I’ve shared images from this location before, it’s offical name is Matakea/Shag Point and you’ll find it a few minutes north of the small town of Palmerston in East Otago. There’s a tiny, deeply indented natural boat harbour there that was originally used by Ngāi Tahu as a canoe landing place. The whalers used it to shelter their boats, and it later became the primary loading zone where boats would load coal once mining operations started.

Daily Photo – Boat Ramp at Shag Point

The problem with boiling whale blubber down into oil in a large trypot on a beach is that large amounts of fuel are needed to keep the fire burning long enough for the process to be successful. To do this, naturally, whaling stations used coastal timber as it was immediately available. However, when that source was depleted, they had to begin scouring the shoreline for alternative fuel. So, in the early 1830s, when the timber supplies near a whaling station at Matakea (Shag Point) began to thin out, the whalers went looking for something to keep the trypots bubbling away.

Exactly what type of fuel source they were looking for is hard to say, but what they found was something that would burn longer and hotter than anything they had previously been using. What’s more, it turned out to be right on the coastline, and was something they could simply chip large hunks off with an axe and toss into the fire: coal!

It turned out that, during their search for fuel, they noticed dark, thick bands running through the yellowish sandstone cliffs, which proved to be coal. It could simply be broken off from the outcrops, thrown into the fire, and it burned exceptionally well. The significance of all this is that while local Tainui and Ngāi Tahu Māori had long known of the heating properties of waro (coal), it is recognised as the first European discovery and use of bituminous coal in New Zealand.