When we first started selling books we sold more books in Germany than in all English-speaking countries put together. We then started selling books across Europe, including France, Italy, and Poland. Then Australia became our major overseas market and last year that was the United Kingdom's turn. This year, our sales in the United States of America are far and away leading the way.

We love that our books from little old New Zealand are being sold the world over. One of our authors have even received fan mail from Germany! It's always lovely to hear from readers and it feels even more special knowing someone on the other side of the planet has connected with what was written here! 

We are so grateful to all the individual readers, librarians, and bookshop owners who have taken a chance on a little publisher such as ourselves and have accessed works by up-and-coming and establisher authors and illustrators. 
 

Trade Days are an excellent opportunity for authors, bookshops, and publishers to meet and learn about each other's needs and wants. We will be attending the Bookseller's Trade Day in August at Weltec. This institution currently teaches the Graduate Diploma in Publishing which allows those wanting to work in publishing to meet both those they may soon be working beside and those they would be catering to in the future. What a fantastic opportunity for all involved. Quite often writers spend a lot of time a lone, understandably, so days like this are great for everyone to meet and share knowledge and promote everything to do with books. 

NZBookLovers publish reviews of New Zealand's latest books and Chris Reed has written a fantastic review of Jerry Mushin's latest book. 

"Jerry Mushin’s An Unlikely Academic is a compelling and insightful memoir that offers a candid look at the realities of academic life. With a career spanning forty-five years in higher education, Mushin provides a reflective and, at times, humorous account of his experiences, charting the evolution of universities from the 1960s to the present day. His observations extend beyond the lecture halls, shedding light on the shifting dynamics between students, lecturers, and institutions over time ..." See https://www.nzbooklovers.co.nz/post/an-unlikely-academic-by-jerry-mushin​ for the full review. 

Helen Mae Innes was recently interviewed for an article in Audubon about warblish. The National Audubon Society is an American organization concerned with the conservation of birds and their habitats. Their journalist Jasper Davidoff interviewed Helen because of her research and forthcoming book about the topic Warblish, Chirpish, Ticktocklish, & Animapoepia. 

Warblish: onomatopoeic interpretations of a specific bird vocalisations using existing word(s), e.g. the California Quail says, ‘Chicago,’ or ‘Where are you?’ 

Helen completed her research about warblish as part of her PhD in creative writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington. She discovered that warblish is found all around the world in numerous languages, but it seems to be mostly an oral tradition and little has been written about it. She collected 1500 examples from 55 languages from a range of books including birding guides, novels, poetry, and memoirs. 

An excerpt from Into the Woods by Helen Mae Innes has been published in Newsroom's Reading Room today. It is illustrated with photos from Glen Innes Photography. Click the button to be take to the website:​

A township began to be laid out on the plateau late in 1892 on land belonging to the Midland Railway Company. The Midland Railway Company and the Blackball Coal Company, both large enterprises owned by wealthy shareholders in New Zealand and Britain, were linked together to sink coal mines and build railways between the Grey and Nelson and Canterbury. A township was needed on the plateau to house and service the workers who would soon be underground digging.

‘Quite a respectable nucleus of a future township is already laid in the shape of workmen’s tents and other primitive dwellings,’ reported one observer in the spring of 1892 after a visit to Jolliffetown. The new township was to be linked with the world by way of the old pack track built by the Nelson provincial government to serve the goldfield at Blackball. The track cut straight through the beech forest and looked almost like a deep trench walled on both sides by ancient beech forest. It had recently been ‘roughly macadamised’ by the Grey county council with the help of a government subsidy. The two companies that owned the land and mine did not pay ‘a penny piece towards the cost’ of making or maintaining it but within a year of laying out the township the companies had wrecked the track by dragging ‘heavy machinery, concrete blocks, and other heavy weights over it on trollies, which it was not constructed to cope with.’

