Almost eight years on, the Pike River Mine and CTV building collapse tragedies are still in the headlines. In both cases, victims' families, dissatisfied with how events transpired, have pursued their own justice. What happens when the bereaved want no part of it? MICHAEL WRIGHT reports.

When it got really bad, Marion Curtin would turn on Concert FM. Any sort of music worked, really, but Curtin was a devout Radio New Zealand listener, so the public broadcaster was her first choice. It wasn't the music she was interested in so much, though. Over on RNZ National the words 'Pike River' could be uttered at any moment. On Concert FM, you only needed to avoid the news bulletins.

Curtin, from Christchurch, has spent almost eight years in quiet opposition to what the public could be forgiven for mistaking was the united front of the Pike River families. For most of that time, a group of victims' family members have fought for accountability over the tragedy and lobbied governments to re-enter the mine to recover the bodies of the 29 who died there, including Curtin's son, Richard Holling​.

Their efforts have commanded considerable media coverage. This month, stories have focused on the efforts of experts in reviewing options for possible re-entry into the mine drift.

KIRK HARGREAVES/STUFF The bodies of 29 men have remained in the Pike River Mine since 2010.

Curtin finds the idea abhorrent.

"I don't understand [the pro-re-entry] view. To me it's an irrational one. Why they think there are bodies to bring out just beggars belief as far as I'm concerned. The amount of money that's been spent I think is disgusting. To me it's just sacrilege. It's like grave-robbing. It's awful."

Mostly, Curtin has kept her counsel on this. Occasionally she has spoken to the media, or written letters to the editor of the Press . But maintaining a public opposition to a prevailing view isn't easy.

"It's very hard to go against what is perceived as the majority," she said. "Because I would much rather not be doing it. I do it to stop an inaccurate picture being painted of 'the families'. It's very seldom that someone speaks up and says to them 'enough's enough'."

Curtin has been resolute throughout that the explosion was an accident and retribution against Pike River bosses was pointless. As soon as the re-entry question was raised, she was against that too. Though she received some "positive" feedback when she did speak publicly, she isn't in contact with any other like-minded bereaved families. Her two daughters and wider family share her view.

SUPPLIED Richard Holling was of 29 miners killed in the Pike River explosion. His mother, Marion Curtin, is vehemently opposed to re-entry efforts to recover the miners' remains.

Curtin keeps three clearfile ring binders full of clippings in memory of her son. Two are filled with funeral programmes, poems, pictures, and letters written to her by Richard's friends. Only one is dedicated to newspaper clippings, including some of the articles and cartoons she's taken issue with over the years. Her hand-written commentary lines the edges.

In one Press letter to the editor from 2011, M & S Jones of Halswell lament the influence of the "quake families" after the February 2011 earthquake: "[We] can't continue to sit silently in case the public come to feel that their comments and feelings represent all those who have suffered bereavement." In blue pen in the margin: "I know how you feel!!"

"I think of Richard with love every day," Curtin said.

"But a good day is one where I don't see or hear anything about Pike River."

GEORGE HEARD/STUFF David Beaumont has been resolute in his belief the CTV saga should be left to rest.

David Beaumont belongs to a Canterbury Television (CTV) building families group. You almost certainly won't have heard of it, because it isn't the CTV Families Group that has received wide media coverage in its push for criminal prosecutions over the building collapse that killed 115 people in the February 2011 Christchurch earthquake. Beaumont's son, Matty, was among the victims.

This group is more informal: seven or eight bereaved families united because their loved ones all worked at the CTV company. They met every six weeks or so for dinner, up until a year ago. All have similar views on the tragedy – that justice had been served by a public inquiry – but they rarely discussed it.

"We were just there for each other," Beaumont said, "I wouldn't say there was any one amongst them that ever looked for blame. They just needed to know there was someone there who was feeling the same as them and was coping with it."

DON SCOTT/STUFF 115 people died when the CTV building collapsed during the February 2011 earthquake in Christchurch.

Beaumont made up his mind while attending the Canterbury earthquakes royal commission that that was where the CTV matter should end. Ironically that was also where the CTV Families Group was born.

Soon after the hearings ended, Tim Elms, whose daughter Teresa McLean died in the collapse, filed complaints with New Zealand's professional engineering body over the conduct of David Harding, the engineer who designed the building, and his boss, Alan Reay. Both men resigned from the body, escaping sanction, although a hearing into Harding's conduct went ahead and found he "misrepresented his competence".

Elms contacted all the bereaved families asking if they would like to be involved, and received 50-odd replies. That group has stayed together for six years, almost unchanged, and is now pushing for prosecutions. Elms estimates they represent between 40 and 50 victims.

Beaumont, of course, is not among them. His view of their cause is something approaching cognitive dissonance. He knows they're entitled to their view and to fight for it, but he really wishes they wouldn't.

"I wish they would let it rest. I really sincerely do. If there was any way I could persuade them, I would be happy about that, but I know full well that I won't [be able to]. There's no way I can do anything about it at all. And I know that there's no way that they'll change."

SUPPLIED Matty Beaumont was one of 115 killed in the collapse.

Beaumont said as much to an assembled group of CTV families when Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern met them in December, shortly after police announced they would not be pursuing charges against Harding and Reay. This was about the time the CTV Families Group, led by widower Maan Alkaisi, came to the fore. Alkaisi has vowed to "keep fighting until justice is done".

