The aftermath of the 2011 Christchurch earthquake, Canterbury & Harewood Memorial Gardens and Crematoriums, and the importance of resilience for death care professionals.
On the 22nd of February 2011, a 6.3 magnitude earthquake hit the city of Christchurch on New Zealand’s South Island. The earthquake devastated the city and surrounding area, 185 people lost their lives and several thousand were injured.
In this webinar, we shine a spotlight on Barbara Terry, Manager of Christchurch’s Canterbury & Harewood Memorial Gardens and Crematoriums about the aftermath of the earthquake and how it impacted Barbara’s life and the lives of those around her. We also discuss the importance of resilience for people working in the death care industry coupled with living in an earthquake zone.
After three deeply satisfying years as a funeral director, Barbara Terry was approached regarding the role of general manager of the Cremation Society of Canterbury.
“My insight into the funeral director role has assisted me to ensure we’re responsive to sometimes complex needs. The 15 years in this role have required all of my skills, knowledge, determination and willingness to learn. Having a technical discussion planning a full rebrick of one of our Newton Cremators, evaluating arborist maintenance of our extensive tree collection, or attending an awards event acknowledging the skill of our dedicated gardening teams … the variety is a joy and no two days are the same. It’s about people – my loyal, skilled colleagues, supportive specialist contractors, wider industry professionals and of course the families we all serve … a beautiful formula.
Pilates is my ‘me time’ and I delight in cooking for family and friends and gathering them around our table.”
Lea-Ann McNeill
We might make a start. People will continue to trickle in and that’s okay. But conscious of time and based on experience, Barb and I can both talk under wet concrete with marbles in our mouths. So it’s probably a good thing to actually make a start. So welcome, everybody, to the next, I guess, in OpusXenta’s webinar series. Last year. Well, I guess since COVID we started running these webinar series and we kind of at that point titled them ‘A Conversation with’. It was all about ‘A Conversation with’, this year we’ve tweaked that just a little bit to call it ‘A Spotlight On’. And it’s really about spotlight on people or places or even events that sort of are shaping our industry or have a great story to tell that we can all learn from. So today I welcome Barbara Terry from the Christchurch, from the area of Christchurch. But Barb actually works for Invocare and she’s with the Canterbury Memorial Park. And I always pronounce Harewood wrong and I think that’s the Kiwi accent that I don’t quite get right.
But we’ll talk about that later. Before we start, though, and I introduce Barbara to you. Just a few little housekeeping bits and pieces. We do record the webinar that’s both for prosperity, of course, but also that we can share it later on with anybody who may not have been able to attend. And we share that broadly through many of the cemetery and funeral home associations that we partner with. So it is being recorded. You can ask as many questions as you like. Barbara and I will chat and I guess I’ll start leading that conversation. But if you have questions, please feel free to ask them. Along the bottom of your zoom screen, you’ll see a couple of features. There is a chat feature we actually try not to use that. We actually prefer the Q and A feature that you can see along the bottom of your screen. So if you want to ask a question, just pop it into that Q and A, and I’ll feed it into the conversation with Barb. It just saves kind of that conversation popping up in front of the screen for everybody. So, please, if you have questions, feel free to ask them.
Just pop them into that Q and A feed. That’s probably it. In terms of housekeeping, we try to run these webinars for around the 45 to 50 minutes, and people can often come and go as they need to. We understand you’re all at work and you have work commitments. I apologise straight up, I have got a terrible flu. I am surviving on a diet of Codral and Nurofen pretty much at the moment and I do have a cup of tea with me so if you see me sipping on my cup of tea, it’s because my throat is getting the best of me. So please bear with us today as we run through our webinar. So I’ll introduce Barb to you in a little bit more detail. So I think it’s fair to say Barbara’s heart is deep-seated in the industry, having started originally as a funeral director, and then she took on the management or the general manager position of the Cremation Society of Canterbury, 15 years in her role as funeral director and working, I guess, in Crematoriums, and I’m thinking now that you’ve started within Canterbury, Barb, this is probably a lot longer than 15 years now, I’m sure.
