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.

European people are used to text and drawings such as those that are used in our maps and navigation charts, thus most people reading here, all of whom are influenced by European symbols and a pen-on-paper written tradition, would probably fail to recognise the object pictured as a navigation chart.

This particular navigation chart is a replica from the Marshall Islands. Cowrie shells represented the relative positions of islands, while curved and diagonal sticks showed swell and wave patterns. Today, these objects are mainly sold as tourist souvenirs, but these ancient navigation aids were once vital for island hopping between the one thousand and more islands that make up the Marshalls group. The charts were not carried on board, but were meant to be memorised. They were also used to record collective knowledge and were useful in training young navigators.



Near Oceania

The origins of the peoples' of the Pacific can be traced back to the landmass we now know as mainland Asia. Ancient people from this period (50,000 - 25,000 BC) had an "old stone age" (palaeolithic) technology and were hunters and gatherers. Using simple rafts they gradually dispersed through the large islands of South-East Asia and into Australia and New Guinea which were then connected by a land bridge. These very ancient people also travelled as far as the southern end of the Solomon Islands. This more diverse region is known as Near Oceania and consists of New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, the Admiralty Islands and
the Solomon Islands.

There is a European centralism to the language clearly obvious to a person from my part of the world. Near Oceania is so named because it is nearer to Europe than Remote Oceania just as we also have the so named near East, Middle East and Far East (naming Asian countries such as Japan and China). From both Kiwi and Australian perspectives they should be named the other way around.

Anyhow in Remote Oceania...

...in the time after 1500 BC and following a millennia of maritime developments that had happened in Near Oceania, highly skilled navigators took sophisticated outrigger and double-hulled sailing canoes that they had developed out into the remoteness of the Pacific Ocean. These people had "new stone age" (neolithic) technologies and food producing economies and were known as Lapita.

These migrations of Polynesian peoples are particularly impressive considering that the islands that were settled by them are spread out over great distances. The Pacific Ocean covers nearly a half of the Earth's surface area (something which is much more noticeable on the McArthur map of my last post than on the modern contemporary map that we are used to looking at). Within a few centuries between about 1500 and 900 BC, the Lapita culture spread 6000km further to the east from the Bismarck Archipelago, until it reached as far as Fiji, Tonga and Samoa. It is in this region that the distinctive Polynesian culture was developed.

Then from about 300 CE this developing and restlessly moving Polynesian people spread out from Fiji, Tonga and Samoa to the Cook Islands, Tahiti, the Tuamotus and the Marquesas Islands. Sometime between 300 and 1200 CE the Polynesians then discovered and settled on Rapa Nui (Easter Island). This is supported by archaeological evidence as well as the introduction of flora and fauna consistent with the Polynesian culture and characteristic of the tropics to this subtropical island.

Around 500 CE Hawai’i was settled by the Polynesians and around 800 - 1000 CE Polynesian people travelled to and settled in Aotearoa/New Zealand.



Tohunga/Navigators

Tom Davis (Pa Tuterangi Ariki) describes the navigators as part of a professional class, which were an important element of Polynesian society known as ta'unga in the Cook Islands, ta'ua in Tahiti, kahuna in Hawai'i, tufuga in Samoa, and tohunga in New Zealand. A way to understand who these people were and what they were about, is to compare them to the "craft guilds" that were to develop eventually in Europe. The skilled professions ranged from navigation, agriculture, fishing, shipbuilding, carving, housebuilding, medicine, history, tattooing, soothsaying weaving, and any other services, arts or crafts needed by their society. The methods and techniques used in a profession were closely guarded secrets usually only passed on to members of the practitioner's family which is why for a long time little was known of the principles of navigation used by the Polynesians.

Voyage routes were preserved in memory or recorded in song. They were mapped using notable features of the landscape such as mountains, outcrops of rock or prominent trees, lined up with known star paths. The term for this method of navigation is back-sighting. Navigators would set sail at dusk, lining up their canoe with prominent landmarks behind them, and follow the relevant star path as the sun set.

A skilled navigating Tohunga kept a mental record of all courses steered and all phenomena affecting the movement of the canoe, tracing these backwards in his mind so that at any time he could point in the approximate direction of his home island and estimate the sailing time required to reach it—a complex feat of dead reckoning. This required careful attention.

After the discovery of a new island, the altitude of stars passing overhead and the places on the horizon of rising and setting stars would be carefully observed and incorporated into the lore of the navigators. Such knowledge would enable them to find the island again. Places for astronomical study were built, often as rock platforms oriented in some relationship to certain celestial events.

By aligning a canoe with landmarks, the departing canoes could set out upon previously known courses. The rising and setting places of familiar stars provided a compass, see below. Knowledge of the paths of such stars rising or setting in succession enabled Tohunga to steer on bearings which had been worked out from experience. When stars were obscured by cloud or storm, dominant ocean swells, which rolled consistently across vast areas, became dependable direction indicators.

The presence of low islands might be detected by clouds building in rising warm air and appearing stationary, while smaller clouds tend to drift with the wind. Over atolls, the clouds sometimes reflect the green of sunlit lagoons.

