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