I want to say personally that I have visited the Crematorium and Memorial Park that Barbara runs, and they are some of the most beautiful memorial gardens that I have ever seen. And to know that I am seeing them after what happened with the earthquake is really quite a testament to Barbara and her team, because, honestly, there was no trace of it. And I think it was twelve years ago now, Barbara. Twelve years last week, maybe with that. Is that about right? Yeah. And then the big scheme of things, twelve years is not a really long time. It sounds like it is, but I think when you visit the city of Christchurch and you see the works that continue to be ongoing in there, it’s quite a testament to Barbara and her team as to how beautiful the park now looks. And I think that’s a really important message that I got from Barb is around the importance of her colleagues and her team and I know from talking to Barb that that’s going to come through as she talks to you today. So I think maybe the best place to start Barb, is at the beginning.
So I guess we’ve all seen images of what happened with the earthquake, but we’d all love to hear it, I guess, as to how it played out for you and your team. Welcome, Barbara.
Barbara Terry
Thank you. Thank you for that welcome and for the invitation to be here today. It’s a little bit daunting, I will admit, in thinking about this discussion today. It made me actually appreciate that in the twelve years since we had our major event, I’ve become very conscious of other international and national natural disasters, probably mainly, but also challenges that communities face. So at the moment, the families and communities in Turkey and Syria dealing with their devastating earthquake, and in New Zealand at the moment, we have communities in the far north and the east coast who are coping with the damage and the devastation of Cyclone Gabrielle. So my condolences to those communities and our thoughts are certainly with them as they put themselves back together and rebuild. So twelve years ago, set the scene. It was a typical Tuesday, a lovely day. I chosen to wear a dress, high heels and a new pair of pantyhose on the day. Not the best attire for a natural disaster. As intimated I managed two sites the Canterbury site on the eastern side of the city and the Harewood site on the northwest side. We had services in both chapels and at the time when the earthquake struck, just before 1 o’clock in the afternoon, the service at Canterbury was due to start.
It was a casket placed, a lot of people attending, probably at least 200 people. The service at Harewood there were a lot of people gathering because it was to be a large service. The description I’m going to give of how the day unfolded does centre around Canterbury because that’s where I wasut but also it’s where we suffered the most damage. I was sitting in my office and chatting to a funeral director. We became conscious of a rumbling and then the force of the earthquake took over. He was thrown from his chair across my office. I stood, embraced the filing cabinet behind me. It’s well secured to the wall now and I could hear at reception glass display cabinets falling, crashing, people crying out. Our senses were assailed by all of these frightening noises and the movement and the sound of the earthquake felt like it lasted for minutes, but it was really only seconds. So once I assessed what was happening in reception, made sure nobody was injured, my thoughts turned to the many people at the chapel. My youngest son was actually working for a few days in our memorial gardens. At the time.
He was a student and had a term break. He came to check on me and I immediately sent him to the chapel to assist. I checked in with my gardeners, gave them instructions, and then in my high heels, I hightailed it along the street to the chapel. I couldn’t see the building, it was surrounded by trees. It was built in 1936, unreinforced masonry. I really didn’t know what I would see and was so grateful when I could see the building still standing. Over time, I became quite an expert in unreinforced masonry and many, many times sent up thanks to the engineers, builders, architects, who built that building in the 1930s. I was incredibly grateful. What confronted me when I got to the chapel was perimeter fencing, which was concrete block, had all collapsed. People had poured out of the chapel. That my chapel support person and the funeral director assured me that there was nobody injured and that everybody was out of the building. They were dazed, they were weeping, they were hugging each other. The ground seemed to have developed waves. So the family had come for a funeral service. The casket was still inside the building.
