A HISTORY OF BLACKBALL: THE DAWN OF THE AGE OF COAL, 1890

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.’