The Otago Gold Rush (often called the Central Otago Gold Rush) was a
gold rush
A gold rush or gold fever is a discovery of gold—sometimes accompanied by other precious metals and rare-earth minerals—that brings an onrush of miners seeking their fortune. Major gold rushes took place in the 19th century in Australia, New Z ...
that occurred during the 1860s in
Central Otago, New Zealand. This was the country's biggest gold strike, and led to a rapid influx of foreign miners to the area – many of them veterans of other hunts for the precious metal in
California
California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the ...
and
Victoria,
Australia.
The rush started at
Gabriel's Gully but spread throughout much of Central Otago, leading to the rapid expansion and commercialisation of the new colonial settlement of
Dunedin
Dunedin ( ; mi, Ōtepoti) is the second-largest city in the South Island of New Zealand (after Christchurch), and the principal city of the Otago region. Its name comes from , the Scottish Gaelic name for Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland. Th ...
, which quickly grew to be New Zealand's largest city. Only a few years later, most of the smaller new settlements were deserted, and gold extraction became more long-term, industrialised-mechanical process.
Background
Previous gold finds in New Zealand
Previously gold had been found in small quantities in the
Coromandel Peninsula (by visiting whalers) and near
Nelson in 1842. Commercial interests in
Auckland
Auckland (pronounced ) ( mi, Tāmaki Makaurau) is a large metropolitan city in the North Island of New Zealand. The most populous urban area in the country and the fifth largest city in Oceania, Auckland has an urban population of about I ...
offered a £500 prize for anyone who could find payable quantities of gold anywhere nearby in the 1850s, at a time when some New Zealand settlers were leaving for the
California
California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the ...
and
Australian gold rushes. In September 1852, Charles Ring, a timber merchant, claimed the prize for a find in Coromandel. A brief gold rush ensued around
Coromandel township,
Cape Colville and
Mercury Bay but only £1500 of gold was accessible in river silt, although more was in quartz veins where it was inaccessible to individual prospectors. The rush lasted only about three months.
A find in the
Aorere Valley near
Collingwood Collingwood, meaning "wood of disputed ownership", may refer to:
Educational institutions
* Collingwood College, Victoria, an Australian state Prep to Year 12 school
* Collingwood College, Durham, college of Durham University, England
* Collingw ...
in 1856 proved more successful, with 1500 miners converging on the district and removing about £150,000 of gold over the next decade, after which the gold was exhausted. The presence of gold in Otago and on the
West Coast during this time was known, but the geology of the land was different from that of other major gold-bearing areas, and it was assumed the gold would amount to little.
Previous gold finds in Otago
Māori had long known of the existence of gold in Central Otago, but had no use for the ore. For a precious material they relied on
greenstone for weaponry and tools, and used greenstone,
obsidian and
bone
A bone is a rigid organ that constitutes part of the skeleton in most vertebrate animals. Bones protect the various other organs of the body, produce red and white blood cells, store minerals, provide structure and support for the body, an ...
carving for jewellery.
The first known European Otago gold find was at Goodwood, near
Palmerston in October 1851. The find was of a very small amount with no ensuing "rush". Instead, the settlement of Dunedin was just three years old, and more practical matters were of higher importance to the young town.
Other finds around the
Mataura River in 1856 and the
Dunstan Range
Saint Dunstan (c. 909 – 19 May 988) was an English bishop. He was successively Abbot of Glastonbury Abbey, Bishop of Worcester, Bishop of London and Archbishop of Canterbury, later canonised as a saint. His work restored monastic life i ...
in 1858 stirred minimal interest. A find near the
Lindis Pass in early 1861 started producing flickers of interest from around the South Island, with reports of large numbers of miners travelling inland from
Oamaru to stake their claims. It was two months later that the gold strike was made that would prompt a major influx of prospectors.
Main rush
Gabriel's Gully
Gabriel Read, an Australian
prospector who had hunted
gold
Gold is a chemical element with the symbol Au (from la, aurum) and atomic number 79. This makes it one of the higher atomic number elements that occur naturally. It is a bright, slightly orange-yellow, dense, soft, malleable, and ductile ...
in both
California
California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the ...
and
Victoria, Australia, found gold in a creek bed at
Gabriel's Gully, close to the banks of the
Tuapeka River near
Lawrence on 20 May 1861. ''"At a place where a kind of road crossed on a shallow bar I shovelled away about two and a half feet of gravel, arrived at a beautiful soft slate and saw the gold shining like the stars in Orion on a dark frosty night"''.
