Hardy Browning

Harold Browning (5 March 1915 – 2 November 1999), known as Hardy Browning, was a New Zealand miner-turned-potter: a coal miner who, after losing his job with the closure of the Dobson Mine in 1968, was retrained by the artist and teacher Yvonne Rust, and operated a successful pottery studio on the West Coast for 11 years.

Early life and career as a miner Born on 5 March 1915, Browning was the son of Frank and Margaret Browning of Waikaka in Southland. He was educated at Waikaka School, where he showed early artistic promise, winning the Standard 6 drawing prize in 1928.

As a young man Browning worked as a gold miner in the Otago region during the Great Depression. He then moved to the West Coast and became a coal miner at the Dobson Mine, in the settlement of Dobson on the Grey River.

On 30 September 1968 the Dobson Mine closed and 250 miners lost their jobs. At the time, potter Yvonne Rust was teaching art at Greymouth High School, and offered to run a course training miners in pottery techniques to help them learn a new trade and form a collective; she advertised with a notice on the wall of the newly built mine bathhouse. Rust called on her colleague Roger Ewer to move back to the West Coast and set up facilities for training 40 miners, but by the time he arrived all but nine of the unemployed men had decamped to Christchurch in search of work. A Nelson potter had advised the Commissioner for the West Coast that Rust's plan was unlikely to succeed, and the proposal failed to attract any government funding.

When the mine closed in 1968 Browning was 54 and had a partially disabled leg from a mining accident. Although he had no previous artistic training, and only a Standard 6 education, he learned the chemistry of glazes and the physics of kilns. The following month he was part of a joint exhibition of West Coast artists at the Society of Arts in Christchurch, where his pieces were considered typical of the brown, utilitarian style of West Coast pottery heavily influenced by Yvonne Rust. By 1971 Browning was throwing pots in a home studio and teaching pottery at Greymouth High School evening classes. having been predeceased by his wife, Zona, in 1994.