Pakawau and Puponga |
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Pakawau
Traveller’s note – if your wanderings are taking you north from Collingwood across the Aorere River, the last store selling general goods is at Pakawau, some 15 minutes on.
The little settlement is strung along the road, with the old school, now a restaurant, on the left and nearly everything else on the right. The motor camp abuts the superb beach as do most of the houses while a few hundred metres further on, a road junction poses the question - left to Westhaven, veer right to Puponga? Not far from the junction is a processing plant handling a range of seafood including cockles harvested from the beach opposite.
At low tide the sea retreats to a surprising distance, while at high water the tide floods into the tiny inlet in a noisy rush, turning the occasional white heron into a fisherman.
Puponga
Coal occurs in many places throughout the Bay but nowhere were the seams as promising as at Puponga, where the mine opened up in 1899. A railway linked the mine with Port Puponga where a long wharf, said by some to be the longest in the southern hemisphere, stood out into the shallow bay. The early 1900s saw the population of Puponga swell to several hundred, supporting two general stores, a billiard saloon, a bake-house, two boarding houses plus dance hall, post office and a two-teacher school.
The "#1 Mine" was closed by flooding and a strike in 1916 smaller seams were then worked. The township shrank. The nearby "Cape Mine" closed in the early 1930s and the "Township Mine" closed ten years later. However, a resurgence of interest saw the old "#1 Mine" dewatered by electric pumps in the late 1950s and this produced coal until the early 1970s when all mining stopped. Despite the recent closure, there is little to be seen today. The main pit-head is a wilderness of gorse, its buildings torn down; the railway and wharf were in ruins many years before. Some of the houses standing today in Puponga belonged to the mine and there are still many local people who can tell you of the times when Puponga coal powered much local industry.