The public heard about Read's find via a letter published in the ''Otago Witness'' on 8 June 1861, documenting a ten-day-long prospecting tour he had made. There was little reaction at first until John Hardy of the
Otago Provincial Council stated that he and Read had prospected country "about 31 miles long by five broad, and in every hole they had sunk they had found the precious metal." With this statement, the gold rush began.
Arrival of prospectors
By
Christmas
Christmas is an annual festival commemorating the birth of Jesus Christ, observed primarily on December 25 as a religious and cultural celebration among billions of people around the world. A feast central to the Christian liturgical year ...
, 14,000 prospectors were on the Tuapeka and Waipori fields.
[McLean & Dalley, p. 156] Within a year, the region's population swelled greatly, growing by 400 per cent between 1861 and 1864,
[ with prospectors swarming from the dwindling Australian goldfields. Gabriel's Gully led to the discovery of further goldfields within Central Otago. A second gold strike in 1862, close to the modern town of Cromwell, did nothing to dissuade new hopefuls, and prospectors and miners staked claims from the Shotover River in the west through to Naseby in the north.
In November 1862 Thomas Arthur and Harry Redfern sneaked off from shearing for William Rees at Queenstown and looked for gold on the banks of the Shotover River armed with a butcher's knife and pannikin. The Arthur's Point strike led to the largest rush that occurred in Otago. Historic buildings at Queenstown such as ]Eichardt's Hotel
Eichardt‘s Private Hotel is located on the corner of Marine Parade and Ballarat Street, Queenstown, New Zealand, on the shores of Lake Wakatipu. Eichardt’s is a significant local landmark, and is listed as a Category Two historic place by th ...
, the Lake Lodge of Ophir (now Artbay Gallery), the Queenstown Police Station, and stone Courthouse were all begun as a response to the rapid influx.
By the end of 1863, the real gold rush was over, but companies continued to mine the alluvial gold. The number of miners reached its maximum of 18,000 in February 1864.
Life in mining communities
Read's find of gold sparked the interest of people in Dunedin
Dunedin ( ; mi, Ōtepoti) is the second-largest city in the South Island of New Zealand (after Christchurch), and the principal city of the Otago region. Its name comes from , the Scottish Gaelic name for Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland. Th ...
; people travelled long distances in the hope of striking it rich. These goldfields all gave rise to mining towns and communities of temporary shops, hotels and miners' huts made from canvas or calico fabric-covered timber frames. As the scope of the goldfields developed, communities became more permanent with buildings constructed in timber and concrete. Evidence such as material artefacts, foundations of huts and buildings, and photographs from the Central Otago goldfields provide us with information about the labour and social roles of men and women in the 19th Century. A restored Chinese Village at Arrowtown is a popular tourist attraction.
Men in mining communities
The news of gold at Gabriel's Gully reached the inhabitants of Dunedin and the rest of the world, prospectors immediately left their homes in search of gold. The majority of these perspective prospectors were labourers and tradesmen, in their late teens and twenties.
The incoming population included entrepreneurial, skilled and technical people that established services for the miners, such as shops, post offices, banks, pubs, hotels and hardware stores. The owners of these businesses could make more money than the miners.
Evidence
Historical evidence of male miners or businessmen in the 19th Century Central Otago goldfields is readily available in literature
Literature is any collection of written work, but it is also used more narrowly for writings specifically considered to be an art form, especially prose fiction, drama, and poetry. In recent centuries, the definition has expanded to inclu ...
by and about the experiences of inhabitants at the various gold strikes. Census
A census is the procedure of systematically acquiring, recording and calculating information about the members of a given population. This term is used mostly in connection with national population and housing censuses; other common censuses in ...
statistics and photographs are also available, all of which provide inferential evidence about the labour roles in these communities. This in turn provides information about labour and social roles within the community. Such information includes that of the ownership
Ownership is the state or fact of legal possession and control over property, which may be any asset, tangible or intangible. Ownership can involve multiple rights, collectively referred to as title, which may be separated and held by different ...
and management of stores and hotels, such as the bank and gold office at Maori Point (''Bank of New Zealand'') in the 1860s, managed by ''G. M. Ross''.
Archaeological evidence is also readily available. Excavations at various sites throughout Otago show evidence of an array of mining techniques, including ground sluicing, hydraulic sluicing and hydraulic elevating
Hydraulics (from Greek: Υδραυλική) is a technology and applied science using engineering, chemistry, and other sciences involving the mechanical properties and use of liquids. At a very basic level, hydraulics is the liquid count ...