The building was still standing. The aftershocks continued, and we discussed between myself and the funeral director. We needed to do something for this family. So I decided that my chapel support person who was prepared to and I would go into the chapel and bring the casket out so the family could have a simple committal. Others wanted to help, including my son. I wouldn’t let them. I was prepared to take the risk. I didn’t want anybody else to. We took a church trolley in, and there’s a couple of steps up to the bed where the casket sits. So I’m not sure how, but we managed to just the two of us lift the casket down, place it on the church trolley, and bring it out into a safe area at the front of the chapel. After shocks continued to rumble. I remember noticing the disarray in the chapel foyer and in the chapel, wooden pews with broken backs, things tossed but I tried not to really absorb that because there was a job to do. So we had this simple committal. I made sure that everybody that was there had someone to help them. They had a means of trying to get home.
We were actually in our own little bubble. We didn’t know what the rest of the city was experiencing. We didn’t know there was 185 fatalities. All of that knowledge was to come later. In my office when I was chatting to the funeral director. I said to him I’ll just charge my phone. It was only on 18% with a dodgy battery, that 18% had to last me for an entire complex, afternoon and evening. Communication was very patchy it was difficult to get in contact with people. I made sure that my Harewood team were okay. I had a great team. I knew that they would look after things there. I was assured that the building was secure, there were no injuries, and people were going to eventually make their way home. So that was how it unfolded in those moments.
Lea-Ann McNeill
I think Barb and I know that you don’t necessarily like to harp on this, but I also want people to understand that Barb was at work. So Barbara also lived in this area, as did many of your staff. So while you were working in this space, there was stuff for you going on at home that you didn’t necessarily find out about till later either. And as I say, I know you don’t like to harp on about it, but it would be great if you could share a little bit of that.
Barbara Terry
So I wasn’t sure when you’d like to pop that in, but I’ve made a few notes about the personal story. Now, this is the bit that can get a person a bit weepy. Okay.
Lea-Ann McNeill
It’s okay. You’re amongst friends, Barb. We talked about this.
Barbara Terry
I was very conscious that for all of us, we had family, elderly relatives, small children. It was a terrifying time for people who needed to be able to be with their loved ones. I established that my husband was alive, but that was about all we could really establish. Once I got a sense of, okay, this is how we are here later, much later in the day, I managed to make my way home by this stage details filtering through about the enormity of what the city was facing. Everyone was terrified. We didn’t know whether we had the biggest earthquake or whether that was still to come. We were just dealing with what was in front of us and trusting that we would be okay. I could only drive a short distance. I had to abandon my car. Liquefaction was everywhere. And actually, just on that note, the memorial gardens were in ash memorial gardens and liquefaction was something that we got to know. It was a term that we had no knowledge of before. It’s this liquid that bubbles up from the ground and then settles and becomes this solid muck with dreadful odour. It was as if somebody had sprinkled fairy dust around the memorial gardens and said, this place is special.
It needs to be protected. We only had a tiny, tiny little patch of liquefaction in the very back of the memorial gardens. If it had suffered the way the surrounding homes and streets did, it would have devastated it. So I really didn’t understand the impact of the liquefaction until I tried to come home. I abandoned my car, walked, spoke to people, gained information, got to a very big bridge that I had to cross to get home, and noticed an elderly lady approaching it and I had spoken to this elderly lady at the chapel earlier in the day, and I said to her, oh, my Lord, have you walked all this way? And she said, yes, I have, your Barbara. You spoke to me and gave me a hug, and I said, Where are you going? And she was going further towards Sumner to the very badly damaged areas. And she said, We’ve got to cross this bridge. And there were large gaps that had opened in the bridge. And I said to her, you can’t cross that. And she said, if you hold my hand, we will. She was very stoic and very determined. So we approached this bridge and we waited for an aftershock because they were rolling through.
