‘The title comes from the Cascade Westport Coal Company, which mined a seam of some of the best coal in the country, in difficult terrain and an even more difficult climate.
This mine depended on inventing some new ways of extracting the coal from high in the headwaters of the Cascade Creek, using the longest wooden coal flume—12km of impossible engineering—to get it to the Buller Gorge.
They said it couldn’t be done, but it worked. Then there was the politics and the unions and climate and a post World War 1 global economy to deal with.
It’s quite a story, and Walsh’s well-researched book contains plenty of photos to illustrate the times and the conditions the workers endured to get black gold out of the ground.’