Book of the Week: Black Island

2026-03-18 - 16:13

A kind of index of the dead and the living, headlined Whakaari: 47 people on the island at time of eruption, was printed out as an A3 piece of paper and laid out on the media bench at last year’s coronial inquiry into the tragedy at White Island. I studied it constantly during the two-week hearing. It was divided into rows of photos of the tourists and their guides who were on the island on December 9, 2019, there for the amazing close-up sight of geysers and fumaroles smoking out of the crater. The photos of the 22 who died were given a blue border. Most of the survivors were captioned, “Non-publication of identity.” They included a tour guide who was laughing out loud, open-mouthed, looking like a real hoot in her photo, at the bottom left of the A3 sheet: Kelsey Waghorn. She can now be named. Waghorn is the author of her memoir of what happened on Whakaari and what her recovery has been like, in the many stunning pages of Surviving White Island. It went straight to number 1 on the NielsenIQ BookScan bestseller chart. Waghorn has lived to tell the tale. You read her book with a sense of awe and terror, of imagining the moment it erupted, the toxic blast and the panic and the certainty of death—there are passages which take you to that Hell: “Fear had filled my body as soon as I saw that ashen cloud barrelling down the island. My breathing increased ten-fold. My body shook. I knew our odds of survival were basically zero. In an effort to do something, I put my gas mask and sunglasses on. If there was to be any hope – and it was minimal – I knew I needed to be able to see and to breathe. I pressed that mask and those glasses as hard as I could against my face. There was no way I could hold my breath. Despite trying to slow my breathing, I couldn’t. I was panic-breathing. Hyperventilating. My body and brain knew what was coming. This is how you die.” It’s one thing to write this kind of thing in the privacy of a screen and a keyboard but another matter entirely to have to answer questions about it in public. Waghorn elected not to appear as a witness at the coronial inquiry. It was enough that she gave a long interview to police. She writes, “I did my police interview voluntarily in June 2020 – six months after the eruption. I knew it was unavoidable: I could either do my witness statement in my own time, in a controlled manner, or I could get called into court to deliver it on the stand for the chief coroner. In an attempt to feel as though I had some kind of control, I went for option one. It took four hours, and by the end, I was absolutely shattered. It was the first time I had gone over everything that had happened that day from start to finish in minute detail ... It took me a couple of days to recover.” She notes in her Introduction that she cried a lot while writing her book. But she doesn’t allow herself to crumble and reach for the easy solutions of cliché to get the job done. She writes with a clear purpose, and seriousness. The chapter on the eruption is properly terrifying. The chapters on her recovery, same. The skin grafts, the blood blisters, her “fried nerve endings”, and, even worse than the physical agony, the mental anguish, of panic attacks and sudden paranoias, of nightmares (all set on White Island) and pre-sleep nightmares, that moment just before sleep “when my mind would wander into darkness”. Her book gives shape to what happened and makes sense of it, gives it an order. The coronial inquiry was like all courtroom affairs—random pieces of information, small bursts of memory and insight, a tangled mess. There were 18 pages heavily redacted, really 18 pages of solid ink: “It relates to the recovery of the bodies, and falls outside the scope of the inquiry.” A witness talked of flying over the island after it blew up and seeing a great many dead fish on the surface of the water. A surgeon talked of flying in cadaver skin from Australia. The inquiry was held in offices on Khyber Pass, Newmarket; each morning I would turn into Khyber off Broadway and walk past Galung Fung staging their silent calisthenics on the artificial turf of Lumsden Green, their transistor set to a droning chant. It was the last moment of peace before entering the coronial room to listen to bits and pieces relayed from Hell. Surviving White Island gives the experience a coherent narrative. There is a deeply felt subplot: the hatred of news media. Waghorn writes of “deranged journalists” who get the facts wrong in their haste to print anything they can get their hands on about the tragedy. Yes, that sounds right. They “hound” her and her family, and stoop to “devious” methods. Yes, all very playbook. But then: “The reporters were relentless: dressing up in lab coats to try to slip into the burns ward and ICU ... We even heard of one burning themself on purpose to try to get into the burns wards. For anyone wondering why I never spoke to mainstream media, this is why.” Jesus. Lab coats, self-immolation—I don’t know anyone in the news media who would have the gall or the imagination or the malice to go that low. Did it even happen? With everything they went through, the least you can do is give her family the benefit of the doubt but it sounds like misinformation. The larger issue with the book is the 151 pages—151 pages!—given over to the family group chat on Messenger during Waghorn’s first few weeks in intensive care. They worry about her, tell each other she’s doing great, that they love her and are really proud of her and so on and so forth. “Kels doing well. Has been sleeping all afternoon after an exhausting morning of physio. The physios have been so lovely. They got her into a chair this morning but it took over an hour with lots of wet cloths on her forehead, oxygen and pain”, etc etc. It takes up the middle of the book and sinks it; the book caves in, collapses. It’s a void. It’s just kind of boring. Waghorn writes in her Introduction that she only gave herself six months to write the book—and then took about six weeks off to go travelling. It shows. The group chat messages could maybe have been crafted, worked into the narrative; to just dump them into the centre of the book feels like a very poor publishing decision. Oh well. The beginning and the end of the book make for compelling reading. Waghorn has a no-bullshit writing style and her account of the blast is told with real flair. “My reaction was immediate. My safety training kicked in, and I headed for shelter, running along the track about 10 metres, up through some mounds of boulders, and ducking around to the right to hide behind one. Most of the tour group came my way, while some went to the left and hid behind another mound of rocks, still within sight. We were 300 or 400 metres from the main crater.” The pyroclastic surge kills and maims. And then: “The air around me stopped moving, and everything was silent. Even the screams from my group were now reduced to whimpers and quiet crying. I couldn’t hear the swell on the rocks. I couldn’t hear the rush of steam escaping the vents. Just the sounds being made by my group, and my own breath heaving through my clogged gas mask. ‘No one is coming for you,’ I barked. ‘You need to get up.’” Incredible. It’s a vulnerable, frightened and frightening, matter-of-fact book, staunch in its defence of White Island Tours, with a heartbreaking romantic sub-plot and moments of relief, of humour, of good people doing good things. She credits the first responders and medical teams. The Rock radio station and heavy metal band Blindspott also come across as heroes. And I loved this detail, from one of the later chapters when she was in deep despair: “The only thing that cheered me up a bit was a gift from [her boyfriend’s] dad. He’d made me a papier-mâché White Island that was incredibly accurate in its geological landmarks – so that I could burn it.” To a fucking crisp, I hope. Surviving White Island by Kelsey Waghorn (HarperCollins, $39.99) is available in bookstores nationwide.