. Tailings (the materials left over after the removal of the uneconomic fraction (gangue) of the ore) also provide some of the archaeological evidence from Otago gold mine sites. Midden analysis from camp and settlement sites provides information about diet, with evidence of a preference for beef and lamb in the European camps, and a preference for pork within the Chinese camps.
Artefactual evidence found during excavations includes blue and white ceramics, cooking and eating utensils, metal objects, such as buttons, nails and tin boxes (flint boxes, tobacco boxes) and an exceedingly high number of alcohol glass bottles. It is possible these glass bottles were recycled, so archaeologists cannot draw definite conclusions as to alcohol consumption. Within the Chinese camps (such as the Lawrence Chinese camp) artefacts include gambling token
Gambling (also known as betting or gaming) is the wagering of something of value ("the stakes") on a random event with the intent of winning something else of value, where instances of strategy are discounted. Gambling thus requires three eleme ...
s and Chinese coins as well as celadon earthwares.
Although diaries and memoirs about the lives of males in the mining communities exist, little mention or information is known about the significance of female labour and social roles. Archaeological evidence, however, suggests that many females in the goldfields took significant roles in mining and the general community.
Women in mining communities
In the 19th century goldfields, women played significant familial, labour and entrepreneurial roles, such as wives, mothers
]
A mother is the female parent of a child. A woman may be considered a mother by virtue of having given birth, by raising a child who may or may not be her biological offspring, or by supplying her ovum for fertilisation in the case of ge ...
, prostitutes, business owners and service providers and 'Colonial Helpmeets' (wives who worked alongside their husbands). Women within these communities were young and single, or married with a family, although the community was predominantly male, female family never having intended to move to the goldfields until towns developed with hotels, stores and schools. Yet, there was a female presence in this environment from the start of the gold find in 1861, at Gabriel's Gully. An example is Janet Robertson, who lived with her husband in a small cottage in Tuapeka
Lawrence is a small town in Otago, in New Zealand's South Island. It is located on State Highway 8, the main route from Dunedin to the inland towns of Queenstown and Alexandra. It lies 35 kilometres to the northwest of Milton, 11 kilometres no ...
. It was here in her cottage, where Gabriel Read wrote his "discovery" letter of gold to the Otago Provincial Council. As the news of this goldfield in Gabriel's Gully spread, prospectors engaged in the area, and Janet opened up her home, cooked meals and tended to the miners, as they passed through.
Another significant woman present on the 19th century Central Otago goldfields was Susan Nugent-Wood, a well-known writer in the 1860s and 1870s. Nugent-Wood, her husband John, and their children moved to Otago in 1861, as prospectors of gold. Nugent-Wood worked on the goldfields of Central Otago in several official positions. She wrote stories based on her life and roles on the Central Otago goldfields, which provide accounts of labour and social aspects of mining and gender in the 19th century.
Harriet Heron
Harriet Ann Heron (née Buttress, ca. 1836 – 28 October 1933) was an early settler and business owner in Central Otago, New Zealand, and one of the few women who lived in gold mining camps during the Otago gold rush.
Early life
Heron grew up i ...
also lived on the goldfields, most notably at Fourteen-Mile Beach where she and her husband Henry lived in a tent for three years - Heron was the only woman in the mining camp at the time. They later built a cottage in the area, which is known today as "Mrs Heron's Cottage" and maintained by Heritage New Zealand.
As the majority of women within these mining communities were married
Marriage, also called matrimony or wedlock, is a culturally and often legally recognized union between people called spouses. It establishes rights and obligations between them, as well as between them and their children, and between t ...
, many became widows
A widow (female) or widower (male) is a person whose spouse has died.
Terminology
The state of having lost one's spouse to death is termed ''widowhood''. An archaic term for a widow is "relict," literally "someone left over". This word can so ...
, as their husbands died during mining related activities or diseases. These women, whose husbands owned stores or hotels, adopted ownership rights. Many became well known throughout the communities, amongst visitors, passing miners and local citizens. Archaeological evidence of a widow who took over ownership rights following her husbands' death, was Elizabeth Potts. Potts was given a licence for the Victoria Hotel in Lawrence in 1869. This was recorded and published in the ''Tuapeka Times'', 11 December 1869. This archaeological evidence provides information which suggests that women played significant labour and social roles within mining communities.
