A colourful portrait of Blackball, told from the vantage point of 1975 - four years after the government closed The Paparoa Mine at Roa. With the great days of coal gone, the inhabitants of this West Coast settlement were told to leave and let the town die. They refused, and the town didn't just subsist, it thrived, as Jack Perkins discovered when he visited the famous settlement on its plateau in the Paparoa Rangers near Greymouth.
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