Its like this...you can take the girl out of Blackball
but you can never take Blackball out of the girl
it is my soul...
When I last returned
we crossed the mountains/ the spine/ the backbone/
of the South Island -
climbing past the blue braided rivers rolling down to the East
to the Pacific...
Then through the small township of Arthurs Pass/ time
for a pit stop/ maybe lunch/ visit the wekas at the lookout
drive down the new viaduct -
then to the left is the Taramakau rolling down to the West
to the Tasman Sea...
Blackball, The Blackball Bridge, and the Grey River 
The Grey River is seventy five miles long. The Maori name both for the river and for the pa at its mouth was Mawhera, but in 1846 Heaphy named it the Grey, after the new Governor, Sir George Grey; the town of Greymouth now stands on the site of the old pa. In the following year the explorer Thomas Brunner discovered coal on the banks of the river a few miles from its mouth, which later became the Brunner Mine.
Further along the river (about eighteen miles from Greymouth) there was the Blackball Bridge, which was opened by the then Prime Minister Richard (Dick) Seddon in 1903. The historic coalmining town of Blackball sits on a terrace above the West Coast's Grey River. Between the river and the town is Blackball Creek where George Cundy discovered gold in 1864.
When we lived in Blackball there was an old gold dredge on the creek and shingle tailings over which grew blackberry vines. My father would drive us down with buckets which we would fill with blackberries for jam.
From The Listener Archive: February 19-25 2005 Vol 197 No 3380 "Christchurch poet Jeffrey Paparoa Holman spent his formative years on the other side of the Alps in rough-and-tough Blackball, then left as a teenager with hardly a look back. Decades later he revisits his old stamping ground in The late great Blackball Bridge Sonnets, which is his second book of verse. Within its pages he becomes a kind of soapbox orator, expressing an almost evangelical enthusiasm for the West Coast – its seasons, its myths and its features – above all, the now demolished Blackball Bridge over the Grey River... memories of schooldays in the 50s and early 60s... [
The] poems are vivid with imagery – a possum up a telegraph pole caught in a spotlight and brought down with a rifle shot; “[the river] torrent … in high spring flood, bearing away/in the darkness cattle, willows, the nests of birds” – and offer witness to place, kinship and belonging. This is poetry as local history and vice-versa: “in the house of my body”, Holman writes, “I carry that river." 
The town of Blackball first began around 1865 as a goldmining settlement, (in fact the one hundredth anniversary of the town was celebrated while we were living there), however there was better gold to be found a few miles upriver at Moonlight. The opening of the coalmine in 1893 saw the town grow and at it's peak in 1928 there were 1200 people living there.
Blackball is most famous however for it's illegal strike in 1908, (illegal because the Liberal Party led by "King Dick" Seddon had outlawed strikes), which became the subject matter for Eric Beardsley's novel
Blackball 08, which, as you all know, I have just reviewed. The strike was in support of a half hour lunch break (crib time) which every other miner in the country was getting. Ironically during the court case the judge adjourned the court for an hour and a half lunch break.
The success of this collective action fired up the workers of New Zealand and the
Red Feds were formed which in time developed into the
Federation of Labour and the
New Zealand Labour Party, and as I mentioned in the book review the
Communist Party moved it's headquarters from Wellington (the capital city of NZ) down to Blackball.
In the nineteen sixties when my family lived at Blackball there was a population of about four hundred people. Approximately eighty children attended the school and they were divided between four teachers. I think my first teacher was the only woman in the town who was employed in paid work on her own account. This first teacher had been teaching this primer (new entrants) class for so many years that she had taught most of the kids' parents to read and write.
Other women involved in "earning a crust" were married women working alongside their husbands in the local shops and pubs. Of course the Blackball and Roa coalmines were the main employers and women were not coalminers. Many of the women were involved in volunteer work and committees.
I was just turning five and ready to start school when we first moved to Blackball from Taumaranui in the North Island. My father had been applying for jobs that were advertised in the Police Gazette but missing out on them for one reason or another; after a while he just applied for any job that came up which was how he became the sole charge police officer in Blackball. His application was probably the only one.
It was a long journey in our old Ford V8, my little sister got carsick (she never travelled well), and then we copped a stormy crossing over the Cook Strait on the inter-island ferry and my baby brother who had just turned one, was sick over his flash travelling outfit. In my memory we drove through sheets of rain all the way down the West side of the South Island and encountered frequent stoppages for road works which was at least a useful chance for one or both of our parents to haul us children out of the car for toilet breaks behind the ever present bush. One thing about the West Coast, there is never a shortage of handy trees.
Finally we arrived in Blackball. We had to stay at a local hotel while our house was still being cleaned and redecorated and the rats and mice eradicated. The house had been empty for about six months because the Blackball Police Station had been supposedly permanently closed, but the people of Blackball had been horrified at not having a policeman in their town and had protested so vociferously that the station was reopened.
Are you in the school picture, Iri? 