And then we counted and we jumped and we jumped and we jumped across the openings until we got to the other side of the bridge. And I made sure that she was okay with some people she carried on her way. And I came up the hill and as I walked up the hill, I became very aware it was so quiet, very eerily quiet. And the houses up the hill, as I walked, they were in various states of collapse. Damaged, broken windows. Curtains were blowing out of the windows. It was like I imagine a movie set might be. I could hear the sound of helicopters, which we became very accustomed to, and as I got further up the hill, my son came walking towards me with our dog on a temporary tether. He had gone home earlier once I could release him and he needed to check on our precious dog. He told me to sit down. I said in the gutter? He said, not good, Mum. You have to sit down. And then he struggled to find the words to tell me that it wasn’t good at home and that’s the bit that catches me everytime because it was so tough for him to have to have that conversation. But we linked arms and walked up the hill and got home. There’s some images that I shared. The concrete blocks for his bedroom collapsed in. If he’s been in there, well, that’s the scary part.
Lea-Ann McNeill
I’ll pop those photos up, Barb. I know there’s some others we want to show later, but so everybody can have a look at these, I will show you the photos that Barbara shared of her home. There you go, Barbara. Can you see that now?
Barbara Terry
Yeah. That’s my son’s bedroom. The middle photo. The kitchen. There was some lovely red wine along with olive oil and flour and everything else all mixed in. We’d actually started cleaning up by the time I took that photo. We just had to get a shovel and start shovelling it in. And the photo on the right, number nine. And my lovely son and husband. We just wanted to go home after the initial dramatic days were over. We were, unfortunately, one of the hill families that had a terrible fight with our insurance company. Very cynical, very protracted and six years later, finally, we got to put the key in the front door of our rebuilt home. It was a very difficult time that really tried us as a family, as it did everybody else. And our story is very common and I want to emphasise that in everything that I described today, throughout the city, throughout other communities, there are hundreds and thousands of stories just like that. It’s not unique.
Lea-Ann McNeill
Barbara, just to get factual for a minute, because this is something that fascinated me and I didn’t understand. I mean, in Australia, we don’t get a lot of earthquakes. We do get pockets of them. But you described to me the type of earthquake this was because there are a couple of different types. Maybe that’s worth sharing too.
Barbara Terry
Well, look, for that particular earthquake, it caused so much damage on the hills because of the upward thrust. So the homes, everything, there was a huge, massive upward thrust. And then before everything settled, there was a second upward thrust and a demonstration of that, and I actually couldn’t find a photo. We had a thick front door mat and the house ate the front door, so the front door mat so the mat was shunted underneath, the house came up and the house settled back down on the corner of it. So there are earthquakes where it’s more a ripple effect. There’s fabulous technical terms for it that I can’t do justice to but our district, the Canterbury Region, had suffered an earthquake in the September before, September 2010 that didn’t have the same impact on the city, but had devastating effects on some of the districts. And it had different character, I believe so the noise, I’d grown up in the south of the South Island. We grew up with earthquakes. There would be minor earthquakes quite often. Nothing devastating or frightening, but that was the noise I’ve never experienced.
Lea-Ann McNeill
That was day one, I guess. How do you move on from that? Because you have to start somewhere on a rebuild and my guess is that that really does happen from sort of day one, even into day two, you would have had services that would have booked the following days. So I guess how do you keep service delivery going in some part and then start to rebuild? Because there’s the reaction and then there’s that recovery component.
Barbara Terry
The news, in New Zealand the Funeral Directors Association they have a group, the Funeral Disaster Response Team, and they are led by Simon Manning in Wellington, and they mobilise when there is a need. So they were amazing. They came to Christchurch as quickly as they could. Of course, getting in and out of the city was very difficult. They established headquarters at Lincoln University just outside of the city and set about putting in place what they could to support the industry. So that was amazing. For us as Cemcrem, it was just us. We had cremations that were scheduled to happen that day. We had services booked, as you say, so we needed to see a plan and we had to turn to manual systems because we couldn’t rely on technology or communication. So the first thing was, are my people okay? Are their families okay? Are their homes okay? We had quite a range of homeless to slight damage. The people in my team and also in wider Christchurch who had no damage over time, they felt guilty because they felt as if they weren’t sharing the burden. But we relied on them, we needed them.
