On the 10th of January 1928, two New Zealand pilots, George Hood and John Robert Moncreiff, set out to try and cross the Tasman Sea in a Ryan B-1 Brougham monoplane, taking off from Sydney early in the morning. Their aim was to fly to Farewell Spit on the Western side of Cook Straight, the body of water that separates the North and South Islands of New Zealand. They failed, and the wreck of their plane was never found. But they are not the people I want to talk about today.
In the wake of this event (New Zealand’s first major aviation mystery!) many attempts were made to find the wreckage on land and sea, but by far the most unusual was that made by a couple to locate the wreckage by communicating with the spirit of Moncrieff. They were aided in this by living Maori guides and a host of local Maori spirits. Like any good spiritualist coterie, they had a whole set of regular ghostly visitors, who advised them in unclear terms that they knew where the wreckage was.
They struggled through the forest for months, and over this time Lawson’s diary entries became more disjointed (he wasn’t a very good writer to start with) and the stresses of living in difficult terrain took their toll. Bad weather, steep inclines and fading hope meant that their Maori guides became less enthusiastic, in spite of the fascination provided by their regular seances. The guides, ‘Keepa Tainguru and E. Wehikokre’, were both members of the Ratana Church, a new religious movement that European commentators often compared to spiritualism. Because of this, the Lawsons very much saw them as ‘the same as us’. In a way they were. Both spiritualism and the Ratana church were mocked in the mainstream and religious press. They were newcomers to the complex world of modern religion, and their activities were acceptable to neither secular sceptics nor established churches.
All through their mountainous peregrinations, John Lawson’s diaries remained positive. The spirits warned them, as their discovery supposedly drew closer, that they should be prepared for the horrible smell of the decaying corpses of the pilots, and one night they received further direction when: ‘While we were sitting outside of our tent we have seen the most beautiful star descending like the star of Bethlehem in the east’. After spending about a month in the bush, however, they had to return, exhausted of provisions and energy, from their pilgrimage.
Spiritualism has always been a strange phenomenon – but in some ways it appears stranger than it actually is. Claiming ancient roots, yet always very modern in its orientation, language and themes, its bizarre beliefs about the persistence and manifestation of ghosts have been accepted by some very intelligent and critical people, including, most famously, Arthur Conan Doyle (who happens to be one of my favorite historical figures). His conversion to spiritualism was a tragedy, but it was comprehensible, in the curious mix of grief and dislocation after the death of his son in the First World War, and the scientific, modernist language of spiritualism that merged so well with his existing enthusiasms for physical culture and modern science and technology. Read the diaries or books of spiritualists from this era and you will see hundreds of references to spiritualism as analogous to radio technology, and many other references to cinema and aviation – the sexy new technologies of the interwar era. The very fact that the Lawson’s were hunting the wreckage of an aeroplane with the advice of ancient Maori spirits somehow makes perfect sense in this context.
In 1956, a member of a local Aero club spotted what he thought was the remains of a wreckage on the remote mountains near where John and Elizabeth spent their fruitless weeks. Lawson saved a clipping, and it sits with the rest of his diary from the trip in the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington. Even decades after the failure of his expedition, Lawson seemed to have found vindication in this purported glimpse. Faith endures, and makes people do crazy things. And for all the thousands of times spiritualism has been discredited, and for all we tend to mock it, people in more established faiths – including people whom I know – do things that are just as eccentric for the sake of their beliefs.
Source: Lawson Diaries, Alexander Turnbull Library