The Tuia Mātauranga Pōkai Whenua GeoTour follows the footsteps of early explorers of Aotearoa New Zealand taking you to places where leaders of the past searched for food, resources and ways to adapt and survive in this new land.
Use the Pōkai Whenua GeoTour as your classroom to explore the stories of the past, in the present, to preserve what is unique in Aotearoa New Zealand for the future.
Collect the codewords to get the Geocoin puzzle pieces
To be able to complete this GeoTour and receive your special Geocoin collectable, remember to take a note of the codeword placed in the cache. This will need to be recorded in your passport which can be downloaded here.
63 of the 150 Pōkai Whenua GeoTour caches will contain a randomly placed special FTF token (a replica of the Tuia Mātauranga GeoTour commemorative coin). This is yours to keep! If you find more than one, you might consider leaving it for the next person who finds the cache.
Mahi Tupuna (The work of our ancestors)
The Birth of Blackball
Coal mining began here in the 1800s. The community gained its name from the Blackball Shipping Line. This company shipped Blackball coal from the port of Greymouth to the bigger ports of Lyttelton and Wellington.
In 1892 the mine was bought by a British shipping company needing a secure supply of coal for steamships carrying frozen meat to Britain. A five-kilometre aerial ropeway was built to carry the coal across the Grey River. The ropeway operated until 1909, when a new railway and bridge replaced it. The wide verges of Stafford Street once sited the standards which supported the coal buckets.
In 1899 the British shipping magnate Sir Edwyn Sandys Dawes took a controlling interest in the mine, and also owned most of the land in Blackball township.
Miners who built their own houses had to pay rent to him. Several of the streets are still named after members of the Dawes family, such as Sir Edwyn’s son and successor William. Neither of those men ever came to Blackball.
From 1902 the company chairman was Canterbury businessman George Stead. He had earlier organized strikebreakers on the Lyttelton water-front during the great 1890 Maritime strike.
So by 1908 Blackball was a company town. Almost every resident relied, directly or indirectly, on the mine for their income. And the mine was owned by distant British financiers, and run by their loyal local agents.
Getting on the Coal
Miners and their families came from many corners of the world to work in the Blackball mine. They brought with them traditions of mutual support and stubborn determination built up in their dark, dangerous, underground workplaces.
About half of the Blackball workforce was from North England coalfields in Durham, Yorkshire and Lancashire, with a few from Cornwall. Another third were lowland Scottish and most of those arrived by way of mines in New South Wales, Australia. The rest were mainly Irish and also often migrated here from Australia. A small number came from other homelands such as Scandinavia or Italy.
At Blackball they found a climate that was cold and damp in winter, and working conditions more primitive and dangerous than most were used to. Boys started at the mine when they left school, at first helping to transport coal by the aerial ropeway. Then they moved underground, working with machinery or the pit ponies that hauled the railway trucks. From about the age of 20 a man could ‘get on the coal’ by becoming a hewer, a real miner who worked with a pickaxe and ‘banjo’, or heavy shovel, and was skilled at using explosives.
The miners paid part of their wages into an accident fund and employed the town’s only doctor. As the demand for coal varied, the Blackball miners could be ordered to work longer hours, or laid off completely. They formed a union in 1900 to protect their wages and conditions. In 1904 the company sacked the whole workforce, then rehired half of them. The following year most men worked for only one or two days a week, and the union almost collapsed.
Arbitration – A Lifeline or a Noose?
In 1890 a nationwide strike by seamen, watersiders, miners and others was defeated, and their union organizations were destroyed. At the next general election unionists voted to rebuild the labour movement and elected a Liberal-Labour government. The “Lib-Labs” passed the 1894 Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration (IC&A) Act, setting up a system of compulsory settlement of industrial disputes. This encouraged new unions to form and the Blackball Industrial Union of Workers was first registered under the IC&A Act in 1900.
For the next 10 years there were almost no strikes in New Zealand and international observers flocked to study this world-leading legislation. English Fabian socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb, British Labour Party leader Ramsey MacDonald, French political scientist Andre Siegfried and American reformer Henry Demarest Lloyd all wrote about the “country without strikes”.
However the compulsory arbitration system began to trouble parts of the union movement. Unions now played only a small part in the process of negotiating with employers. As well, the court-ordered arbitration system was slow and overworked and unions had to wait up to a year for their disputes to be heard. Some New Zealand unionists began to challenge the international image of their country as a “workers’ paradise”.
In Auckland in 1906 and Wellington in 1907, strikes broke out in defiance of the IC&A Act, and unionists in other areas supported them. New Zealand was no longer the “country without strikes”.
Everyone is Talking Socialism
The miners of Blackball, like workers elsewhere in New Zealand, were well read. They subscribed to magazines, bought books and pamphlets from overseas and debated long and hard over their favourite titles. Through their reading, and visits by speakers from overseas, Blackball people received the latest and most exciting political ideas from Europe and the US.
