“Still Here” received first prize in the 2025 Graeme Lay Short Story Read Still Here, Claire Jewitt’s award-winning short story inspired by the 1968 Wahine disaster. Winner of the 2025 Graeme Lay Short Story Competition.
The wind met her as soon as she stepped out of the car, a salt-bitten blast that smelled of kelp and rust. Mary Bennett pulled her jacket tight and squinted up at Pencarrow Lighthouse, stubborn on the cliff’s edge, refusing to yield to time. She’d driven over from her home in Eastbourne, the road hugging the bays before climbing toward the headland. Mary loved stormy days, watching the weather sweep across the harbour toward Pencarrow. At night she would lie snug in her bed listening to the southerly rattling the windows whilst the waves boomed against the seawall. A smear of fog clung low on the ridgeline, softening the outline of the lighthouse. For a moment it seemed half-vanished, as though it belonged as much to memory as to the mist itself. Her unease lingered along with a strange sense of belonging — as though still listening for voices long gone.
She had volunteered to help with a small heritage project near the lighthouse, where the keepers’ cottages had once stood. Most were demolished in the 1960s when automation made staff redundant, but a few stone foundations still clung to the hillside. Winter storms had triggered a landslip, exposing part of the old site, and the team was clearing debris before the next season. The work was slow: cataloguing boxes and a wooden teachest, salt-stained and warped, as if the sea had only just returned it. Most items were ruined — a tarnished compass, maps furled tight with age, brass gone green. Then, at the bottom of the teachest, her hand brushed leather: a slim, salt-stained notebook — not an official logbook but a private diary bound in cracked brown leather. It looked deliberately hidden, the cover warped, pages stiffened by long-ago seawater. Mary hesitated, unable to shake the feeling that the diary had been waiting for her.
She opened it, the spine cracking. The handwriting was neat in the early pages, more personal than procedural: weather noted, ships sighted, sketches of sea and sky. Whoever wrote it had been watching and waiting, alone. Then she saw a line that made her pause:
Lights flashing in the harbour. Weather worsening. Wahine heading straight for the lighthouse. Prayers for those aboard.
Mary’s chest tightened. She knew the date instantly — 10 April 1968, the storm that tore across Wellington Harbour, driving the Wahine onto Barrett Reef. She read on. The entries turned fractured:
Wahine entering Wellington Harbour. Go back! Huge wave. Too late. Ferry on the reef. Engines down.
Mary remembered that storm as a child. The French doors in their house were blown off their hinges, allowing the deluge of horizontal rain to soak the carpet in their living area. Later there were news bulletins on their black and white screen about the capsized ferry. Then the words grew more urgent:
Abandon ship! Children thrust into lifeboats. People jumping overboard. Voices.
Shock, she thought — someone alone on the headland, forced to watch what they could not stop. Later entries read:
Still the voices. Cannot sleep. A child’s cry carried on the wind.
Mary closed the diary, unsettled. She told herself it was grief captured in ink. The words clung to her as she packed the teachest and drove home.
That evening, over dinner, she mentioned it to her daughter.
“I found a diary about the Wahine disaster — someone must’ve seen it happen. They wrote about hearing voices.”
Her daughter smiled. “That’d make anyone hear voices. Strange no-one has found the diary before now.”
Mary nodded. “That’s what I thought. It was… strange.”
She didn’t explain how vividly the words replayed in her head all night. She told herself she wasn’t superstitious, yet she caught herself listening for the sea’s rhythm even at home — half-expecting a voice to rise beneath it. The logical part of her mind said she was tired. The other part wasn’t so sure.
The next week she returned and went straight to the diary. The writer described the ferry on its side, rescuers fighting the elements, shouts on the wind — voices that could never reach shore. Weeks later, they still wrote of cries, faint but insistent, on still nights. Mary set the diary down. Everything at Pencarrow had been examined long ago, or so she’d thought. Perhaps the site itself had its own way of keeping certain stories buried.
That evening another front blew in. Clouds thickened. Mary lingered, ensuring everything was stowed and labelled. By the time she reached her car, the gale was shrieking across the headland. And then she heard it. A cry — thin, wavering — carried between the gusts. She froze, staring toward the harbour mouth. The sound came again, higher now, like a child calling. Her skin prickled.