They offered us some normalcy in small what might seem small, but just incredibly valuable ways. So we needed to determine, right, people are okay, our buildings are they safe? Is our gas safe? Because our Cremators are LPG 45 kilo bottle powered. So we needed to understand are our buildings okay? Is our infrastructure okay? We had no power, no water, no sewerage. At our Harewood site, it fortunately is self contained in that it has its own artesian water well and amazingly, a septic tank. We’re not hooked up to the local authority. We had a hard drive, and a server, there was no cloud. So we just lifted everything that we needed to from Canterbury, took it to Harewood, set ourselves up and then set about how can we do this? The value of having strong relationships with local providers, I just can’t emphasise enough. Remote help is no good when people can’t get to you. And so hands and feet on the ground, are what are needed? We have stunning, our gas engineers are amazing. Our local refractory, bricky, electrician, IT support, all of these people are local people. It’s not quite the same now, but I’ve still got all of those people I could call on if I needed to.
They were vital. And the new person that came into that dynamic is structural engineers. Of course, they were in high demand, but essential. So I managed to form a relationship with a structural engineering company. They understood the requirements for us to be able to continue functioning. Because to put that in perspective, Christchurch Local Authority has never provided its own Cremation services. In the 1930s, when TL Jones, a local engineer, was convinced that Cremation was the way of the future, he had contact with the local authority and they were in discussions, but they took too long for him so he set about establishing the Canterbury Memorial Gardens and Crematorium, established the company in 36, started Cremating in 37. So we didn’t have anyone to fall back on. We had to be cremating. Our community needed that of us.
Lea-Ann McNeill
I was going to say that’s a really interesting conversation and this is a little bit of a question without notice, Barb, because you are right at the time of disasters, and while Australians may not have experienced earthquakes like you have, we’ve certainly experienced floods, we’ve certainly experienced fires. And I suppose all of us through COVID at some point those of us in the industry were being asked about those sorts of capacities. If we were going to have a significant increase in fatalities. These are the facilities that need to be operating. I don’t know what your experience is, but sometimes my experience has been actually cemeteries and crematorium are the afterthought. They’re not often considered in city’s incident response plans. I’m interested in your thoughts around that. But then how do we advocate so that they are included in these sorts of things?
Barbara Terry
Look, Lea-Ann, you’re quite right. And also another factor at that time, twelve years ago, we were privately owned, so we were not part of the Invocare network. Invocare offers us a great deal of strength and so the story today would be quite different apart from the fact that actually you need cremators, since then there are three small providers in the district now, so everything is not completely reliant on us. However, we are the largest provider between my two locations. The Cremation is the end of the chain as far as the industry is concerned and they think nothing of booking a Cremation for the end of the day on Friday with the ashes required over the weekend because the family had to fly away. Actually, that’s not that straightforward so we tend to start our planning for anything at okay, what result is required here and then work our way back. Where do we have to start so that we can deliver at that point because we’re so used to always being the end of the line.
Lea-Ann McNeill
Yeah, absolutely. And often the last people thought about around that. Again, I’m just going to mention if anyone’s got any questions, please feel free to pop them into the Q and A feature. But rebuild Barb, and again, I’ve got some photos to share whenever you would like. But as I say, I’ve been to the Memorial Park, there’s been a tremendous rebuild there, so how did that happen? And again, I keep thinking about the impact to you and your team personally. There’s this stuff going on for you all at home trying to rebuild while you’re also trying to rebuild not only this really critical infrastructure, but continue to deliver those services to families that we fall back on what we so desperately need in times of disasters. And things like services for our loved ones are one of those things that people really hold dear to.
