Bottle collectors put the boot in

Press, 6 December 1985, Page 12

Bottle collectors put the boot in

By

BEVERLEY McCULLOCH

Blacks Point is a small township about four kilometres south-east of Reefton on State Highway 7. It is sited at the junction of Murray Creek and the Inangahua River and is named after a pioneer settler. Today, it has few inhabitants, but last century, it was a centre of the thriving gold industry, close to the earliest quartz mines in the district.

In 1900, the population was still over 300, most miners (and their families) who worked in the mines and batteries nearby. The “Golden Fleece” battery at Blacks Point, the remains of which can be seen today, was one of the most profitable.

Driving through Blacks Point the visitor can see, standing on a rise just above the road, a small museum housing relics of the goldmining past. The building was originally a Methodist Church where the Cornish miners and their

families worshipped and which could accommodate a hundred people. On a recent visit I photographed the small, mud-covered boot shown here. It probably belonged to a child, boy or girl, or it could possibly have fitted a small woman. It came from a rubbish dump at another nearby abandoned settlement and mine, Globe Hill. Despite the fact that this particular boot has been rescued and is now preserved safely in a museum for me it was a sorry sight, representing a great deal of thoughtless destruction.

Some years ago I drove to Globe Hill along an overgrown track and with my family spent some time just looking at the relics. Downslope in one place, in the thick bush, was an old rubbish dump,

archaeologically referred to as a midden, and often a very important source of historic information.

The West Coast does not have the ideal climate for the preservation of material. Organic remains are preserved only under certain circumstances usually by either very dry conditions, or, more commonly because they are deposited somewhere where the oxygen necessary for decay causing bacteria is excluded. It was this latter circumstance which prevailed at Globe Hill. The very wetness of the climate had caused the top layers of the rubbish tip to form into an impervious peat-like layer which had effectively excluded all oxygen from the layers below, a very similar phenomenon to that which often occurs in our moa swamps.

Beneath this, historic remains to the depth of several metres had been almost miraculously preserved for the best part of the century. At least that had been the situation until just before my visit. When I arrived the site had been visited shortly before by bottle collectors. They had usea garden forks to turn over the contents of the tip. They had then taken their prizes, the bottles which were the only thing of interest to them, and departed. But they had broken the vacuum seal of peat, and scattered and exposed over the area were all the rest of those historic relics, including a lot of leather goods such as the boot shown, and which if carefully excavated could have told so much about the past. Every one of those exposed relics would have disappeared, biodegraded, within a few weeks. The little boot in Blacks Point

Museum may well be one of the few pieces left. Today, historic sites such as this are under the protection of the Historic Places Act of 1980. But for places like Globe Hill and others throughout the country that protection came too late. Our history as a country belongs to everybody, but sadly it can be destroyed by the selfish interests of a few.