OVERALL WINNER — MARGARET SMILEY
Somewhere along the way, Richard Smiley thanked his wife Margaret for saving his life amid the horror of Cyclone Gabrielle.
The 76- year- old Hawke’s Bay grandmother dog- paddled below a 90cm gap in the garage door and into swift, murky floodwaters, ducking under submerged wires across a 20- row apple orchard to get help as her husband of 56 years — a non- swimmer — clung to the rafters.
Margaret got close enough for their neighbours in rural Puketapu to pull her on to a jet- ski to alert rescuers. When they cut through the garage roof and pulled 76- year- old Richard to safety, the water was tickling his nostrils.
Margaret Smiley is Our Hero for 2023, both for her own act of bravery and as an indefatigable emblem of the courage and determination of so many in Hawke’s Bay, Gisborne-Taira ¯ whiti and beyond to the beach communities of Auckland’s West Coast.
They didn’t give up when faced with a meteorological monster that took 11 lives and left a trail of broken — but not beaten — communities in its wake.
Smiley, living in Pakipaki while her wrecked Puketapu Rd home is rebuilt, doesn’t think she’s a hero.
“The kids and Richard and everybody have told me that, but I can’t sort of get it into my head because I thought, ‘ Well, anybody would do it’.
“But the amount of people I’ve spoken to who said they wouldn’t have, and I’ve said, ‘ Well, if you didn’t, Richard and I were going to die’ — we were going to drown, there’s no bulls*** about that.” Richard knew.
“He thanked me anyway, one time, for doing it.
“And yeah, I didn’t need any thanks . . . no, don’t get carried away, it wasn’t romantic. He said, ‘ It was a terrific thing you did.’ And I thought, ‘ Oh no, I didn’t think it was anything great.’”
Smiley, whose swimming ability is limited to dog paddling, is pleased her triumph acknowledges the actions of so many.
“I’m only one. There’s a lot of people that saved other people’s lives. Yeah, there were a lot of brave people.”
People like cousins Mikey and Rikki Kihi, and their friend Morehu Maxwell, who used Maxwell’s jet boat to rescue more than a dozen people and pets stuck on rooftops, trees, vehicles and a caravan in devastated Esk Valley, risking their own safety in a massive new waterway clogged with housing materials, powerlines, cars and silt.
Or Chance Wharekawa, who biked for two hours through knee- deep water to help his partner out of rising floodwaters in Pakowhai, near Hastings. In the air, New Zealand Defence Force helicopter pilots, rescue services and private operators plucked up to 400 people from rooftops, sheds, trees and cut- off communities, taking them away from the worst- hit areas to safety.
And then there’s former whitewater kayaking instructor Max Robertson — who may have tallied the most rescues by an individual — jumping into Esk Valley floodwaters again and again.
He first helped his dad, their dogs and two others — who had floated on to their property clinging to a drum — to safety.
Later, Robertson swam to help a couple, their child and two dogs get on to their roof, before pulling a neighbour, clinging to his home’s gutter, out of the water.
His final rescue would be of the man’s wife, who’d become jammed in glasshouses 50 metres away.
“She was blue,” he later told Hawke’s Bay Today of the moment he reached the freezing woman.
“[ She] was just hanging on.”
I didn’t need any thanks . . . no, don’t get carried away, it wasn’t romantic. Margaret Smiley