Fog swept in, blurring the ridge. The cry seemed to move with it. Beneath it came another sound — not a cry but a low, rhythmic chant rising and falling with the wind. The tones were mournful, ancient, unlike any melody Mary knew. For a moment she thought of the tangi she’d once attended at a marae in the Hutt Valley — that raw music of farewell. It had to be the wind — yet the cadence lingered, threading through the roar like memory made audible. When she drove home, the sound stayed lodged in her ears.
Days later she grew restless. She visited the National Library, scrolling through newspaper reports from 1968. Survivors’ accounts told of shouts swallowed by the storm, children swept away, voices lost in the sea’s roar. Several reports mentioned how, in the midst of the storm, the Wahine had first seemed to drive straight for the Pencarrow lighthouse before veering toward Barrett Reef. Mary checked the keeper registers for that year, hoping to find a name, but nothing fit the diary’s tone. If someone witnessed the tragedy from that cliff, they had left no record — except perhaps this diary.
Then, turning another reel of microfilm, she found an older entry: Pencarrow, 1859 — the country’s first permanent lighthouse. Its keeper: Mary Jane Bennett, first and only woman lighthouse keeper in New Zealand. Mary stared at the words, goosebumps prickling down her neck. Her own name, tied to storms and solitude more than a century before. The article explained how Pencarrow, perched above the harbour mouth, was often swallowed in fog. She felt a chill. Fog blurred both sea and memory, swallowing light and voices alike. She sat back, unsettled. The coincidence of her name, the fate of the lighthouse, the diary buried for decades — it was as though the place had been waiting for her.
A new storm was brewing, but Mary returned to the site, drawn by something she couldn’t explain. The sea was a grey wall beyond the ridge, waves battering the rocks. She lit one of the old lamps, its glow trembling against the shed window. She opened the diary again, hoping to make sense of it, but all she found were descriptions of wind, sea, and chanting. Then the entries stopped abruptly, mid-sentence. The final page was blank.
She made to leave as the wind howled. Fog was closing in; she would need to go before the storm worsened. And then, clear as before, the voice. A child’s cry, borne on the wind. A second voice beneath it — that same haunting lament, syllables indistinct, rising and falling like the sea. Mary’s breath caught. She stood at the window, the book open before her. The sound rippled through the air like a memory replaying itself. For a moment she thought she saw a flicker in the fog — a figure moving between the ruins — but when she turned, there was only rain. Her pen slipped from her pocket, clattering on the desk. Without quite intending to, she picked it up. Her hand hovered over the blank page. She wrote, slowly, deliberately:
Still here.
Then, after a pause, she added her name.
Mary Bennett.
The ink bled faintly into the damp paper. Outside, the wind eased, as if satisfied. The hillside stilled.
When she left the site, the storm had broken. Mist rose from the water, wrapping the ridge in a pale shroud — tender now, as though the voices were resting. She carried the diary to the project’s prefab and placed it among the other finds. She told no one.
On the drive home she felt oddly lighter, though the sound of the cries — and that soft chant — still flickered at the edges of her memory. She wasn’t sure if she had acknowledged the lost children of the Wahine, or simply her own loneliness stitched into the place. Either way, the diary was no longer unfinished.
And on nights when the southerly roared through Cook Strait and the sea thundered against the rocks below Pencarrow, Mary sometimes thought she heard an echo — faint, almost like a prayer — drifting through the roar. In those moments the world held its breath: the wind stilled, the fog thickened, and she knew the voices were still here — in the silence and pages she’d signed with her name.
***
Publication Update – June 2026
I am delighted that Still Here has now been published in Awa Wahine Magazine (Iwa | Issue 9).
A beautifully produced literary magazine published twice yearly, Awa Wahine brings together writing and artwork exploring themes of healing, creativity, memory and connection. I am honoured that Still Here has found a place within its pages.
***
Links & Background
• Wahine Disaster documentary (YouTube) — a moving account that helped inspire aspects of this story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0FWdnzhkyI
• Mary Bennett — New Zealand’s first female lighthouse keeper, whose resilience is legendary: https://nzhistory.govt.nz/people/mary-bennett
Fabulous writing Claire !!