John Madden exhibition at Oedipus Rex Gallery

John Madden with his painting Coal Gatherer, one of his images portraying the hardships and stoicism of the mining life.

Someone at Michael King's Auckland funeral said to me, "You must find time to go to the John Madden exhibition, Black Truth, at the Oedipus Rex Gallery. Madden is saying visually what you do in words."

The speaker was right. The little gallery in Upper Khartoum Place was crowded with images of West Coast coal miners, their families, their hardships and their stoicism. I loved the exhibition and was moved.

My book The Denniston Rose had just been published and it was great to see someone else fascinated by the stories and ghosts of West Coast coal mining. Now I have been privileged to see a preview of Underground Soldiers, his new body of work on a similar theme.

The paintings are powerful human images. Some are vibrant, particularly Coal Gatherer, where a tired man, eyes on the ground, pushes his bike through a landscape of bright bare hills and rust-red sheds, or the jaunty red presence of the Denniston Miners' Bus.

Other paintings are sombre, featuring whites, black and greys, as in the wonderful steamy haze of the miners' shower-house and the coal train looming out of a misty ghostly landscape.

I felt particularly drawn to Strike on Denniston: the white-faced, grey-clad crowd of striking miners at the black entrance to a mine. In my mind, it shows the first New Zealand miners' strike on Denniston, which I wrote about in The Denniston Rose.

Madden has a coal mining pedigree - he grew up on the Coast and his father was a miner.

I have none of his personal intimacy with mining but what I have learned from research and from imagining my characters living on Denniston has given me, I think, a wonderful hook into his paintings.

We share something else, though. We have both come to our present careers - John's painting and my writing - after an apprenticeship in the craft movement.

Madden has worked as a potter and with potters I knew - Yvonne Rust and Barry Brickell. I am a jeweller and was very active in the Craft Movement of the 70s and 80s.

Perhaps that apprenticeship has helped to give John his obvious respect for the manual worker and for working-class families and, similarly, why I have chosen to write about working lives rather than the more interior life of the mind.

Connections aside, I find this new body of work evocative and immensely appealing. The images are perhaps not so disturbing as those in Black Truth, but they are every bit as strong.

The old ghosts are there - the tired miners sitting in the home-bound bus, the showers sluicing away a day's grime, the black 1930s cars sitting outside Toll's Hotel in the snow, the pluming chimneys.

Strong, emotional images. No wonder the coal-mining era of the early to mid-1900s echoes today around New Zealand.

The mining families were so tightly knit, often living in grim and dangerous conditions, yet making for themselves a richly satisfying communal life. Ex-miners and their families from those ghost-towns on the West Coast now live in other parts of this country and have taken their stories with them.

Now that era is bedded into the memories of this country, whether we are from the Coast or not.

I expect that everyone will take to Madden's visual memories as they have taken to my verbal imaginings.

* Jenny Pattrick is the author of Catching the Current, The Denniston Rose and Heart of Coal.

What: Underground Soldiers, by John Madden
Where and when: Oedipus Rex Gallery, to Oct 1