Missing people at Piha: The disturbing pattern - Shane Te Pou

OPINION:

There aren’t many happy stories about Piha. Arguably New Zealand’s most famous beach, it takes its name from the monolithic headland bisecting the slick black sand, beaten against ceaselessly by mighty waves like a waka’s prow: Te Piha, more commonly known as Lion Rock.

On this rock, the neck of an eroded volcano, the people of the Whakaari pā made their last stand against a Ngāti Whātua war party led by Tainui warrior Kāwharu. You can still see the middens and terraces of their citadel. Along the coast, the image of Hinerangi, daughter of a local rangatira, has been sculpted into the cliff by Tangaroa and Hauauru, the west wind. She faces outward, forever pining for her husband who had been swept out to sea from the rocks below.

In 1948 Walter Ashton, the former secretary of the Auckland Trades Council and active member of the Auckland branch of the Communist Party, went missing in South Piha. His car had been abandoned and locals reported seeing a strange man climbing the track to the rocks at Dawson’s Ledge in pouring rain. The Labour MP for Wanganui, JB Cotterill, accused the then-police minister of poorly investigating the disappearance, highlighting that £1600 of financial aid for the USSR had gone missing too. He expressed hope that Ashton had not “been caught in the sweep of Russia’s sickle”.

The next year a French engineer named Jean Venot was found dead near Lion Rock, his personal documents floating in the sea near the cruiser “Black Prince” at Devonport naval base. His head had been wrapped in a towel with a bullet hole in it; the coroner ruled his death a suicide.

Quentin Godwin, Éloi Rolland, Cherie Vousden, Kim Bambus, Laurence Wu and Iraena Asher: six people who have disappeared at Auckland's Piha Beach.

These days the stories we know of Piha are those of Quentin Godwin, Iraena Asher, Cherie Vousden, Éloi Rolland, Laurence Wu, and Kim Bambus. These are tragic stories and are each without an ending, persisting in pain and uncertainty for their families.

Honestly, I avoid Piha. I always have - there is an unsettling wairua, and the wild water seems cruel and uninviting. Lately, though, I find myself thinking of the place often, my morbid curiosity piqued by Black Coast Vanishings, an excellent documentary series commissioned for Three. Co-directors Candida Beveridge and Megan Jones have put together a true-crime masterclass, presenting Piha as a murky enclave of secretive outcasts pulled straight out of the movie Deliverance.

The series is engrossing and beautifully made, but it struggles with the lack of concrete evidence and the manifold, anecdotal accounts of the interviewees. The fact of the matter is we don’t know what has happened to the missing six, and attempts at drawing conclusions where none are easily offered can quickly veer into the conspiratorial.

Is there a mākutu on the land? Are these the individual victims of an endemic mental health crisis, or the collective victims of a serial killer? Or must we apply Occam’s Razor, and conclude that these missing people are just that, missing, in the dense native bush? I won’t speculate.

If we consider just what we know: there is a disturbing pattern of people going missing from this beach and remaining unfound. Investigations into these disappearances have been at best inconclusive and at worst totally inadequate; in some cases police have arguably been hasty in considering suicide as a cause. Locals point to unsavoury elements within the local community and several women have come forward with accounts of being stalked or harassed by men in the bush around the Mercer Bay track.

I believe what is done in the dark will be seen in the light. There is clearly cause and public will for a renewed inquiry into these cases, and I entreat the police to consider this seriously. By the same token, I encourage anyone with information to come forward and continue this conversation publicly and without fear of rebuke. We are worried and we are listening.

At the very least, there should be CCTV along the Mercer Bay Track, and increased signage warning of the dangerous terrain. A fence at the top of the hill, as it were, not an ambulance at the bottom.

In the meantime, it remains that many Aucklanders, women in particular, are rightfully fearful of the area and its history. In the wake of the release of Black Coast Vanishings, locals have mobilised, forming walking groups in a grim, necessary display of solidarity. I stand in solidarity with them, and the loved ones of the missing, in demanding answers.

All of us have a right to feel safe in our communities and to enjoy the beauty of this land in peace. Apathy is not the path that will lead us there.

I orea te tuatara ka patu ki waho.

A problem is solved by continuing to find solutions.