29-04-2025
Denniston Rose author says new coal mine is ‘crazy'
The Denniston Plateau is an historical site. There are wonderful interpretation panels up there, telling the story of that great engineering wonder – the Denniston Incline – and of the people who lived and worked in those harsh and isolated towns, now long gone. I'm proud to have helped in making the plateau a tourist destination. Many of the visitors, I'm told, go there after reading my novel The Denniston Rose. There's even a self-guided Denniston Rose Trail, pointing out where my fictional characters lived and worked.
Those underground mines of Denniston are an important part of our history. And that's where they should stay. Old underground stories. Opening up a new – opencast! – coal extraction on Denniston is in my view backward and lazy thinking.
The rock on the plateau is hard. The great podocarp forests of the West Coast can't grow there. The dead could never be buried on Denniston. Early photographs of the mining towns show a landscape devoid of vegetation: homes and buildings squatting in the mud.
But it's so different now – chimneys and brick doorsteps are screened by mosses, shrubs, stunted trees and grasses. It has taken decades but the old plateau is overcoming that mining trauma. I pointed this out to an old miner and he laughed. 'Probably all the shit from our dunnies did some good after all.' I also asked him, back then, must be 20 years ago, where the coal trucks were coming from. Every 10 minutes or so, a laden truck appeared climbing into the old Burnett's Face road. The miner shrugged. 'A little boutique mine down the valley near Cascade.' But the Denniston Plateau was a conservation area and ecologically unique. How could this be? And anyway what the hell was a 'boutique mine'? He just shrugged. Another laden truck climbed into view. At that time I was taking photographs for the illustrated version of my novel. Could we go down and see?
No way, he said. The road was steep, winding and single track. If we met a truck it would be impossible to back all the way up again.
After he moved on, we waited till the next truck came up and then headed downhill hoping to arrive at this 'boutique' mine before the next load set off. We made it. We saw, and photographed the small coal seam and the out-of-proportion devastation of the hillside and bush in that beautiful regenerating valley. The men operating the sluice told us proudly that the top grade coal would be used in making cosmetics and car tyres. How did this hidden operation get permission to mine? I never found out. Nor do I know what happened to that valley after the seam ran out.
In my new novel Sea Change the wealthy businessman Adrian Stokes says to the villagers who are trying to block his plans to develop their properties, 'I am rich and have the ear of those in power. I will always win.' I hope that view doesn't turn out to be true of Bathurst mining company's plans for Denniston.
The new bestseller Sea Change by Jenny Pattrick (Bateman, $37.99) is available in bookstores nationwide. Synopsis: a tsunami has devastated a village on the Kapiti Coast and a mandated retreat is announced. This government's decision has been manipulated by a wealthy and powerful businessman who has designs on the area for his own private development…
