Mitchell wrote for the Bluff Beacon for more than 25 years and in 2017 he started writing a column called Remember When that reflected on stories of the town’s past.
He said he got a huge response after writing about the Bluff Pie Cart or Foveaux Café with people remembering the drunken feeds and some of the fights that had happened there.
The response encouraged him to continue writing the column for three years until he passed the Beacon on.
Mitchell offered to give the Bluff History Group his files for their archives, but the group thought it would be a good idea for him to compile his stories into a book.
He curated 42 different stories that included mostly unrevised articles from the Bluff Beacon and some stories from his own recollections as well.
‘‘There's some terrific stories and some great characters in the town from over the years and it’s always sad to see these things die out and not be passed on to the younger generation.’’
The stories were a real cross-section of small-town life, Mitchell said.
They included stories all the way back from the early 1900s when the town’s reservoir burst and destroyed lots of property and stories about locals including one about a man who saved a fishing boat in Foveaux Strait when he was 9 years old.
Some of the stories had a big personal effect on the author because he had lived through them himself.
He said a story about the 1951 waterfront lockout where he had seen the families of the workers go through hardships first-hand brought back a huge amount of emotional turmoil.
The book is available throughout Bluff and at E-Hayes & Sons on Dee St, Invercargill, as well as through online orders.