The Midland Railway Company sold township section leases at auction in Wallsend on 31 May 1893. At the auction, around sixty leases were bought. Almost all of the buyers were well-to-do people who lived elsewhere and had no intention of living in Blackball. Speculators, in other words. Edward Charles Evelyn Mills, for example, the son of a rich merchant family in Wellington, bought the leaseholds over sections 1, 2, 4, 16, 20, 28, 49, 96, 99 and 100. Two clergymen bought several leaseholds. A doctor bought one. Other investors were small capitalists. Hugo Lundquist was a farmer and ferryman at Ngāhere, as was James O’Brien. Henry Feary, from a Westland farming family, bought a section, as did a Greymouth hotelkeeper, James Brimble. A handful of buyers were wage workers; one was George Lemon, a miner who bought the lease on section 33. Only one woman bought a leasehold: Jessie Orams, born in the Shetlands and now living in Greymouth.
‘With a site entirely free from risk of floods and other disadvantages, practically level for streets and buildings,’ wrote a booster, ‘centrally situated in the most progressive mining district of the colony, and environed with charming scenery, the township of Blackball begins life with everything in its favor.’

Blackball also began life very much as a ‘Company Town.’ The mass of men working for a wage in the new township would be working for one company. Almost all the land in the township would be owned by that company, too. The Blackball Coal Company and its partner the Midland Railway Company would be both paymaster and landlord.

​

I’ve just finished reading this fine book. James Courage kept a diary from the age of sixteen to the end of his life. He wrote in its pages about being a boy on a country estate near Amberley, about being a teenage boy at Christs College, and about being a student at Oxford. He wrote mostly about the long years afterwards when he was working hard on novels and short stories – always doing his best to write truthfully. He was mordant. He was fearful. He was inhibited. He was imaginative.
     He, like me, was sexually abused by an uncle.
     ‘Do you know what my uncle called me? I was this timid boy – delicate and small even at fourteen – and he called me “White Mouse”. He seduced me in a cave, a limestone cave. I was terrified. For six months afterwards I lived on the verge of a breakdown, then collapsed at school. But I couldn’t tell anyone why. I thought I’d go to prison, be hung.’
     My main reservation about the book is that it lacks knowledge of the social context of James Courage’s early life in Canterbury. James’s father is characterised as a ‘farmer’ when really he was a wealthy landowner and the family lived in a mansion with servants on their estate, Seadown. His grandmother is characterised as living ‘on a farm near Mount Somers’ when really she was the dowager in charge of a huge sheep station called Mount Somers. The large landholders of Canterbury only began calling themselves ‘farmers’ at the very end of the nineteenth century when they were being attacked as a parasitic aristocracy by a broad coalition of political opponents from the middle class and working class. It was a highly successful rebranding. It blurred the boundary between the few hundred landed gentry and the many thousands of small farmers below them in the social heap.
     Other than that reservation, though, Chris Brickell has done a skilful job choosing and editing diary excerpts.
     James Courage comes vividly to life in this book.


Stevan Eldred-Grigg

Just finished rereading this novel set in Italy and France on the eve of the Second World War. I’ve admired Moravia ever since first reading him while learning Italian in the mid 1970s and been intrigued by fascism ever since studying it as an undergraduate in the early 1970s. The Conformist is among the most subtle probes into the mentality behind fascism that I’ve ever come across. I find it very easy to empathise with the way the protagonist, Marcello, craves to fit in so much that he embraces what we might call the ‘inner fascist.’ Moravia very skilfully portrays anti-fascists though the eyes of the fascist. Professor Quadri, for example, seems to Marcello to be nothing but a sordid ‘hunchback’ weakling squatted in a study amidst an ‘enormous quantity of books’ while peering short-sightedly from ‘a curiously flat, asymmetrical face, like a papier-mâché mask … a face that had nothing real or reliable about it.’


Stevan Eldred-Grigg

Blackball in 1890 was home to around a hundred people, mostly men and boys working as gold diggers or selling goods and services to diggers. Chinese were probably the biggest group. Almost all the other people in and around Blackball were British, Irish or German.
     The population was scattered around three little clusters of houses. The oldest cluster was The Junction: down in the wetlands below the plateau and grouped around the hotel owned by Georgina and William Kinsella, it had a butchery and a few huts. The newest cluster of housing was at Jolliffetown: centred on a hotel owned by Frances and Thomas Jolliffe and sited on a narrow pack track that climbed up the terrace from The Junction and then sliced straight through the dense canopy of black beech. After quitting the plateau the pack track climbed the steep thickly forested spurs of the Paparoa Range to the gold reefs of Upper Blackball.
     Gold was still the main money earner in and around Blackball, but high hopes were held for coal. The Black Ball Creek Coal Company, owned by a group of big capitalists in Canterbury, first struck coal in the spring of 1890. The Grey River Argus eagerly proclaimed: ‘hidden treasures will be yielded up … the coal at one end and the gold at the other … Blackball should become one of the best-known districts on the coast.’

