28 LISTENER JUNE 8 2019
W
henever a man was
killed on the Mana-
pouri power project,
work would stop for
24 hours. A serious
drinking bout would
begin in Deep Cove
aboard the Wan-
ganella, the ship that was home for 500
workers. They sold more beer on those days,
recalls the ship’s storeman, John Mutton,
than on any others. “Everybody would be
drunk.”
Twenty-five years
later, says Mutton, it is
hard to describe how
close-knit the work-
force was. Everyone felt
the death. Each worker
gave £5 for the widow.
“If anybody was found who had not put in
their £5,” says Mutton, “they were thrown
overboard.”
Eighteen men died on the job, which was
one of the toughest engineering projects
ever done in New Zealand.
Men from more than 40 nationalities
worked together to bore a 10km tunnel
through the mountains between Lake
Manapouri and Doubtful Sound, where the
Wanganella was moored.
They hollowed a huge cave out of the
hard rock at the lake’s west arm and built
a power station in it. They blasted a 20kmroad out of the mountains over Wilmot
Pass.
One day, a man was blown to pieces near
the summit. An “acceptable” rate of loss was
one life per kilometre of tunnel.
When they brought a body out of the
mountain, recalls Mutton, “the whole ship
was in mourning. We’d go down to the pic-
ture theatre and hold a church service. Even
if you didn’t know him, you would go down
there. It was just respect and courtesy.”
The men on the Wanganella – some of
them veterans from the
Australian Snowy River
project – were hard,
macho types. There
were Italians, Greeks,
Yugoslavs, Lithuanians,
Estonians, Americans,
Spaniards, Irishmen,
Scots, Pacific Islanders and Anzacs. No lan-
guage linked them except the language of
liquor.
“When they found out that one guy had
voted against 10 o’clock closing [in the 1967
referendum on pub hours], they threw him
overboard,” says Mutton. Only beer was
allowed in the Wanganella’s bars, but the
workers smuggled in spirits as well. “When
you opened a bottle of spirits, you threw the
top out of the porthole.”
Whenever a quarrel broke out on the ship,
the resident police officer would lead both
men down to the gym, provide them withboxing gloves, and referee the fight. “When
it was over, they would shake hands and go
back upstairs for a jug,” says Mutton, who
spent three years on the boat, from 1965 to- In his last year, the two tunnelling
parties – one starting from the fjord, and
the other from the lake – met in the heart
of the mountain.
The wages were terrific, says Mutton. He
got £40 a week on the Wanganella, four
times the normal storeman’s wage. The
hard-rock tunnellers got as much as £60 a
week, a colossal sum. Huge illegal gambling
sessions took place in the ship’s gymnasium
(it was soundproof).
“I went on leave once with a Greek fella
and we couldn’t get a rental car in Welling-
ton. He went down and bought a new Fiat
- and it had to be red. He paid cash for it,”
SCHOOL OF
HARD ROCK
The Manapouri hydropower scheme
of the 1960s was one of the country’s
toughest engineering projects and
took an enormous human toll.
An “acceptable”
rate of loss was onelife per kilometre
of tunnel.The Listener turns 80 this year and in
celebration of reaching that milestone
we’re delving into the treasures of our
archive. This article, by Anthony Hubbard,
ran in the January 8, 1994, magazine.