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.

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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