I’ve been meditating lately on this mantra from Zen Buddhism:
 
Words are the enemy of understanding.
 
My version is:
 
Words work against understanding.



​Stevan Eldred-Grigg, Blackball

I’ve just begun reading the new book, James Courage Diaries, edited by Chris Brickell and recently published by Otago University Press. I’ll post more about it later, but already I’m deeply involved. Actually I’ve felt deeply involved with James Courage ever since 1973 when I first read Such Separate Creatures, a collection of his short stories edited by Charles Brasch and puI’ve just begun reading the new book, James Courage Diaries, edited by Chris Brickell and recently published by Otago University Press. I’ll post more about it later, but already I’m deeply involved. Actually I’ve felt deeply involved with James Courage ever since 1973 when I first read Such Separate Creatures, a collection of his short stories edited by Charles Brasch and published by Caxton Press. After reading the collection I went out of my way to find his novels and read them one after another. A mixed bag. Yet they all had something to say to me about myself and the world in which I found myself living – and writing – the Canterbury Plains, Christchurch, sheep, straight streets, flat paddocks, straight plantations, inhibition, secrecy, sodomy, snobbery.

​Stevan Eldred-Grigg

I’ve just read this novel for the second time after more than thirty years. If you don’t know the storyline, it’s grounded on the life of Liza, a baby born into a battler family in a gritty industrial city in northern England at the start of the twentieth century. We follow Liza’s life up to the years of Margaret Thatcher.
     Pat Barker shows a world of working class people who have to keep their wits sharp to cope with too much work and not enough money in the first decades of the century, and then not enough work – except for the women! – and not enough money in the later decades of the century. She shifts backwards and forwards between straightforward realism and lyrical wondering. She shows the terse humour of her characters as they sling words at one another in quick comments and backchat.
    It’s a world I recognise intimately from my own mother’s family in South Christchurch – the world I wrote about in Oracles and Miracles. Liza’s England has its occasional longueurs. And at times it feels hasty as it sprints through the decades.
     Yet it’s a little masterpiece: warm, strong, clever, drily droll.


​Stevan Eldred-Grigg

Sue Green and I thought it would be a good idea to call an open meeting of Blackball women and anyone else interested in women’s role in the political history of the working class at the Blackball Working Men’s Club. We got a good turnout. The room was talkative, questioning and lively.
      I did a presentation arguing that active involvement by women was crucial to the history of unions, the Labour Party and the Communist Party. I also argued that the political history of the working class was more than just the history of those unions and parliamentary political parties. Working class women – and men – organised a powerful Prohibition movement which was in many ways in open conflict with unions and the left political parties. Working class women also set up or were important to other community organisations. Although we think of the mothers, wives and daughters of coal miners as toiling away all day and night in their kitchens, most of them were also busy in the streets, the shops, the halls, the pubs, the churches, the school and other centres of working class political life.
      I ended by suggesting that perhaps instead of eight huts a better plan might be for the Blackball Museum of Working Class History to build four huts telling the story of the men, and four lean-to kitchens telling the story of the women. Others in the room had a lot of other good ideas and it was clear that everybody thought equality for women goes without saying.
      The Museum of Working Class History committee when it meets again will tackle how to follow up.
 
pic: the leaders at the front of a Miners Union protest march, Blackball, 1931
 

​Opened in 2009, this little museum is unique in our country. No other museum is dedicated to telling the story of the working class. We owe a lot to the citizens of Blackball and the West Coast unions who came together to found the museum. We owe a lot, above all, to the commitment and energy of Paul Maunder, writer and filmmaker, who had the original vision for the museum and then worked long and hard to make it a reality.
 
The Ministry for Culture and Heritage has now offered $20,000 for the museum to start work on a project building eight huts modelled on the Blackball Coal Mine Company’s single men's huts. Great news! The museum when it asked for this funding said that the huts would ‘tell the full political history of the New Zealand working class from 1890-1935.’
 
