Mining is the Pits Poetry Reading

Central Stories Museum, Alexandra
6:30 pm–8:30 pm, Saturday 22 November 2025

Six Aotearoa New Zealand poets – Michael Harlow, Bridget Auchmuty, Jillian Sullivan, David Eggleton, Richard Reeve and Robert Sullivan – read poems to emphasise our cultural and spiritual connection with the land as a people, and protest the ecological and aesthetic violence being proposed in the form of open-cast gold mining.

Poetry reading to protest industrial gold-mining

A mining-protest reading by six Aotearoa New Zealand poets – Mining is the Pits – is scheduled for the Central Stories Museum in Alexandra on 22 November 2025.

The reading – which features both the present New Zealand Poet Laureate Robert Sullivan and 2019-2022 New Zealand Poet Laureate David Eggleton – is planned as a continuation of the cultural protest No Go Bendigo, an art auction curated by acclaimed Wellington-based writer Gregory O’Brien featuring leading New Zealand artists including Sir Grahame Sydney, Dick Frizzell and Nigel Brown.

Poets and artists across the motu emphatically reject the plans of Australian company Santana Minerals and other multinationals to establish open-cast gold mines in the Central Otago backcountry, not only at Bendigo in the foothills of the Dunstan Mountains but also in the Rock and Pillar and Lammerlaw Ranges near Middlemarch, the Ida Valley near Alexandra and the Silver Peaks near Dunedin.

In Auckland, Paula Green, recipient of the 2017 Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry, has hosted on her widely-read Poetry Shelf website, ‘Reading Poetry to Rare Lizards’ – Poetry in Defence of the Environment, a diverse and powerful collection of protest poems in response to the Bendigo proposal.

The scale of the proposed onslaught on Otago’s natural heritage, brought on in no small part by Minister of Resources Shane Jones’ aggressively pro-mining stance and Fast-Track legislative reforms, is unprecedented.

Poet Michael Harlow of Alexandra, recipient of the 2018 Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry and a poet performing as part of Mining is the Pits, has described the widespread proposals as a ‘plague’.

Celebrated Oturehua author Jillian Sullivan, surviving partner of the renowned late poet and environmentalist Brian Turner,  believes ‘Brian would be into this fight for land boots and all.’

While the protest reading has been brought into existence by Santana’s proposal and its implications for Central Otago, the poets in their work will be emphasising our cultural and spiritual connection with the land as a people, with the environmental destruction arising from open-cast mining being wholly contrary to those values.

For more information on the reading or to arrange for poet interviews, please contact:

Richard Reeve (Coordinator)

THE POETS

Michael Harlow of Alexandra is the author of thirteen books of poetry and a recipient of the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in 2018.

Bridget Auchmuty lives in the Ida Valley. Her collection of poetry, Unmooring, was released by Quentin Wilson Publishing in 2020.

Jillian Sullivan lives and writes in Oturehua in the Ida Valley.  Recent publications include Map for the Heart: Ida Valley Essays (Otago University Press, 2020), A Way Home  (Potton and Burton, 2016) and Parallel (Steel Roberts, 2014)

David Eggleton was New Zealand Poet Laureate from 2019-2022. His most recent book is Lifting the Island: Poems (Red Hen Press, 2025). Eggleton lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin.

Richard Reeve lives in Warrington / Ōkāhau, to the north of Ōtepoti Dunedin. A barrister sole, he is also the author of seven collections of poetry including About Now (Maungatua Press, 2024).

Robert Sullivan (Ngā Puhi (Ngāti Manu / Ngāti Hau), Kāi Tahu, Irish) lives in Oamaru. He is the current New Zealand Poet Laureate. His most recent book, Hopurangi – Songcatcher: Poems from the Maramataka (Auckland University Press, 2024), was a finalist for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry at the 2025 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.