"Rotowaro was once a mining township on the Waikato coalfields west of Huntly. Situated in the path of an opencast mine, it was entirely removed in the late 1980s. The destruction of this community is the subject of Lake of Coal, a 20 year photo-documentary project by New Zealand photographer David Cook. This groundbreaking book is a complex weave of photographs and text, a multi-layered work of social history that tells the story of Rotowaro from the point of view of the tangata whenua, the works, their families, management and the photographer himself. Lake of Coal puts a human face on the economic realities of the late twentieth century and asks: What does coal mining mean on a local level? What happens when a community loses the ground beneath its feet?"--Back cover note.