Barbara Terry
They do. You’re right. The next morning it was a tough night, but my husband and I made our way to a friend’s place. They said their house was okay, well their barn was okay and they had some water and whiskey and we thought.
Lea-Ann McNeill
That was all you needed.
Barbara Terry
So we sort of got a bit of rest that night. The next morning we had to obviously make sure the buildings were safe. But also we had up to 3000 sets of ashes that had collapsed. The walls had collapsed. The ashes were fortunately in containers and they were marked, named. There was an amazing group that evolved out of the earthquakes called the Student Army, which has become quite renowned, legend, an amazing young man, Sam Johnson was there. He became a leader overnight, mobilising his fellow university students. And he’s a good speaker. His story is an amazing one. He’s somebody that you should look at.
Lea-Ann McNeill
Write that down Barb.
Barbara Terry
Yes. Sam Johnson, the Student Army well, we had our own mini version. My son and his fellow, his student friends, those that could came the next day along with one or two other volunteers. And actually one of those volunteers is still on our staff today, which was pretty wonderful. But they came those that could helped us collect the ashes. If the plaque was near and it was partially intact, we’d put them together. We identified a shed that we could safely lock and store them in. Those students that found that a little bit confronting we sent them off to get us food and water because the dairy wasn’t open. Food and water, fresh water weren’t actually that easy to come by.
Lea-Ann McNeill
And for all the Australians out there, the dairy is the local shop.
Barbara Terry
Thanks Lea-Ann. We did that for a start. What came next was looking after the families and our staff families, and I can’t emphasise enough, the ongoing community cremations. We have a great relationship with the funeral directors. We had that great relationship with our suppliers, our contractors and specialists. They were all in high demand, but they made sure that they could give us what we needed so that we could continue to meet our community responsibilities, because it was the community deaths that we had to deal with at that time. The earthquake victims, they came later.
And sadly, only a few weeks later in March, I think it may have been the 11th of March, Japan suffered a mega thrust earthquake off the coast, causing a tsunami, tsunami and the devastation of the earthquake. So the families who we have a lot of international students in one of the buildings that collapsed, and a lot of those students were Japanese, those families travelled to New Zealand as quickly as they could and then eventually they were told, actually, you can’t bring your children, your loved ones, home to be cremated. You have to do that in New Zealand. Now, fortunately, we are knowledgeable on specific Japanese ceremonies for cremation. So we worked very closely with our local funeral directors to meet the needs of these families. We worked six, seven days a week, some weeks, whatever was necessary. We just did what we had to to meet those needs. And I’ve had the pleasure of meeting some of those families in subsequent years when they would come back for the anniversaries. And if I noticed the memorials that they don’t have flowers, I popped them there. I’d like to think that someone would do that for me
Lea-Ann McNeill
You talked about we started to talk about rebuild and the ashes, walls, Barbara that fell and again, I’ve just popped these photos up because I think think rebuild is a really important thing to talk about. I mean, people can get swept up with what happens, but it’s the rebuild and the resilience and the courage of the team, I think that becomes the message from most of these stories. And these are the walls now.
Barbara Terry
So we took a long time to design walls that we felt would withstand future aftershocks, devastating earthquakes well they wouldn’t. And so the facade that you can see is actually polystyrene. We designed something that was very lightweight and with the ability to make adjustments of the foundations in the future, if there were aftershocks that did cause ground disturbance, but didn’t actually collapse the walls. So they took a long time to design and build. The chapel, we took a long time to look at this. We took a long time to get the right advice. It was an unreinforced masonry building. It’s an octagonal shape, and it’s believed that the shape of the building actually helped us stand strong. We, after a period of time, closed the chapel for some months. We stripped the interior. We put a structural strengthening pinning system into the internal walls, into the interior of the chapel, into the walls, replastered it, put a new floor in, and there you have the result. We took care to be advised and implement a system that was going to give this beautiful lady another 100 years. It had stood strong and protected 200 people on the day, and I wanted its life to continue.