Celestial Navigation

Tom Davis (Pa Tuterangi/Ariki), himself a sailor, wrote that, "the celestial hemisphere and the celestial bodies in it are the bone and sinew of navigation. The world is round and every sailing master worth his salt throughout history has known this. Columbus knew it but could say nothing about it for fear of the dungeons that Galileo suffered for demonstrating a simple truth of falling objects. How many times does a thinking sailor see islands and hulls with their shorelines and sails disappearing over the horizon to realise that the surface of the ocean is curved. Polynesian sailors worked within it as all who sail the oceans must. Let the landlubbers of history speak to themselves."

The main principles of traditional Polynesian navigating were relatively simple, but Tohunga refined the practice of their craft with experience which was handed down generation by generation. The greatest skill of the old navigators was their ability to read the night sky. The rising and setting points of the brightest and most distinctive stars and planets were gauged with the help of sophisticated star compasses, and then memorised. They also used compasses to chart the winds.

Te Kapehu Whetu (the Maori star compass) divides the 360 degrees around a canoe in the open ocean into different houses/whare. The location of these houses depends on where the sun, moon and stars set and rise. The navigator/tohunga would then attempt to keep the canoe on a course relative to these observations.

What they did. Navigators steered their canoes toward a star on the horizon. When that star rose too high in the sky or set beneath the horizon, another would be chosen, and so on through the night. Seven to twelve stars were apparently sufficient for one night's navigation, and the moon and bright planets such as Kopo (Venus) and Parearau (Jupiter) were also useful. At daybreak, navigators noted the position of the canoe in relation to the rising sun. As the sun got higher in the sky, they looked to where it would set in the evening.

If skies became too overcast for Tohunga to use the sun, the moon, planets or stars, instead they were able to guage their course from ocean swells. In the Pacific Ocean, prevailing north and south-easterly trade winds push up swells that remain constant for long periods. The navigating Tohunga kept their waka (canoes) at the same angle to these swells. Sudden changes in canoe/waka motion would indicate that the waka had changed course. To avoid veering off their course, a rope was trailed behind the canoe – if a wave suddenly jarred the vessel, the rope would true to the original line of travel.

Using the Waka as a Compass: Some Tohunga also lined up their canoe/waka with wind direction, using pennants tied to both mast and rigging as a guide. They might also use the waka as a compass. What they did here was to divide the 360° horizon around the canoe into different sectors named "houses" and these were marked on the canoe railings. Navigating Tohunga would know that the arcs of the sun and other stars cross the sky at different heights depending on the time of year. At night the rising and setting of stars were used to align the canoe in a direction of travel. For example, when Star A set, Star B was used, and so on through the night until the earth’s own star, the sun, rose. The sun was used at dawn and dusk.

To be continued:

Behold, here is a map of the world as I reckon it should look! Totally perfect! I think it looks great.

I am not alone in thinking this way either. This map was actually created by one Stuart McArthur of Melbourne, Australia. When he actually drew his first "right side up" map at the age of twelve years old his geography teacher told him to redraw his assignment the "correct" way up if he wanted to pass the subject. Years later while attending Melbourne University,  he produced the world's first modern "south up" map, and launched it on Australia Day in 1979.

Here's the thing. There is no particular reason why the Northern hemisphere should be perceived as being "up" or "on top" of the planet nor is this perspective necessarily "correct". Equally there is no reason why the South should be seen as "below" or "downunder" as it is often described as being. This is a convention that has taken place over a few centuries now, when northern hemisphere navigators started using the North Star and Magnetic compass.

Before that, the top of the map was to the East which is where the word orientation comes from. The perception therefore of North as "above" is a eurocentric idea, and because most of us in the modern world grow up in cultures where this view is familiar, we "believe" unquestioningly that it is the only view.

But in Biblical Times evidence from the Torah that east was at the top of all maps. In Genesis when Abraham's nephew, Lot, is captured in war and carried away and Abraham races to the rescue, when he and his men catch up with Lot's captors and set him free, this happens in "Chovah which is to the left of Damascus." (Gen. 14:15). Chovah is north of Damascus. In Psalms 89:13 it says, "The north and the right, You created them". This implies that right is synonymous with south, so you are facing east when you read the map.

People in ancient Arabia placed south at the top. This is because when you wake up (in Arabia) and face the sun, south is on the right. Because of positive associations with the right as opposed to left, they put that on top. Yemen is so named because it is on the "yamin" right of Arabia. And of course, with the sea to the south of them there was nothing "on top" of the country, so they preferred it that way.

The ancient Chinese were the first to invent the compass, which they always thought of as pointing south. To them, South was a sacred direction, and in ceremonies, the king would always face south.

In Medieval Europe cartographers (people who draw maps) always drew Jerusalem on top of their maps because that was the Holy Land. This meant that east was more or less at the top.

And in Aotearoa/New Zealand, the area where New Zealand's capital city Wellington now stands was known to our first nations people as Te Upoku O Te Ika (the Head of the Fish). This fish - as we know from the Maui legend - is the North Island. When we look at the now
"normalised" modern map of our world it shows the head of the fish facing "down" towards Antarctica; the tail of the fish is on the northern end of the fish body. The problem here is that in the Maori view of the sacred and profane (tapu and noa), the head is never below the tail. One does not, for example, place your bum on a pillow where your head may later lie. In Maori cosmology, therefore, the head of the fish has to be on the "above" and southern end of the North Island. South is pointing upwards and now the Antarctic is on the "top of the world", as shown in the McArthur map.