Digging deeper

The mining debate needs to go much deeper than the shallow “jobs versus frogs” framing, writes Catherine Delahunty.

 

At the end of January, the Minister of Resources, Shane Jones, came to Waihi to announce a mining strategy, which was about more goldmining, more coal mining, and more blaming anyone who dared to question the assumptions behind the “critical minerals” list.

He was outstandingly rude to a mana whenua wahine who challenged these assumptions during the announcement. Outside, one hundred of us stood in the heat and called for people to think deeper.

Right now, a shallow debate on mining rages through the media. It’s ”jobs versus frogs” and “ritual verbal warfare between what Shane Jones calls ‘the open economy’ and those he calls many derogatory names, including ‘the emerald lizards’.”

As a publicly named “emerald lizard”, I’m keen to dig deeper into the underground context of this issue.

It’s part of my heritage to examine goldmining. My great-grandfather, Black Pat Delahunty, was a miner in the Thames gold rush, as was my great-great-grandfather, Charles Dunn. The Delahuntys came from Tipperary to find gold in 1864, and Charles Dunn came from the US with his daughter Julia Ann about the same time. Julia married Black Pat.

Black Pat worked in a number of the mines under Thames. It was dirty, dangerous and financially unrewarding for the family. He eventually died of a lung disease associated with exposure to quartz dust. Hard rock mining was hard.

I once went into a mine tunnel built in that era, and every step was alarming, going deeper and deeper away from natural light. I kept turning back to see the glow from above narrow into a smaller and smaller circle. Inside the old tunnel, the sound of water dripped into pools at our feet. The walls were black and wet and spoke of hard labour.

I did not want to imagine spending more than eight hours a day hacking away at a quartz seam. The timber posts that held up the walls and roof of the tunnel were old and looked soft. My heart was beating louder than the dripping water. When we turned back towards the surface, the expanding circle of sky was more beautiful than I had ever realised.

Our family and many others left the Thames still in poverty, still looking for “the better life”. Four of Black Pat and Julia’s 10 children died of tuberculosis between the ages of 8 and 38. Our more middle-class economic status as the family descended from Black Pat’s son Patrick owes everything to the housing and health policies of the former welfare state in the 1950s, and nothing to gold.

Our family was typical, part of a gold rush that rewarded the owners of stamper batteries that processed rock from the mines, and the local shopkeepers and pub owners. The community of Thames soon morphed into a small rural town whose economy was based on farming and fishing with occasional waves of gold fever.

The biggest impact of these rushes was the vast loss of tangata whenua land through manipulation and force. The machinations of the Native Land Court, and men like James Mackay among many others resulted in goldmining access being used as a weapon for permanent land loss.

There was resistance and division as the gold rush and the capitalist economy were forced on the Hauraki.

Modern unionism in this country owes much to the mining labour force of the late 1800s and early 1900s. In those dark and dangerous spaces, those men could rely only on each other.

The companies that owned the mine machinery didn’t look after their interests, be it wages or the right to stop and eat, the right to an eight-hour day, let alone a weekend. Every worker’s rights then, as now, had to be fought for by organising.

My great-grandfather was the deputy leader of the Thames Miners’ Union. He had given up on mining before the strike at Waihi in November 1912, which led to the death of unionist Frederick Evans, who was beaten to death in the street. The unionised mining workforce protested his killing behind the banner: “If Blood be the Price of your cursed wealth, good God we have bought it fair.”

No one at that time, except tangata whenua, lamented or challenged the clearance of the forest, the holes in the maunga, and the dumps of mine waste leaking into rivers and on the coast.

Modern large-scale goldmining is on a different scale. In 2011, Jeanette Fitzsimons and I, as local MPs, were escorted down into the huge underground caverns and tunnels under Waihi. After safety briefings and putting on safety gear, we were driven in a huge truck into what felt like the heart of the earth.

Again, I felt a suffocating unease, but it was presumably technically secure. It was not the coal mine at Pike River where risks of methane build-up led to utter catastrophe. We rumbled around the lit-up roads as large machines were digging up huge rock faces and filling trucks with “ore body” for processing.