So that was a very satisfying project to be part of.
Lea-Ann McNeill
I guess I was going to say I am conscious of time. Barb so for you and you and I’ve talked a lot about this because originally I was using words like resilience. Resilience to describe you and your team, and you kind of actually said, no, Lea-Ann it was actually more about courage. And I guess that’s a great lesson to come out of some of this for us all.
Barbara Terry
Yeah, you hear resilience a lot, and it’s a quality that we all respect and promote and aspire to contain. For me, I’m a very instinctive person, and I believe it takes courage to actually be prepared to act. Once you have the courage to act, I believe resilience comes as you are willing to continue to act, to continue to respond. And so it was the courage that came first.
Lea-Ann McNeill
Yeah, that courage to take the first step.
Barbara Terry
I believe it is. For me it is. People look for a leader when they are faced with difficulty, whatever that difficulty may be, they look, they turn and look for someone that they can trust that will make them feel safe. If you’re, a manager, or have a leadership position in your role, they assume that you will be that person. And if they’re physically surrounded by threat, then they need that. So are you able to deliver that? Well, you don’t know. You don’t expect to have to be challenged. You don’t expect to be put to the test. I never believed I would. When I went into my house to get our passports, I felt compelled. I had to protect our identities. Don’t ask me why. My son wanted to come. I said no. I went and I got our passports. I got a tracksuit and some sneakers. I went out to the garden, I got changed out of my high heels. Don’t know what happened to the pantyhose, and went to the toilet in the garden. And that began the recovery. It was the courage to do those things. I did them instinctively. I didn’t question it. And everybody around me, we linked arms and we supported each other.
We supported if someone was feeling vulnerable, somebody would feel strong. And it’s only in doing that and empowering people to do that. Be a servant leader, do what you do for the benefit of your staff, your community. Don’t do it for yourself because that doesn’t bring success.
Lea-Ann McNeill
I think that’s the message of most kind of true leaders out there. I do have a couple of questions. First one was around the building redesign, certainly with the walls. So was there consultation with the families around that new build and what that design and structure might look like to help protect their ashes into the future?
Barbara Terry
We didn’t consult with the community on that aspect, but there were certain resources that we had that were so valuable and one was photographs. We’ve got a great photo library. So people, maybe 60 years ago had chosen a position in a memorial because they wanted to be near their cousin. Our paper records are great. We have that. They’ve been well filed, well archived, we have access to them. So we were able to, in combination with this, reinstate the walls so that people were next to the person they were next to before. And the public were very interesting. We would get phone calls as soon as communication was open. Are my family memorials okay? They were concerned about that and so we had to assure them and for some people we had to send a photo. But sometimes people were so stoic and so practical, they just expected us to be able to continue and deliver normal services in our normal way. And if we weren’t able to do that, they were quite judgmental, quite aggressive, and we had to take care not to take that personally. When you’re tired and fatigued and doing the best you can every day, you can feel quite worn down by certain people’s attitudes.
Lea-Ann McNeill
Sorry, Barb, I’m sorry to interrupt. Because you talked about the New Zealand funeral directors or the collective that have this disaster response group. Somebody else asked a really good question here. Is there an opportunity for the New Zealand Cemeteries and Crematory Collective to engage with this response group? So actually, the response group is far broader than just funeral response, so that there is an opportunity to keep those things going.
Barbara Terry
Look, I know that those two groups are moving closer together and are talking, that would be so valuable. It caught everyone by surprise. Everyone thought that there might be a massive earthquake in Wellington at some time, but I don’t think it was ever considered that there could be something like this that would happen in a main centre elsewhere. There’s been so many lessons that have been learned from the Christchurch situation and I think one of the strongest lessons is people recognise that they have to be agile, they have to have strong relationships, people that they can draw on. And don’t fix your mind that you will act in a certain way, in a certain circumstance that may not work. You may have to do something entirely different.