Tom Mann and Ben Tillett, leaders of a famous strike by English watersiders, came to the West Coast and described how organised labour could change a whole society. Several West Coast mining towns, including Blackball, formed branches of the New Zealand Socialist Party. Its lively meetings were an opportunity for political speeches but also for dancing, comic performances, music and singing. Most of all, the Socialist Party encouraged its members to read and pass on booklets and pamphlets on new political and social ideas.
Some of those pamphlets talked about a new exciting union movement from the US called the Industrial Workers of the World, known as the IWW or the Wobblies. This organization believed in organizing workers into “One Big Union” across the entire industry and it welcomed unskilled workers, women and non-whites as members. The IWW believed that direct action including strike action, was the only way for workers to win the goals they hoped for.
In January 1908 the Socialist Party’s organizer, a fiery Canadian named Harry Fitzgerald, arrived in Blackball to form a branch of the party. He encouraged the miners to join the IWW, and made a great impression. “Everyone here is talking socialism”, said one Blackball resident.
The Wild Men
Semple was born on the goldfields of New South Wales and began working in mines at the age of nine. He became a union activist and was placed on a blacklist that made it impossible for him to work in Australia. Semple then came to New Zealand and found work at the State coal mine in Runanga, south-west of Blackball. He was made president of its miners’ union in 1904. ‘Fighting Bob’ Semple was lean and tough, a champion boxer and famed soapbox orator. In January 1908 he moved to Blackball with his union mates to form a branch of the Socialist Party.
Paddy Webb was also Australian-born and like Semple he was blacklisted for union activity and came to New Zealand. He started working at Denniston in 1906. The following year Webb was described as “always late for work, rushing across the Denniston plateau, the backs of his trousers leg worn through at the bottom for the distance of about nine inches, and vigorously flapping”. He joined Semple at Blackball in early 1908.
Joining these two Pat Hickey, the son of a Fenian (Irish Republican), who was born near Nelson. He travelled overseas as a young man and joined the radical Weston Federation of Miners in Utah, US. Pat Hickey returned home in 1906 committed to organising his fellow workers.
These three, known as the ‘wild men’, were soon active in the Blackball Socialist Party, the miners’ union and community life in general. They won the support of older miners like Bill Bromilow. His wife Ann had been a ‘pitbrow lass’, a young girl who worked at the mine entrance in her hometown of Wigan, Lancashire. The Bromilows were staunch members of the Blackball Socialist Party and keen to see how it could improve their hardworking lives.
Grounds for Discontent
By 1908 about 500 people lived in Blackball, with about 170 men employed in the mine. They were increasingly unhappy with their working conditions. The underground air supply was poor, causing men to vomit and faint. Deadly gases such as blackdamp could build up, and water flowed into the mine from up above.
Hewers (the men who dug at the coalface) were paid by the weight of the tubs they filled with coal. The men claimed that over the hot summer these tubs had dried out and become lighter, so they were digging more coal for the same pay.
Once they finished work, the miners had no bathrooms to wash off the clinging coal dust. Some single men lived in tiny huts with no water supply or sewerage, and others had to queue to use the bath in their boarding house. Married men washed in a tin tub on their kitchen floor. The combined effect of these grievances meant the miners and their employers were headed for a confrontation.
Another issue actually sparked the Blackball strike of 1908 – the question of how long the miners were allowed to eat their midday meal, or ‘crib’. In most West Coast mines, half an hour was allowed for crib. In the Blackball mine, crib time had traditionally been only 15 minutes. Within weeks of arriving in Blackball Hickey, Webb and Semple, the ‘wild men’, were urging their fellow miners to take a full half-hour to eat their lunch underground. The union agreed to take up this demand.
Blackball on Strike
On Monday 27 January 1908, Pat Hickey sat down to eat his lunch. The mine manager, Walter Leitch, stood over him with a watch in his hand and after fifteen minutes ordered him to return to work. “See here, Boko,” replied Hickey. “I haven’t eaten my pie yet.” “No joking. I order you to resume work”, said the manager. “And I refuse”, said Hickey. He and another miner, Lawrence Mori, were fined for disobeying an order.
All the miners continued to take half an hour for crib, and in late February Leitch suddenly sacked Hickey, Paddy Webb, Bill Bromilow and four other miners. These seven men formed the entire committee of the Blackball Socialist Party. Three were also executive members of the Blackball Miners’ Union. That night the Miners’ Union resolved to strike until the seven men were given back their jobs, with no loss of pay. All but five of the hundred-plus unionists voted in favour.
All work in the mine immediately came to a halt and the tubs swung empty from the aerial ropeway. Life in Blackball changed utterly as men stayed home and played cricket and rugby. Dances, brass bands and orchestral concerts kept their spirits up. Hunting and fishing, and their own chickens and gardens helped to feed their families. There was plenty of noisy debate but no violence. The strike remained good-natured and peaceful.
Right from the start of the strike Hickey and other union orators took their message to other unions and the public. The Christchurch newspaper called the Blackball miners “irresponsible, erratic and insane”, but the combined unions of Auckland, Wellington, Canterbury, Westland and Dunedin voted to support them. Other unions raised large sums of money to donate to the Blackball miners. The crib-time strike in small and remote Blackball became a nationwide issue.
