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.

As many as nine million women may have been destroyed as witches during the European witch-hunting craze of the so-called "Enlightenment Period", (from the late fifteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries). These people of whom about ninety percent were women, were accused, tortured, and executed.

The witch-hunting craze which reached it's peaks during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was centered upon revivals of exaggerated cultural and biblical associations of women and evil.

Political Junkie, (Poli), asked me quite a few weeks ago why I use the witch as part of my id; at the time I was about to blog The Story of Hannah and James I think, so I said I would write about the witch thing later. Now its weeks later even.

Mostly when I answer this question I am inclined to flippantly reply that I have the right hair for the job and in a way that is a reason too, but mainly I carry this witch id with me in memory of all those women who were killed back then in what is sometimes described as the Women's Holocaust.

Poor women, vulnerable women, women who were "alone" ie "without a man", women who were old, grumpy or had warts or moles, mouthy women, women who had rejected sexual advances, or conversely women who were too sexual, and women who were healers and/or midwives, all these and more were served up to the Inquisitors to be tested as witches.

Once a woman was standing in front of an Inquisitor she was cast into a no-win situation. The water test is a good example of the no-win, most people will have heard about this I am sure. A woman is weighted with a sack of stones or suchlike, if she sinks and drowns she is innocent, if she somehow manages to stay afloat she is clearly using magic and is therefore a witch who needs burning at the stake to cleanse and purify her from her sins.

The Inquisitors would torture the hapless victim until she confessed and the only way to make the torture stop was to "confess". Naturally an important part of the "confession" was to name other witches in the supposed coven and torture continued until some people had been named, then they too were tortured in turn.

It's not hard to see how many people were named as witches in ever-increasing circles and why so many were killed. It is said that at one point a whole village of people were annihilated in this manner.

It wasn't just about misogyny though. There were Religious and Socio-Political underpinnings.

A widening physical gap was growing between the wealthy and the poor members of the European societies, and while both groups "believed in" magic and the spirit world and occult things, (belief is a powerful thing), it was the poor who were by far more likely to be accused of having and using these evil powers. The dominating elites seeking ways to consolidate their political and economic power were motivated to "stamp out" superstition within the great unwashed masses.

By cooperating with zealous church reformers of the Catholic and the Protestant churches, the dominating elite groups found a way to deal with dissenters, women and the poor.

(Eradication is always a foolproof way of dealing with dissension. Hitler later found eradication a useful tool too as did Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, and other megalomaniacs).

The powerful elite also had a drive to "control" medicine for this was also the age of growing elite male interest in medicine and women healers presented an actual threat to male credibility in this field. Basically women's herbal lore was more successful for healing at the time.

Sometimes it was also about land grabs. When a person or family was found guilty of witchcraft and summarily executed their land was of course revoked, often back to the person with the most power within that community.

Religious reformation required a stamping out of the last vestiges of paganism, (women's beliefs, earth bound religions and medical lore), and "witchcraft" was therefore associated with heresy, (serving the devil), which was seen as great a crime then as serving Osama Bin Laden is seen in western countries today.

The religious reformation is also seen to have provoked widespread guilt. Evangelical-style preachers were bombarding people with "fiery" sermons centered on their congregations' sinfulness. The devil was seen as unflagging and tireless in his attempts to capture souls. Eternal damnation awaited for those people indulging in pleasures of the flesh or yielding to carnal temptations. Hence projection onto the less powerful was a method of assuaging guilt.

If you could blame a witch for the thoughts in your head it became her sin not yours.

In the religious view of the zealot, women were supposed to be "more sensitive" to the supernatural and women's closer ties to the earth, their "materiality", was supposed to make women more susceptible to devils and demons. The intellectually inferior women naturally lacked fundamental moral sense, (unlike the 'superior male), which made them receptive to evil just as their bodies propelled them into licentious and sensual behaviours.

In the best of theodical traditions, when a witch was tortured the rationalisation was that God would intervene for the innocent. The "just" God would only visit intolerable pain on those who deserved it, (so HIS non-intervention is proof of guilt). A further rationalisation was that as God condemns sinners to eternal suffering, then righteous men were justified in inflicting pain to destroy evil and save souls. Some Inquisitors and witch prosecutors really did care about the salvation of the souls of their victims.

The earliest printed books were handbooks to investigate heretics and witches of which the Malleus Maleficarum of 1486 which was authored by Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, is one of the most well known today. It was considered to be an encyclopedia of witch beliefs and was constantly cited in support of those beliefs by both Catholics and Protestants through to the eighteenth century.

"All witchcraft comes from carnal lust", states the Malleus Maleficarum, "which is in women insatiable. See Proverbs xxx: There are three things that are never satisfied, yea, a fourth thing which says not, It is enough; that is, the mouth of the womb. Wherefore for the sake of filling their lusts they consort even with devils. More such reasons are brought forward, but to the understanding it is sufficiently clear that it is no matter for wonder that there are more women than men found infected with the heresy of witchcraft."

According to the Malleus Maleficarum, witches who were midwives were also seen to devour and eat infant children or offer them to devils. Witches raised "hailstorms and hurtful tempests and lightnings", they caused sterility in men and animals, "made horses go mad under their riders", witches could transport themselves from place to place through the air, either in body or imagination, see absent things as if they were present, cause great horror in the minds of those about to arrest them, bewitch men with a mere look etc etc. I have had enough of typing this rubbish.

It sounds silly, too silly for people to believe, but is it any sillier than the belief that aliens may descend from spaceships to abduct Americans so that they can examine human genitalia? Repeatedly? People apparently believe things like that even now.

And I think it was only last week that I saw an article trying to convince it's readers that terrorists were stealing babies in order to eat them.