I went along to a meeting of the museum committee – as I mentioned in an earlier post – where we talked about what steps to take next. Some of us were a bit startled to find the proposal is for six of the eight huts to portray the lives of working class men and only one to show the lives of working class women. The other is for working class kids. Two of us argued that half the huts should show the lives of women.
 Opened in 2009, this little museum is unique in our country. No other museum is dedicated to telling the story of the working class. We owe a lot to the citizens of Blackball and the West Coast unions who came together to found the museum. We owe a lot, above all, to the commitment and energy of Paul Maunder, writer and filmmaker, who had the original vision for the museum and then worked long and hard to make it a reality.
 
The Ministry for Culture and Heritage has now offered $20,000 for the museum to start work on a project building eight huts modelled on the Blackball Coal Mine Company’s single men's huts. Great news! The museum when it asked for this funding said that the huts would ‘tell the full political history of the New Zealand working class from 1890-1935.’
 
I went along to a meeting of the museum committee – as I mentioned in an earlier post – where we talked about what steps to take next. Some of us were a bit startled to find the proposal is for six of the eight huts to portray the lives of working class men and only one to show the lives of working class women. The other is for working class kids. Two of us argued that half the huts should show the lives of women.
 
Paul Maunder spoke most strongly against the idea. The museum, he says, ‘has always retained the Marxist consciousness’ which means that men were the key workers in the working class. Giving women and men equal numbers of huts as men, Paul argues, is ‘just plain silly.’
 
Watch this space!
Paul Maunder spoke most strongly against the idea. The museum, he says, ‘has always retained the Marxist consciousness’ which means that men were the key workers in the working class. Giving women and men equal numbers of huts as men, Paul argues, is ‘just plain silly.’
 
Watch this space!

This is one of the most dramatic mountains seen from Blackball. A few of my friends may remember that last year I was experimenting with low-res impressionistic photography. Here’s another of those experiments. What can we call this mountain that’s been smacking my gob since childhood? Although I’ve worked hard to be a wordsmith most of my life, I’ve always felt that it’s a bit of an impertinence to slap a label on something as big, as strong and so beyond us as this peak that humps itself nearly two thousand metres up into the sky. At the same time, whenever I look towards it – which I do every day – I feel a need to name it. The official name on maps is Mount Alexander. I don’t know why. The name used by Blackball people is The Lion. After a snowfall you’ll hear people saying: ‘I see there’s a mane on The Lion today.’ A far older name is Kaimata. The most likely meaning of Kaimata is ‘Raw Food.’ Which must have a story behind it. A group of travellers hundreds of years ago getting a bit desperate because they couldn’t make a fire and found themselves forced to eat things raw that they’d normally eat cooked? I like the fact that the peak has three names. Although Te Pāti Māori argues that only te reo names should be used for maunga – an argument I respect – I disagree. If our species is going to go around naming mighty massifs that are many millions of years old then a certain degree of linguistic instability is, maybe, apt? 

I've just finished re-reading this wonderful book. Norman Kirk was our most impressive prime minister in the whole of the twentieth century. Deeply intelligent. Warmly imaginative. He had his blind spots, of course, but I don't know of any other leader who had such a generous vision for a better society - together with the political acumen to make a strikingly good stab at bringing it about. Margaret Hayman needs to be given a big thank-you from posterity for the way her book lets us understand Norman Kirk so much in the round, and so empathetically. She was lucky to work with so remarkable a leader. He was lucky to work with so gifted a biographer.

The book's full of his dry sense of fun.

One example: Queen Elizabeth, meeting him on one occasion, said: 'We don't like Labour Governments - they're not reliable.'
​
Norman Kirk's response: 'Well, there's one here, and I'm not only Labour, but Socialist as well.'