Red Rosettes in Court
The Greymouth courtroom was packed to the doors on 11 March 1908 as the Arbitration Court began hearing the Blackball strike dispute. Miners and their supporters crammed the visitor’s gallery, declaring their socialist sympathies by wearing red ribbons in their coats and sporting red ties.
Union leaders such as Hickey had a public reputation for uncompromising radicalism, yet during the Arbitration Court hearing they negotiated a backroom deal with the mine owners to return to work. The union first accepted this deal but later refused it, saying they were determined to remain on strike until all their conditions were met.
The miners’ lawyer argued that his clients had a genuine grievance since fifteen minutes was far too short a time for them to eat their lunch. The judge, Justice Sims, growled that he thought fifteen minutes was ample for a lunch break. According to Pat Hickey, the judge then, “glanced at the clock, noticed the time was 12.30 and stated that the Court stood adjourned for lunch until 2pm.”
As expected, Judge Sims found the Blackball Miners’ Union guilty of an illegal strike and fined it £75. Since the union had no funds, the strikers were each personally liable to pay part of this fine. A group of police constables went from house to house in Blackball with a horse and cart, loading up belongings such as furniture, sewing machines, bicycles, brass band instruments and a piano. These were to be sold by a public auction in Blackball.
On the morning of the auction several sturdy miners, including a well-known boxer, warned off would-be bargain hunters. The only bidder was a striking miner who brought back all the goods, estimated to be worth £125 pounds, for twelve shillings and sixpence.
Ending the Strike
The morale of the strikers remained high as the strike continued into its third month.
Pat Hickey refused to pay the original fine imposed on him, and was arrested by the local constable. He arrived at the Greymouth police station on the shoulders of his fellow strikers, with the Blackball brass band blaring stirring tunes.
Hickey was sentenced to two weeks in prison, but his fine was immediately paid by an anonymous supporter and he was released.
In the end it was the West Coast weather that brought the dispute to an end. To replace the lost production from Blackball, the mining company relied on coal from another mine at Brunner. In early May the winter rains arrived and drenched the Coast for days on end. The pumps in the Brunner and Tyneside mines could not cope with the torrents of water, the mineshafts were flooded and work was forced to stop. Two days later Company directors and Walter Leitch, the Blackball mine manager, agreed to all the strikers’ demands and work began again.
The union rejoiced, and so did the labour movement nationwide.
A Federation of Labour
By the time the strike ended, Pat Hickey, Paddy Webb and Bob Semple were nationally known figures – reviled by some but admired by others. They immediately built on their success by convincing the various West Coast miners’ unions to combine into a powerful Federation of Miners, on the IWW model of a single union for an entire industry.
In 1909, the combined miners joined forces with the shearers, labourers, watersiders and other active unions to form the country’s first Federation of Labour. The Federation was soon nicknamed the ‘Red Fed’ by a hostile press, but it rode a wave of union militancy to win a series of victories against employers. Paddy Webb of Blackball was its first president, Bob Semple its organiser, and Pat Hickey was sub-editor of its newspaper, the Maoriland Worker.
The Federation supported a strike by goldminers in the North Island town of Waihi. In 1913 the whole country was in turmoil when watersiders and other militant unions brought the port cities to a standstill. Police combined with the army and volunteer mounted constables (known as “Massey’s Cossacks”) to crush the strikes and destroy the power of the ‘Red Feds’.
Hickey, Webb, Semple and other Federation leaders were blacklisted and had great difficulty finding work. Some, including Hickey, were forced to leave New Zealand. It seemed as though the hopes created in 1908 had been destroyed just five years later.
Blackball’s Political Legacy
Blackball’s radical tradition survived the disastrous strikes of 1912 and 1913. Paddy Webb was elected to Parliament in 1913 as this region’s representative. He was the first coalminer to enter Parliament.
However, the Great War of 1914-18 was another massive setback to the labour movement. Although many unionists, including Samuel Frickleton from Blackball, enlisted and served with New Zealand forces, others, including local MP Paddy Webb, fiercely opposed the government’s policy of compulsory conscription.
New Zealand’s first organised strike against conscription took place here in Blackball in late 1916. The miners were needed to provide coal for the country so they were not eligible for conscription themselves. They struck in support of others who were forced to go to war against their principles.
Paddy Webb and other mining leaders were arrested for their anti-conscription stance. Paddy was charged with sedition and given three months in prison. Then he was himself called up for military service. He refused to accept the call-up notice, challenged the government to a by-election on the conscription issue, and was returned to Parliament unopposed. Paddy continued to refuse to go to war and was given another prison sentence, this time of two years’ hard labour.
Bob Semple also spent a year in jail for speaking against conscription. Soon after his release he was also elected to Parliament, representing the New Zealand Labour Party. The Party had been formed in 1916 as a political response to the wave of activism that followed the 1908 Blackball strike. It first came to power in 1935 and both Semple and Webb were Cabinet Ministers.