When we rumbled back into the daylight, the PR guy asked me what I thought. He was clearly disappointed when I said: “It was a well-managed and tidy operation that felt absolutely pointless and a huge waste of fossil fuels.”

There is no shortage of gold already above the ground, and it can be endlessly reused. That industry is called urban mining, and the strategy is to extract gold and other metals from e-waste.

Whenever I go to Waihi, I walk up the hill to the huge open cast pit in the heart of the town, which was, is, the maunga Pukewa. The north wall of the rock face is crumbling away, a huge, unstoppable slip. In the 1990s, the town was promised that this pit would become a recreational lake, a local asset, but we don’t talk about that anymore.

A few kilometres down the road at what was once Golden Valley farmland, there are vast mountains of mine waste sitting behind earth dams, steadily growing into the sky. They hold the toxic residue of mine processing, the heavy metals that leach long-term poisons including arsenic, lead, cadmium, zinc, antimony, manganese and more.

Gold mining offshore does create jobs for “the nephews” that Shane Jones refers to, who are heading to Australia to work in their mines.

There is no denying that people need work, and to be well paid. The Australian mines represent a chance to save money for some, if we don’t ask questions about the environmental impacts, the Indigenous peoples who’ve opposed it in some places, and the fossil fuels.

Why not develop this industry at home? Some parts of the unions representing mining are all for it, as paid work is paid work, and the system requires an uncritical approach to what we do as work — choice being a luxury when you’re at the bottom of that food chain.

I want us to have a conversation about this damaging and needless system, that goes beyond the slogans about green mining and making money. It’s essential that environmental movements, in our defence of 200-million-year-old endangered species, also engage with the issues of how people today can feed their families.

These challenges cannot be separated.

Black Pat’s grandson, my father, was a PSA union official feeding seven people with his wages. Who can feed seven people on a single wage today?

And by having a conversation, I don’t mean with the multinationals who have the power to buy whole pages in the local paper and lobby any government. I mean with workers and communities.

Most of all, we need to acknowledge Te Tiriti relationships and the unceded tino rangatiratanga rights of hapū and iwi. Their decisions over land and minerals must come first.

We are not in the late 19th century. This approach to our world is taking us not only to extremes of inequality but also to ecological collapse.

Pushing for any development for the sake of jobs does not acknowledge the good work and important jobs that are not being done. We are yet to clean up the legacy of past goldmining that turned the Ōhinemuri River orange in August 2024 and left elevated arsenic in the mahinga kai. No one wants to pay to clean this up, but that work should be done and paid for. I would pay more tax for that, and so would many others.

Let’s go deeper again. I was taught by kuia Betty Williams about the mauri of gold. An obsessive search for one metal prevents us from seeing the complex life below the surface. We don’t understand enough about how aquifers and underground rivers connect to the surface, how dewatering underground might affect the forest above ground, how the metals work while bound together, and what toxicity is unleashed when they are broken apart and exposed to oxygen.

The mysterious underworld, much like the deep ocean, has become a place for extraction and the dumping of waste. From the top of the sky to the centre of the earth, there are fragile closed networks of elements which, when in balance, provide many gifts. Not gold and coal but clean water and healthy plant life, the gifts we take for granted.

There is a reckoning ahead, and its first signals are dirty water, wild weather, and war over resources.

The group I’ve been part of for 45 years, Coromandel Watchdog of Hauraki, wants to keep being the alarm bell. We will support a tiny frog sensitive to blasting and the dewatering of its habitat. We will worry about toxic waste dumps collapsing in the future and contaminating Tikapa Moana.

My great-grandfather had one goal on the goldfield: to break out of poverty and precarious work. That goal was not achieved. Maybe he’d have been able to do that as a contract miner today, as long as he was prepared to ignore everything else.

 

Catherine Delahunty is a Pākehā activist in environmental, social justice, and Te Tiriti o Waitangi issues. She is a writer and a tutor on social change issues, and a grandmother. Catherine was a Green MP for nine years and lives in Hauraki.

E-Tangata, 2025