South Island – Greymouth, Blackball and Gold Panning

The road from Hokitika to Greymouth was just a short skip and a jump up the road, we did encounter our first set of traffic lights in the South Island though….they were doing up this one laned rail/road bridge and the sides were all boxed up….I cannot believe this is the main highway and not only do you have to look out for cars but trains too. Southerners are tough buggers!

We drove into Greymouth, and took this route to the lookout on the way in.  It is a very disjointed looking town with little communities everywhere, you would call them suburbs if it was a bigger place.  In Greymouth proper Rosie described this biggest town on the West Coast as grim, The Operator thought it was very utilitarion…it aint no pretty town, it serves the purpose of living and working.  It would not be a place Rosie would stop at again, there are prettier towns and spots to stop than Greymouth.

Still 10,000 people call it home and it has a staunch mining history to boot.  It is built around the river mouth of the Grey River and a big wall, dam, dyk stops you from seeing the lovely sight from the town….still it is useful in the fact that it does stop the town from flooding and whats abit of scenery when it serves a practical service.

We took the road out to Blackball and came to the site of the old Brunner coal mine, established in the 1870s it is the site today of New Zealands largest loss of life in a mining disaster.  On the morning of the 26th March 1896 the morning shift was going to work down the mine.  4 pit ponies were on duty down the shafts and they didnt want to enter the mine, they tried four times to get the ponies to enter and in the end they had to cover their heads and force them down…to all their deaths.  At 9.30 that morning a series of explosions ripped through the mine, 95 men and boys were killed.

This memorial statue looks over the peaceful, tranquil site today.  On that day the interpretive panels which tell the story show how the town of 2000 stopped in its tracks, everyone rushed to the mine entrance, sombre and poignant black and white photos show woman and children weeping as the bodies of the men were stretchered out.  The funeral processions and the mass grave burial photos were all taken over 120 years ago but speak the same story of every mining disaster since.  Everyone in town had a relative that died, one lady had her husband and three sons killed.  New Zealand rallied around at the time, shocked and saddened, a collection was taken up to help the widows and dependants as there was no welfare system, 33,000pounds was raised, the equivalent today of $5,500,000.  The memorial names all 95 lost.                                                                        The bridge has a wee tail of its own, it was built in 1876 to maximise mining efficiency, one week before the grand opening, it collapsed into the river…an engineering ‘miscommunication’ meant one of the anchor ropes wasnt secured properly.  Ooops, it took a further 8 months to rebuild…The Grey river is below, flowing through Brunner.

 Oh yes welcome to Blackball, Rosie has claimed this small town in the middle of nowhere on the West Coast of the South Island as her spiritual home.

 Once upon a time it was a thriving working mans town established in 1866 to service gold diggers, coal mining also kicked in between 1890 and 1964.  One of the first Trade Unions in the country was started here and there were some influential strikes over working conditions in 1908 and 1931.  Nearly everyone has moved on and Blackball is now certainly a run down lifestyle choice.

 To its credit, it has 1 pub, 1 hotel, one workingmans club, a general store, a salami shop and a few ummmm…odd craft shops….

The Blackball Hilton is probably the towns biggest claim to fame (although the salami Co is gaining prominence with their beautiful venison garlic salami and black pudding).  The pub was in a court battle with the Hilton Hotel group and well you can guess who lost…Rosie thinks they needed a better lawyer, the pub is actually on Hilton Street…might have won a technicality.  The pub is a listed historic site building and is totally original inside, no big huge bar through the doors, the bar is to the right and there are dining and roadhouse facilities in the bottom with rooms to let up stairs.  Like everything in the town it has seen better days.

Tourists were coming through with a regular frequency, for a coffee or a beer, we had lunch out front with a nice cold one and it was then Rosie was hooked.  The silence, the complete and utter silence with only the sounds of the bush and wind around.  Birds chirping, the wind lightly blowing and utter silence.  No voices, no cars, no thing.  It was nirvana, Rosie could stay here awhile and ponder life.  The Operator reckoned he would be happy hunting and fishing here for awhile.  Profound silence.

Ans yes, it was a lifestyle choice living here, most of the houses were run down, empty sections were overgrown and the lived in houses were all pretty unique in their own weird and wonderful way…Rosie thinks she is abit square for this colourful community.

After our drive we thought we would go and explore Shantytown for the afternoon.  It kind of puts the West Coast history of logging, gold and coal mining into perspective.  We arrived just in time to ride the steam train up to the sawmill.                                               The weka was hanging around the station, they have popped up everywhere on our travels, scrounging inquisitive birds with short stumpy legs.  One kid kept calling it a kiwi, and its hill billy mother never even corrected it…yes, they were NZers, embarrassingly.          The train was a short ride up the track, it was a genuine steam train and when it reached the end of the line you could have a look in the engine bay, it was a beautiful looking beast alright.                We looked at the sawmill they had made up and learnt all about logging the big trees then thought we would make our fortune quicker gold mining….we headed for the sluices to take a quick lesson in panning.

We had paid an extra $7 to get instructions on how to pan for gold…we were guaranteed a scrap in every pan.  The gold is apparently 13 times heavier than water and about 8 times heavier than the dirt and rubble in the pan.  The Operator started out pretty gingerly but with those stats it was pretty unlucky to actually loose the gold from the pan using the proper technique.  Dip the pan into the water, shake from left to right to settle the gold at the bottom, hold the pan pretty upright and tip out the water then using a little water at a time wash out the rubble, after every forth rubble out wash put water in the pan and shake again to keep the gold settled.  The Operator worked pretty slowly and carefully but after he realised if there was gold there it wasnt going to get washed out you could go quite quick…if this was for real.  The pan has a secondary lip where you see the rust so the gold would get caught in their first. We got down to the bottom and low and behold the gleaming fragments of gold were revealed.  They bottled it for us and away we went with dreams of striking it rich by going up the river.

The rest of Shantytown was set up like a frontier town, it had a butchers, bank, hospital, shoe store, general store and post office and of course a pub.  You wandered around and had a look in all of the buildings and their were interactive boards that told you stories.  It was a neat town full of information.  Rosie needs to do abit of washing…..should have emptied the camper and had a go on the washboard…looks like some one bet her to it……

 We stayed the night in Greymouth and Rosie was looking forward to moving on in the morning, off to the blowholes and pancake rocks and then we will try and beat the rain forcast north into sunnier climates.