We're up with the sun to watch KiwiRail's coal train leave Dunedin Railway Station at 0730. We lose it at the tunnels after Port Chalmers, but spot it again at Doctors' Point Beach winding around the top of the cliff before descending around Blueskin Bay.
Twenty-eight coal wagons, 500 tonnes of coal, 1100 tonnes of carbon dioxide flash past. Evansdale, Warrington, Seacliff, Karitane — the coal train snakes its way through farmland and small seaside towns. Waikouaiti, Palmerston, Moeraki, Herbert, to Oamaru at 10.35.
This is where it stops. We eat a sandwich. Drivers change trains. Empty coal wagons head south and full ones continue north with a new driver.
Hills give way to the Canterbury Plains. Eighteen thousand years ago gravel washed over these plains as glaciers retreated, leaving braided rivers like the Waitaki in their wake. Today these rivers are choking with pollution.
It's a scorcher up here. I pass dairy herds, shelterless in the sun. I pass monster irrigators lined up to distribute the braided river water into the air and on to the flat fenceless treeless expanses of ryegrass.
Clackety-clack. On our right, Fonterra's Studholme dairy factory looms over SH1 north of Oamaru. Clackety-clack. Oceania Dairy or Yili looms next, even larger than Studholme.
We line up our camera below a railway bridge over the Pareora River.
Great place for an action shot of coal passing above us. Patches of toxic algae float by our feet. The sun beats down. A teenage boy and girl skid over the stones on their motorbike.
Black-backed gulls laugh. Ahh, we get the joke. The train's beaten us. We scramble back to the highway and race to Temuka. Coal wagons have just been offloaded and are being trucked one by one to their final destination, Fonterra's Clandeboye factory. Here the coal gets dumped into two giant hoppers and burned to dry the milk produced by the cows we've seen along our journey.
Cows, slippery stones, irrigators, the constant whiff of cow s*** along State Highway 1 — they're connected. It takes a thousand litres of water to produce a litre of milk. It takes 22 tonnes of coal per hour for Fonterra's Clandeboye factory to take the water out again. To powder the milk to send around the world.
What shall we cancel for the climate crisis? Hey Fonterra, how about coal?
(Rosemary grew up on a small dairy farm in Brunswick, just north of Whanganui, and in between climate activism is helping to transform 11 acres of ex sheep farm to food forest and native bush.)