Thefts and murders were common on the goldfields of the West Coast. Only a minority of those crimes were ever picked up by police and law courts. Thieves roamed freely from field to field. Five highwaymen, for example, their faces masked, made away with an astonishing £4000 after holding up a bank on the road between No Town and Twelve Mile. A draper was robbed of gold, notes and cheques worth £1400 by masked men with a shotgun one day near Totara Flat.[i] And a ‘sticking-up case’ caused ‘a sensation’ in 1866 when three masked highwaymen committed robbery under arms at Blackball.[ii]
     The robbery began one afternoon when Henry Hammett, owner of the store on the flat, heard his dog bark and looked out a door. The next thing he saw was ‘a double-barrelled gun presented to his head.’ Two other men, one with a single-barrelled gun and the other a revolver, stood further back. The masked men ransacked the store. Hammett and two customers in the building at the time of the crime were tied up with flax. Only one of the three robbers was brought to court. Robert Stone, found guilty of robbery under arms, was sentenced to six years’ penal servitude.[iii]
     The two most well known highwaymen in the district were murderers as well as thieves. One was an Irishman, Thomas Noon alias Kelly. The other was an Englishman, Richard Hill alias Burgess. Joseph Sullivan, another Englishman and a fellow highwayman, wrote that the Burgess gang murdered men wholesale.
     ‘It appears that the number of victims,’ noted a shocked editor, ‘is nearer thirty than twenty.’[iv]
     Others in the neighbourhood seem to have been murdered by other gangs. A man whose dead body was found by travellers one day in 1869 ‘on one of the beaches near the Blackball Creek’ led a newspaper to say there was ‘something fearfully suggestive’ in the large number of ‘accidental deaths’ in the district.[v]
     Diggers dealt with crime on the goldfields by taking justice into their own hands, in a democratic way. The first diggers to get to a field would hold a meeting to talk over and vote on an agreed code of ‘digger law.’ Although unwritten, these laws were very effective in bringing wrongdoers to book. The system was one of acknowledged understandings. Claim jumping, for example, was most often dealt with on the spot. A big gathering would be called when a crime was more serious. The diggers would choose a judge and jury. We know of no such event in Blackball but one famous digger trial took place in 1867 at nearby Moonlight. A man was caught robbing a hotelkeeper of her cashbook. The miners chose a judge and jury. After ‘a fair trial’ the man was found guilty and driven off the field subject only to ‘a little personal chastisement.’[vi]


[i] Latham, D J, The Golden Reefs, Christchurch 1984, p. 192.
[ii] Evening Post, 28 May 1866.
[iii] Grey River Argus, 26 July 1866.
[iv] West Coast Times, 13 July 1866.
[v] Grey River Argus, 9 October 1869.
[vi] West Coast Times, 20 August 1867.

One way to try coining cash on goldfields was by selling tools, food, drink, drugs and sex to the diggers. A ‘whole population’ always followed goldseekers to diggings, wrote Julius von Haast; ‘the demi-monde, sharpers and idlers of every kind, resembling marauders who follow an army.’[i] Tools were needed to dig for gold. Food was needed to stay alive while digging. Gin, rum and whisky were downed to keep the spirits up. Beer, on the other hand, was not drunk very freely; it cost too much to pack it in on the backs of horses or donkeys. Opium, ether and other drugs were mixed with alcohol and sold as patent medicine. Sex was sold by women keeping pubs or stores as ‘fronts’ for sex work. Although all these trades could be good earners, traders often went bust within a year or so.
     Two stores were set up not long after the rush to the diggings at Blackball.
     At some point in 1865 the first opened its doors on the wetlands where Blackball Creek and Ford Creek flowed into the Grey. Henry Hammett was the storekeeper. We know nothing about him other than that he and his wife had split up. Johanna Newenham, the wife, was dying on a goldfield in Victoria when the husband set up shop at Blackball.[ii] He sold, after a short while, to a man called Campbell. The new owner quickly flicked the store on to Mary Hewlitt and her husband Henry Mitchell. Mitchell had worked as a boatman on the Grey, ferrying goldseekers upriver from Cobden to Twelve Mile, before opening a store at Nelson Creek. Mary and Henry ‘carried it on for a short time’ but found themselves unable to make money. Campbell took back the ownership. Afterwards, he sold to Henry Hammett, who had ‘another try at it’ for a year or so before selling to a couple whose name would become legendary in Blackball: Georgina and William Kinsella.[iii]
     William Kinsella was an Irish school teacher, ‘very good at mathematics.’ Georgina Thompson married him in Hokitika in 1868 and they settled at the store not long after the wedding. They had a licence from the Nelson provincial government to run a ferry across the Grey. Also they had a licence to sell drink. Alexander Bowkett tells us that they built the store ‘early in 1870’ but since a store already had been on the site for five years the truth may be they simply rebuilt it more robustly. The new store sat on top of ‘very high piles because when the creek rose it flowed under the house.’ The Kinsella family were soon growing oats as well as running the store, pub and ferry. And they kept poultry: ‘turkeys, fowls, geese, ducks.’ They planted an orchard. They grazed and killed bullocks. William became a gold buyer, acting as an agent for the Bank of New Zealand.[iv] Georgina and William were soon bringing up a family.
     A second store was opened within a year or two of the rush to Blackball. William Williams opened his doors to trade in a rough clearing whose setting was the opposite of the other store in its swampy wetlands. A wooden building with two stone chimneys, it sat among the steep spurs and narrow gorges in the black beech forest of Upper Blackball, near where Clark Creek flowed into Blackball Creek.[v] Williams not only sold tools and food but also had a licence to sell drink.
     A third store was opened on the flats in the late 1860s by a man called Hughes, who had ‘come from the Coal Pits rush, and was some time also working in the locality.’[vi]
 