Beaumont worries about the effect this ardour can have. The drain it can be on the fighters and their families.

"You're never going to close the thing at all. It's always going to be there. You've got to handle it in a way that you can live day by day."

JOSEPH JOHNSON/STUFF Maan Alkaisi has lead the CTV Families Group in calling for charges to be laid over the tragedy.

Like many bereaved parents, photos of Matty are sprinkled throughout David and Jeanette Beaumont's home. A close-up on the coffee table, a cross-shaped collage on the wall. On the dresser in the master bedroom is an outsized portrait shot of their son, tuxedoed and holding an Oscar statuette beaming, as a real Academy Award winner might.

Every year, Beaumont explained, Matty would hold a ceremony with friends, adjudging his own best actor, actress, director. Now Beaumont has his own ritual - giving a thumbs up to his son's picture.

"Every day."

When Virginia Pawsey watched the saga of the CTV building play out, culminating with the 'no charges' announcement last year, one feeling overrode everything else: deja vu.

Pawsey and husband Harry endured their version 20 years earlier, when the inquiry into the collapse of a viewing platform at Cave Creek, which killed 14 people including their son Kit, concluded no person was to blame. No charges were ever laid. The families considered a private effort, but a crucial police report vanished.

So far, so sadly familiar: victims' families pursue justice and are left feeling like they got none. "When the Crown makes a mistake, it becomes a systemic failure," Harry Pawsey told media at the time, "No-one is held to account."

MICHAEL WRIGHT/STUFF Virginia and Harry Pawsey's son Kit died in the Cave Creek platform collapse in 1995.

The families started off as one. United by grief, they found a lawyer, Grant Cameron, to represent them at the royal commission of inquiry they hoped would deliver accountability and institutional change. As the inquiry progressed, the woeful state of the platform was exposed.

One irate father took to stalking around the bottom of the stairs outside the courthouse and filming every witness when they emerged after giving evidence . "Got the bastard," he'd say each time.

"There were some people who wanted to get the guys who actually built the thing and hang them up from the rafters," Harry Pawsey said. "Other people said,' actually, how did these guys get that job? Who was overseeing it?' Then the group diverged."

But it also stayed together. The group and Cameron met every day after the hearing and any hard conversations – there was more than one – were held in private. Only once did Harry Pawsey, the nominated spokesman, have to issue an admonishment when someone else gave an interview purporting to speak for all of them. When the findings were released and the question of private prosecution arose, the for and against camps emerged again.

"At that stage we were pretty burnt out," Virginia Pawsey said. "We decided that in light of the fact that reports had disappeared and we were fighting a government, not some individual, that our course of action should be some kind of compensation.

"We got exemplary damages and once we did that, that sort of removed our right to go for prosecutions. The whole parent group had to sign that and we all did. So we were cohesive enough to all agree. If even one parent had said they wouldn't sign up, the deal was off."

This, more than anything, differentiates the Cave Creek families' effort from those that followed Pike River and CTV. They didn't share exactly the same feelings or even the same motives in signing, but the single act bound them together, and underpinned surface differences.

"The people in CTV and Pike River who don't want to push prosecutions and things, they don't get heard because they're not interesting and controversial," Virginia Pawsey said. "We didn't have that situation."

Outliers, such as they were, came in the form of Gary Reid, who doggedly pursued the missing police report, and Andrew McCarthy, who the Pawseys remember standing up at a families meeting and announcing he "forgave" the Department of Conservation, which had oversight of the Cave Creek platform.

IAIN MCGREGOR/STUFF Runanga teacher Andrew McCarthy lost his daughter Catherine at Cave Creek: "There were mistakes made, but not criminal mistakes."

McCarthy's daughter Catherine died in the collapse and initially he wanted heads on a stick. He took party status at the inquiry, meaning he wasn't represented by Cameron and could question witnesses. But then something changed.

"I got the sense in the first year or two after the tragedy it was one of those things," he said. "There were mistakes made, but not criminal mistakes.

"It was the feeling of empathy for those who had unwittingly contributed towards the tragedy."

Even when he changed his mind, it was no big deal.

"It just had to be so. There were disagreements, but we were united in tragedy. "

Twenty-three years after the tragedy, Virginia Pawsey still sends out an annual newsletter to all the families, and still watches the aftermath of other disasters unfold in public.

"You sort of look at it with a weary cynicism," she said.

"The poor families that are still trying to breach the wall. And you think, 'They're not going to get anywhere.'"

Human tragedies beget human responses. In the wake of a traumatic event, any differences of opinion tend, like everything else, to get magnified.

"You're grieving so much, everything is out of proportion," David Beaumont said.

"I don't think anyone can explain that. That will be the same with every one of us."

Marion Curtin used to be an avid reader of the Press newspaper, but stopped when she found she'd developed a habit of rifling through the pages, scanning for Pike stories, and only actually reading the thing if she didn't find any.

Before that day came, one story gave her some solace. It was a report that quoted the Dalai Lama on a visit to Christchurch after the 2011 earthquakes. During a speech, the Buddhist leader urged those who had lost loved ones not to dwell overlong on what they had lost:

"Instead of sadness, make an effort to overcome."

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