Chairs Report Chairperson’s Report: 2007-2008. (2009 will be posted soon)
This year has consisted of rather severe swings between the positive and the negative. The positives have been another very good Mayday in 2007, and a remarkably successful Blackball ’08 Strike Commemoration over Easter, 2008, which has received excellent feedback and which achieved considerable national publicity. The Trust was at the centre of organizing both events. A further positive was the receiving of a major donation of $25,000 from TrustPower, negotiated by Maori Gully Road resident, Wayne Collins. . The negative has been the response of Development West Coast and Lotteries to our scaled down Miners Hut proposal. Development West Coast have moved from insisting on the general concept of co-location (which generated the proposal), to now insisting on co-location with Shantytown (to the surprise of Shantytown). This is a condition of their funding (around $90,000). Lotteries was suitably confused by Development West Coast’s decision and now insist on a new feasibility study to ascertain the best location. We remain faced with funders’ suspicion with regard to the sustainability of anything other than a local museum in Blackball, as well as the content of the museum being unfashionable (perhaps the former justifies the latter). We are also faced with the refusal to understand a community development model as opposed to a market-based model. There has been a slight shift in opinion since the success of the Commemoration, but that unfortunately, will slowly dissipate. At our last meeting, a motion to wind up the Trust was tabled and discussed, but not passed. It was decided instead to continue to mount cultural events such as Mayday, to enter discussions with Shantytown, with the possibility of a satellite option for the Miners Hut installation, to contribute to the mix of development proposals for Blackball, to investigate the possibility of a Blackball ’08 Strike Commemoration Centre which also has a backpacking option based on the Single Men’s Huts design, and at the suggestion of Te Papa’s regional advisor, to look at expanding the website (she wondered in fact whether we shouldn’t be a digital museum). The Commemoration certainly gave an energy, and for a moment, Blackball as it might be, existed. The various strands of ancestors, activism, social history, archeology and village scale culture came together – for a weekend, a better world existed. The challenge is to hold on to that vision, and recreate that energy on a regular basis. And to find the form(s) which enable that to happen in an increasingly changeable world. Paul Maunder | 
