natural disasters, as they are caused by organisms in the natural world – bacteria or viruses. An epidemic is when a disease kills people in a single town or country, but when the same infection kills many people in many countries it is called a pandemic.
New Zealand’s worst disease disaster was the so-called Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918. Worldwide this was humanity’s second-worst recorded pandemic, killing in excess of 50 million people. (The worst was the Black Death of the 14th century, which killed about a third of the European population.)
New Zealand’s experience of the
1918 influenza pandemic remains the only country-level flu mortality in the world analysed on the basis of individual death certificates. Historians in the 1980s established a known death toll of
8092 registered deaths, but Maori registration was seriously incomplete, and the best estimate of total New Zealand mortality was set conservatively at 8573.
Recent research on New Zealand military deaths overseas has added another 64 flu deaths that had been missed in previous counts, bringing the total to 8637. Yet there were probably several hundred Waikato Maori deaths that were neither registered nor reported, so the grand total may be nearly 9000.
New Zealand lost over 18,000 men killed in the four years of World War I.
Yet in the space of only six weeks late in 1918 half that number, mostly civilians, were killed by the 1918 flu pandemic.
From a total population of just over a million, 9000 yields a death rate of 8.8 per thousand. But the
1918 Maori population of about
52,000 suffered a much heavier loss, close to 5 per cent. This was in line with the losses of many indigenous populations in 1918, but not as bad as that of Western Samoa, which lost 20 per cent of its population, thanks to the negligence of the New Zealand military authorities who failed to impose quarantine, despite alarming reports from Auckland. (By contrast, American Samoa had no deaths, thanks to a prompt maritime quarantine.) Western Samoa suffered the worst recorded death rate anywhere in the world in the 1918 flu pandemic.
If we count the 1918 flu pandemic as a natural disaster, its death toll easily eclipses that of the Napier earthquake. As a peacetime disaster, it also eclipses the Erebus Disaster. In six weeks the 1918 flu killed 10 times more New Zealanders than our worst day in WWI.
Each year on Anzac Day we remember our war dead. Perhaps it is time we spared a thought each November for the thousands of New Zealanders who died in peacetime just after the WWI.
It has often been said that New Zealand’s losses in that war ‘‘forged the nation’’ out of a collective sense of shared grief and loss. Yet it can also be argued that the experience of the 1918 flu, when neighbours risked their lives to help neighbours, and communities rallied to care for the sick, helped confirm the more admirable qualities of the Kiwi character – bravery, compassion, fairness, resourcefulness, good humour and optimism in the face of adversity.
Most of the soldiers died lonely deaths on foreign battlefields, but the flu was fought here at home, in every town and in at least half of all households. This was a crucible of shared experience for a young nation. It should not be forgotten, in case something similar ever happens again. Black November, Black Flu 1918.