Ōhai once had 1200 people and 100 miners at the coalface. Locals say they are now watching their towns fade

Carter Allan can still give you the numbers from memory. When he was working underground, the Linton Mine at Ōhai had 100 men at the face, and they were hauling out 800 tonnes of coal a day. Allan went down the mine as a teenager and stayed for 40 years. Now nearly 80, he lives in a town where, he says, he would struggle to name 10 people.

Allan was one of several western Southland residents who spoke to RNZ reporters Tim Brown and Louis Dunham for the broadcaster's Backroads to the Beehive series, in a story also carried by Farmers Weekly and the Otago Daily Times. Their portrait of Ōhai and Nightcaps, two towns that once had more than 1000 people each and were the heart of Southland's coal industry, is a reminder of what happens to a place when the work that built it goes away.

"There were 1200 in the town. I'd say if there's 300 [now] we'd be lucky," Allan told RNZ. "Once upon a time I knew everybody in Ōhai. I wouldn't know 10 people in Ōhai now. Wouldn't have a clue who they were." He ticked off the losses one by one. The rugby club: gone. The post office: gone. "The four shops – gone. It's quite sad actually."

Mechanisation cut the number of mining jobs, and the last Ōhai mine closed in 2021. Solid Energy ran it until the company collapsed in 2015, and locals say they had been told the land would go back to pasture and lakes once the coal was gone. Instead the site was sold and hundreds of hectares went into pine trees. James McGeoch, an Ōhai resident of about 10 years, believes the hillside above the town will be covered in forest within 20 years. "That land should have been turned back into pasture and used and not planted in trees," he said. "It's just sad. New Zealand's been sold out."

Down the road at Nightcaps, the Takitimu mine is now the only one left in the wider area, and its future is uncertain. Trina Kemp grew up near the town and is raising her own children on the family farm. She has watched school rolls shrink as small farms have been folded into bigger ones run with a handful of workers. "We're just watching our town die," she said. This spring has made it harder still. "It's been wet. It's been terrible. It's horrible."

Rates were a common complaint. Allan pays more than $4000 a year and feels he gets little for it. "We've got a bit of water going past the road. We've got no footpath, we've got nothing, no shops, no nothing." Dave Reid, in Nightcaps, pays close to $5000 and says pensioners feel they are being rated off their properties. Newcomer Mike Samuels, a pensioner who moved to Ōhai recently, said his generation had paid tax for decades and been pushed to the back of the queue.

Yet for all the frustration, none of them sounded ready to leave. Samuels likes the pace: "If we have three cars going up the road or down the road, it's called a traffic jam here. It's really good, honestly." Reid has his own reply for anyone who asks why he lives there. "I say, 'I'm living the dream'."

And Carter Allan, who spent 40 years underground, intends to see things out exactly where he is. "I'd like to keel over here, finish here, that would suit me down to the ground."