[i] Haast, H F von, The Life and Times of Sir Julius von Haast, Wellington 1948, p. 407.
[ii] Grey River Argus, 6 January 1866.
[iii] West Coast Times, 19 October 1870.
[iv] Bowkett, Alexander, Centennial of Blackball 1866-1966, Greymouth 1966, p. 7.
[v] Historic Site Records: Moonlight and Blackball Creeks (Westland) (heritage.org.nz), p 114.
[vi] West Coast Times, 19 October 1870.

We don’t really know how many goldseekers dug in the shingles of ‘the Black Ball’ in the 1860s. Diggers were a restless crew. They swarmed in suddenly. They swarmed away suddenly. ‘The largest population at any time was about 150,’ noted the West Coast Times.[i] A goldfields commissioner estimated at the end of the third year of the diggings that the tally had dropped to only one hundred.[ii] At the end of the decade there were only about thirty-five men and boys.[iii] Yet one or two thousand must have spent at least some time digging and washing on Ford Creek and Blackball Creek.
     Almost all worked together in gangs. Only a very few diggers chose to work alone, which was so odd that they were known as ‘hatters’ – they were thought to be ‘as mad as a hatter.’ A working gang might be three men or it might be twenty men and was known as a ‘party.’ A party was a little democracy. All members of the party were equal owners of the claim, which they had to register with the provincial government of Nelson. All members of the party voted on what to do.
     Although a lot of us have a vague idea that those who rushed to the diggings were driven by the wish to win the jackpot, most diggers were not so silly. Gold digging was an investment. You needed a few hundred pounds to become a digger, which made it beyond the reach of the unskilled working class. Almost all diggers came from the skilled working class or the lower middle class. Almost always they hoped to find enough gold to allow them to buy a small farm, to set up a workshop, or to buy a pub or a shop. The dream was not to become rich but to become ‘independent,’ as people said in the nineteenth century. Or in other words, to make their own living without being beholden to a boss – to free themselves from having to work for a wage or salary.
     How much money did they make from digging at Blackball? A few found big nuggets. One ‘curious piece of auriferous timber’ unearthed in 1867 was a stick or root nearly half a metre long, ‘much contorted and water-worn,’ embedded with ‘nuggets and specks of gold.’ One nugget on the stick looked like ‘the breast-pin in a very quiet old gentleman’s cravat.’[iv] A lot more found small nuggets, flakes and specks plentiful enough to make a good living. A provincial official reported in the fourth year after the beginning of the rush that diggers were earning on average ‘£4 per man per week’ at Blackball Creek.[v] A very good wage by the standards of the day. ‘I could mention many rich claims throughout the district,’ wrote an official the following year, ‘but … £4 to £5 per man would represent the average weekly earnings of every miner at work in my district.’[vi] A good many diggers made so little, though, that they gave up, packed their kits and trekked off to another diggings – or threw in their hand altogether and went back to wage or salary work.
     Or they were killed by the work. Gold digging was dangerous. A digger could be drowned by a sudden flood. ‘I cannot advise anyone to try their luck here, as there is too much water,’ observed a newspaper correspondent from Blackball.[vii] A digger could also be buried alive under a shingle fall.
     The end of some careers on the diggigns was to be driven in a hearse through the streets of Greymouth and buried in the town’s raw new cemetery


