Shane Te Pou – When I was a kid growing up in Kawerau, my old man had a line he’d trot out most weekends. “I’m just going to go have a talk to my mates.”

When I was a kid growing up in Kawerau, my old man had a line he’d trot out most weekends. “I’m just going to go have a talk to my mates.” We all knew what that meant. He was off to the pub. But it was never just a euphemism for a piss-up — it was code for something bigger, something I didn’t understand until I was old enough to go with him.

Because when I finally got to sit in on he was getting on in years and his mates were too, I was staggered. These men — millworkers, shift workers, blokes who’d never finished High school — could talk international politics, the state of the economy, and the ins and outs of union business like they’d read every paper in the country that morning.
In a mill town like Kawerau, unionism wasn’t an abstract idea. It was the kai table. It was how you kept your job, your health, your dignity. These men lived it.

And then there were the lives some of these men had led. Some of dad’s mates were barely a decade or so older than him, I’d sit there trying to get my head around it. One day you’re a young fella out from Te Teko, planting corn or scrub-cutting land that would one day become the streets of Kawerau itself. A few months later, after basic training, you’re standing in the North African desert facing Rommel’s Afrika Korps.

From the corn rows of Te Teko to face-to-face with Hitliers soldiers, in the space of a season.

No wonder they were worldly. They’d already seen the world, at its very worst.

Life moved on, the way it does. I shot off to Auckland, to the big smoke, chasing whatever it is young men chase. But most trips home, Dad had his own plans , and it wasn’t just the pub. “Can you take me round to see my mates?” he’d ask — and half the time that meant a slow walk through the cemeteries. Kawerau. Te Teko. If we were feeling ambitious, off to Whakatāne.

We’d wander those rows of headstones and I’d ask him, “How’d this one go, Dad?” Car accident. Too much to drink, Diabetes

And then, every so often, he’d stop at a grave and just say, “Oh, he died working.”

For years I thought I understood what he meant — that these men had simply worked themselves into the ground, never stopped, never retired, died with their boots on. It seemed a fitting, almost noble way to put it.

I was wrong, and dad set me straight over a beer at the local, the one we always stopped at after the cemetery rounds. I asked him why so many of his mates had kept working right up until they died. He looked at me like I’d missed the whole point. “No, boy,” he said. “These men died because of their work.”

He told me what it had really been like in the mills through the 60s and 70s No masks. No gloves. No warning labels on the drums of chemicals they used to treat the timber. They’d handle the stuff bare-handed because it worked so well as a preservative, and nobody told them any different. What my father was describing, without ever using the word, was pentachlorophenol — PCP — the poison that soaked into the green chain at places like the Whakatāne Board Mill and mills right across Kawerau, Rotorua and the Waipā.

It’s taken this country a long, long time to catch up to what those men already knew .

Sawmill Workers Against Poisons — SWAP — spent decades fighting to have it acknowledged, led by men like the late Matua Joe Harawira, who worked the Whakatāne mill for the best part of thirty years and spent the rest of his life fighting for the ones who couldn’t. I do remember Matua Joe he wasn’t a rabble rouser , he was a quiet well considered man. I think he became the advocate because he was the last man standing.

This year, Te Kāhui Tika Tangata, the Human Rights Commission, finally released its report on the legacy of PCP — naming it plainly as a human rights issue. It found what SWAP families always knew: that the poisoning didn’t end when the mills closed in 1988. It followed the men home, into their kids, into the land, into the water. Most still can’t get ACC to acknowledge it.

So when I think of those cemetery walks now, I don’t hear “he died working” as some tribute to a hard-working generation. I hear an accusation nobody ever got to make in a courtroom.
That’s the story behind my old man’s trips.
And now the old man is gone he’s been gone for a couple of decades actually died working you see the old man died of asbestos poisoning .