Where a busy port once stood
Aworn wooden shed sits at a quiet edge of Havelock estuary, overlooking the rusted iron carcass of a ship in the waters beyond.
These are the final remnants of Blackball, a once thriving mill town and wharf 1.5 kilometres west of Havelock, established in the late 1870s to process and ship millions of metres of native timber.
Pamela Hayter lives here now, quietly raising her flock of blackheaded sheep on land once buzzing with industry. She’s fascinated by the history of the small bay, from that ship, the Pelorus, left in its resting space in 1912, to the dovecote at the top of the wooden shed, where messenger pigeons were kept by the mill company, ‘‘to fly down to the boats and tell them when to go out’’.
Photos of Blackball show towering stacks of timber, ships awaiting departure – including the Pelorus – and a hillside covered in houses. However, few Marlburians know it ever existed, says Linden Armstrong, of the Havelock Museum Society. ‘‘People don’t know it’s there. It only has a little culvert sign and there’s no parking. But in its day, big sailing ships came in there rather than Havelock.’’ The timber industry is a key part of Marlborough’s history, and worth remembering, says Armstrong. ‘‘Forestry was up and running before the gold rush, and it was really important to the area.’’
The Blackball sawmill was established when, in 1879, the Pelorus Sawmilling Company was formed by local sawmillers. The town got its name from an earlier store that used to fly a flag depicting a black ball on it.
The company commenced work on a tramway to transport the huge logs from the forests of the Pelorus Valley to the new mill at Blackball, from where sawn timber could be shipped out. Easy access to Havelock, a more obvious shipping point, was thwarted by a large bluff, known to the early European travellers as Cape Horn.
Before the tramway was established, getting a huge Kahikatea down the river to a ship would require enough rainfall to set it on its way, says Dr Mike Johnston in his Wakamarina history, Gold in a Tin Dish. The tramway work employed nearly 100 men, many of them miners from the Wakamarina (where payable gold was discovered in 1864) who erected tents and huts all the way along the route, Johnston writes. The Pelorus Sawmilling Company cut its first log at the mill in November 1880, but times were tough and within a year the company was broke. One of its founders, Brownlee and Co, bought the sawmill, wharf, tramway, locomotive and stock wood for £16,000, a fraction of its worth.
Brownlee and Co shipped 57 million metres of timber out of the region between 1864 and 1915, so that William Brownlee became known as the ‘king of sawmillers’, says Armstrong.
At its height, the Brownlee empire included three sawmills, 45km of tramline, four locomotives and a fleet of coastal traders, but by 1915, the forests were depleted and the company moved to the West Coast.
Like mining towns, mill towns disappear when the source of industry is gone, Armstrong says. ‘‘Blackball was made up of workers’ accommodation, this huge machinery, timber, and the train. Once the wood was gone, so was the town.’’
‘‘People don’t know it’s there. It only has a little culvert sign and there’s no parking. But in its day, big sailing ships came in there rather than Havelock.’’ Pamela Hayter