[i] West Coast Times, 19 October 1870
[ii] Bowkett, Alexander, Centennial of Blackball 1866-1966, Greymouth 1966, p. 5.
[iii] West Coast Times, 19 October 1870
[iv] Southland Times, 19 August 1867
[v] Bowkett, Alexander, Centennial of Blackball 1866-1966, Greymouth 1966, p. 5.
[vi] Grey River Argus, 8 June 1869
[vii] Evening Post, 28 May 1866.

Gold diggers who toiled in the shingle beds of Blackball during the 1860s were ‘men of all nationalities,’ notes Alexander Bowkett.[i] Not that all of them were men; a good many were boys. A few were women. The first goldseekers to have washed the creeks seem to have been Māori, which is not surprising because the young and fit in many tribes were keen to seek gold and were the pioneer diggers in the watershed of the Buller. Afterwards they were the pioneer diggers in the Grey Valley. They worked in parties of men, women, girls and boys. And they were ‘ever restless’ to find new fields, in the words of the Greymouth gold buyer, Reuben Waite.[ii]
    After them came men and boys from overseas; Britain, Ireland, the United States, Scandinavia and Germany – and later China and Italy.
     The two kingdoms of Great Britain sent hundreds of men and boys to Blackball. A lot of them made almost no mark. One was Alfred Rayment from Burnham, Essex; he was about thirty at the time of the first rush to Blackball.[iii] Another was William Grant from Forfar, Scotland; he was a few years older.[iv] Also some young men came to the diggings from the principality of Wales. One was Henry Francis from Caermarthen.[v]
     Irish diggers came to goldfields mostly from Clare, Limerick, Tipperary, Kings and Kilkenny.[vi] One of them was James Kelly from Kilkenny. [vii] Catholic as well as Irish, the way of life of these men and boys often differed markedly from the Germans, Scandinavians, English and Scots.
     Americans from the Yankee states and from the former Confederacy swarmed to the diggings on the West Coast. Almost all of them were of German, British, Irish or Scandinavian ancestry. George Thomasson, for example, who came from Bangor, Maine, was the son of Scandinavian forebears before ending up a digger at Ford Creek.[viii]
     Germans went everywhere on the diggings. They made key finds on Blackball Creek and gave their name to the tributary of German Gully. German goldseekers seem mostly to have hailed from the north rather than the south of their homeland, making them Protestant rather than Catholic, which in turn made it easy for them to blend with the English, Scots and Scandinavians. Among the Scandinavians, the most numerous were Norwegians. Frederick Olsen from Drammen, Norway, was in his mid twenties at the time of the first rush to Blackball.[ix] Frederick Langren, in his  mid thirties, was another forgotten Norwegian.[x]
     Chinese goldseekers would become a big group working the shingles along Ford Creek. Almost all of them came from the province of Guangdong. Italians would find their way to the reefs at Upper Blackball. ‘The Italians seemed to be in considerable numbers,’ notes Alexander Bowkett.[xi]
     Almost none of these diggers stayed on the diggings. The mass of them camped and dug for no more than a year or two, or for a few weeks, or even for no more than a day or two, before swagging up and heading away forever from Blackball.

​

[i] Bowkett, Alexander, Centennial of Blackball 1866-1966, Greymouth 1966, p. 7.
[ii] Waite, Reuben, A Narrative of the Discovery of the West Coast Gold-Fields, Nelson 1869 (new edition Christchurch 1998), p. 18.
[iii] Grey River Argus, 19 December 1891.
[iv] Grey River Argus, 12 April 1894.
[v] Grey River Argus, 2 October 1893.
[vi] Fraser, Lyndon, ‘Irish Migration to the West Coast, 1864-1900,’ New Zealand Journal of History 34, October 2000, p. 203.
[vii] Grey River Argus, 28 September 1893.
[viii] Grey River Argus, 10 October 1890.
[ix] Grey River Argus, 19 September 1892.
[x] Grey River Argus, 21 April 1896.
[xi] Bowkett, Alexander, Centennial of Blackball 1866-1966, Greymouth 1966, p. 7.