Lea-Ann McNeill
Yeah. And probably on that note, it’s 9.55. So I did warn you all that Barbara and I could chat, so I don’t know if anybody’s got any sort of last questions, but you answered mine. I figured the one burning question I had, which is always a terrible pun when we do these things, I did wonder how the panty hose had survived the day. You kind of answered that question.
Barbara Terry
Yeah. Long gone.
Lea-Ann McNeill
Long gone. Well, then, look, thank you on behalf of the team. Sorry, Lisa just jumped in with a last minute question. Coffin supply? I guess probably not even just coffins, Lisa. I mean, there’s a lot of things that go into a funeral service and cems and crems activity. How was supply within the industry in the days that followed?
Barbara Terry
Look, actually, the caskets themselves, we’re fortunate we have a casket manufacturer in Christchurch.
Lea-Ann McNeill
It’s that local resource thing you were talking about.
Barbara Terry
Centralising is all very fine for certain things, but we’re two vulnerable islands. And so if caskets were okay, other funeral supply products do come from the North Island and there were challenges around that. But I have to say that we were recognised as an essential service and there was a lot of work that was done by the Funeral Directors Association response team to actually support everything that we needed to keep going. There’s a little quote that I actually came across a day or two ago when I was thinking about this and I wondered if I could share it as a parting thought.
Lea-Ann McNeill
Please do.
Barbara Terry
Okay, I’m going to read it. The good you do today may be forgotten. Do good anyway. Honesty and transparency make you vulnerable. Be honest and transparent anyway. What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight. Build anyway. Give the world the best you have, and you may get hurt. Give the world your best anyway. Mother Theresa. It’s a message to aspire to and it actually just seemed to put in one beautiful phrase, everything that was required of us at the time and ongoing.
Lea-Ann McNeill
I’m not sure if it’s at your end or mine, but I’m getting a little bit of lag through the zoom Barbara, so for those that didn’t quite get all of that, I might ask Barbara to send that through to me so that I can share it with everyone. It might not be your end, it might actually be mine, who knows? But look, on that note, on behalf of OpusXenta, and those that have joined us today with the Webinar, Barbara, I just want to thank you. It’s always an absolute pleasure to talk to you. I feel in a very short space of time, I’ve found a friend, I’ve found a kindred spirit in you and that’s been absolutely lovely. I want to give a quick plug. Also, we talk about New Zealand funerals and New Zealand cemeteries. Both have conferences coming up in the coming months. So if you do have an opportunity to get across, I do know the cemetery’s conference is in Wellington in May and I think the funeral home conference is actually very soon. I’m not quite across the dates on those ones, but a beautiful place to visit and always great lessons learned.
I know I’ve learned from New Zealand in a really practical sense through managing cemeteries, not only from you, Barbara, in this instance, but also when you had the terrible issues with the massacre in your mosque and the lessons that we learned from Cindy out of that in terms of how to respond to that kind of a disaster. I know stood me in really good stead when I was managing cemeteries. So lots to learn from our New Zealand counterparts. So, once again, Barbara, thank you very much. Like you, I think we all send our best wishes to everybody in New Zealand, particularly up in the north there, where I know that they are continuing to battle what’s happened with Cyclone Gabriel. So our best wishes to everybody in New Zealand as well. Thanks, everybody. I’ve got some thank yous coming through the chat as well. People saying, thank you so much for your courage today and well done. So I think that’s probably a great way to end it all, Barbara. As I said, we’ve recorded the webinar. We will make that available to everyone. But for now, go out and have a great day, feeling inspired I think.
Barbara Terry
And people are welcome to reach out to me if there’s anything that they are interested to know, any particular additional detail, don’t hesitate. Love to share.
Lea-Ann McNeill
Thanks very much, everyone.
Barbara Terry
Thank you.
Lea-Ann McNeill
Bye now.
Barbara Terry
Bye.