The first goldseekers who dug and washed in Blackball Creek and Ford Creek from late 1864 were followed by swarms of others. The swarms turned up whenever word of some new find came to the many pubs and brothels now thriving on the West Coast.
     Getting to Blackball, however, was far from easy.
     Diggers trekked by way of the old Māori track on the northwest bank of the Grey. The trek began at the little port town of Cobden, founded by the Nelson provincial government as headquarters of the Southwest Nelson Goldfield. The warden stationed at Cobden, together with his armed troopers, was in charge of Blackball. The provincial government set gangs of other men to work turning the old Māori track into a broader ‘pack’ track – a narrow roadway that could be used by horses or donkeys laden with goods. All the creeks flowing across the track had to be forded; there were no bridges. A tree would be felled in some spots a tree would be felled and rolled lengthways across a creek. The pack track for most of its way wound through quaking wetlands and thick stands of kahikatea towering into the sky.
     Or diggers paid a shilling or two to be rowed in whaleboats upriver from Cobden or the other little port town, Greymouth. Whaleboats and barges went as far as Twelve Mile. A township near what we now call Stillwater, Twelve Mile for a few fleeting years was the ‘large and flourishing’ wooden, iron and canvas entropot for diggings along the Grey Valley.[i] A warden and mounted troops for the Canterbury side of the goldfields were housed in its barracks. Flanking the barracks were ‘banks, hotels, and other business places almost out of number.’[ii]
     At Twelve Mile, goldseekers could be rowed across the river at Langdon’s Ferry. John and Harriet Langdon had built a hotel and ran the ferry. Afterwards the goldseekers would tramp on foot, sometimes leading pack animals, to Blackball Forks. Other goldseekers went from Twelve Mile to Ngāhere on a pack track built quickly by Canterbury. At Ngāhere, goldseekers could take a ferry across the Grey.
     Nelson and Canterbury provincial governments struggled to upgrade these ways for travellers to get to Blackball. ‘As soon as Nelson province realised the importance of the south-west goldfields it made efforts to establish a road or rail along the Nelson side of the River,’ notes Alexander Bowkett; ‘but apart from foot tracks and the setting up of a few ferrymen this dream road never came into being.’[iii] Costs were high even maintaining the pack track. One section of nearly a kilometre, for example, was washed away in a spring flood, ‘necessitating the traveller to push his way through a perfect maze of supplejacks and bush-lawyers, a trying task to a digger laden with a heavy swag.[iv]
     Canterbury, a richer province, spent more freely than Nelson. The pack track on the southeastern bank soon became a fairly good roadway. Yet it was still not easy getting through the wetlands from the new road at Ngāhere to the ferry at the Grey. And, once goldeekers had been ferried across the river or got to Ford Creek by way of the Nelson pack track, nor was it easy to get through the wide wetlands and sopping ‘by-wash’ – an old reach of the river now landlocked – where Blackball Creek and Ford Creek flowed into the Grey. Picking a way through wetlands and by-wash could be frightening. Wayfarers often lost the track and sank up to their waists. Sandflies swarmed. Men maddened by the biting sometimes smeared their faces and hands with rancid pork or mutton fat in a hopeless struggle to stop their skin redding and swelling.
     The way got harder still after goldseekers had made their way across the wetlands. Toiling up the two creeks and their tributaries in the quest for paydirt was more and more challenging the deeper a digger went into the steep eastern spurs of the Paparoa Range. Nelson province dug into its shallow pockets to stump up for the first stages of what would come to be known as the Croesus Track. A journalist late in 1868 claimed that ‘many more’ diggers would work the upper creeks if the provincial government only upgraded that ‘frightful’ track as it twisted nearly fifteen kilometres into the upper reaches of ‘the Black-Ball and Ford’s Creek.’[v]
    Goldseekers by the end of the 1860s could get from Cobden or Greymouth to the diggings at Upper Blackball in three or four days.


[i] West CoastTimes, 1 March 1869.
[ii] Grey River Argus, 7 September 1869.
[iii] Bowkett, Alexander, Centennial of Blackball 1866-1966, Greymouth 1966, p. 5.
[iv] Grey River Argus, 28 November 1868
[v] Grey River Argus, 28 November 1868