Excavation evidence
An excavation report from the Golden Bar Mine
Golden means made of, or relating to gold.
Golden may also refer to:
Places United Kingdom
*Golden, in the parish of Probus, Cornwall
*Golden Cap, Dorset
* Golden Square, Soho, London
*Golden Valley, a valley on the River Frome in Gloucestersh ...
between the Macraes Flat and Palmeston, Otago, shows that located in front of the main mine workings of ca.1897, archaeological material was found. This material was a small heart-shaped brooch with 13 glass (paste) diamonds. This archaeological evidence suggests that women were present at this site, and within the Golden Bar goldfield. The exact occupation of women from this evidence is unknown, but indicates that women were present on the goldfields during the 19th Century gold rush in Otago.
Another excavation report by Petchey from the Macraes Flat mining area, presents items of children's toys such as marbles, and a china doll's leg amongst ruins of a house site. This evidence is also useful to suggest men and their families engaged in mining activities and social life on the goldfields in the 19th Century. Archaeological artefacts from 19th-century mining communities in Central Otago suggest that women and children were on site of the goldfields. It is unknown whether these artefacts belonged to women who were miners or women who were domestic wives and mothers.
Aftermath
Results
The city of Dunedin
Dunedin ( ; mi, Ōtepoti) is the second-largest city in the South Island of New Zealand (after Christchurch), and the principal city of the Otago region. Its name comes from , the Scottish Gaelic name for Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland. Th ...
reaped many of the benefits, for a period becoming New Zealand's largest town even though it had only been founded in 1848. Many of the city's stately buildings date from this period of prosperity. New Zealand's first university, the University of Otago, was founded in 1869 with wealth derived from the goldfields.
However, the rapid decline in gold production from the mid-1860s led to a sharp drop in the province's population, and while not unprosperous, the deep south of New Zealand never rose to such relative prominence again.
Later gold rushes
The Wakamarina River in Marlborough proved to have gold in 1862, and 6,000 miners flocked to the district. Although they found alluvial gold, there were no large deposits.
The West Coast of the South Island was the second-richest gold-bearing area of New Zealand after Otago, and gold was discovered in 1865-6 at Okarito, Bruce Bay, around Charleston
Charleston most commonly refers to:
* Charleston, South Carolina
* Charleston, West Virginia, the state capital
* Charleston (dance)
Charleston may also refer to:
Places Australia
* Charleston, South Australia
Canada
* Charleston, Newfoundlan ...
and along the Grey River. Miners were attracted from Victoria, Australia where the gold rush was near an end. In 1867 this boom also began to decline, though gold mining continued on the coast for a considerable time after this. In the 1880s, quartz miners at Bullendale and Reefton were the first users of grid electricity in New Zealand.
Southland also had a number of smaller scale gold rushes during the later half of the 19th century. The first goldmining in Southland took place in 1860 on the banks of the Mataura River and its tributaries (and later would help settlements such as Waikaia and Nokomai flourish). However the first "gold rush" wasn't until the mid-1860s when fine gold was discovered in the black sands of Orepuki beach. Miners followed the creeks up into the foothills of the Longwoods to where the richest gold was to be had. This activity led to the founding of mining settlements such as Orepuki and Round Hill (the Chinese miners and shop owners essentially ran their own town known colloquially to Europeans as "Canton").
Gold was long known to exist at Thames, but exploitation was not possible during the New Zealand Wars. In 1867 miners arrived from the West Coast, but the gold was in quartz veins, and few miners had the capital needed to extract it. Some stayed on as workers for the companies which could fund the processing.
Commercial extraction
After the main gold rush, miners began laboriously reworking the goldfields. About 5,000 European miners remained in 1871, joined by thousands of Chinese miners invited by the province to help rework the area. There was friction not only between European and Chinese miners, which contributed to the introduction of the New Zealand head tax, but also between miners and settlers over conflicting land use.
Attention turned to the gravel beds of the Clutha River, with a number of attempts to develop a steam-powered mechanical gold dredge. These finally met with success in 1881 when the ''Dunedin'' became the world's first commercially successful gold dredge. The ''Dunedin'' continued operation until 1901, recovering a total of 17,000 ounces (530 kg) of gold.
The mining has had a considerable environmental impact. In 1920 the Rivers Commission estimated that 300 million cubic yards of material had been moved by mining activity in the Clutha river catchment. At that time an estimated 40 million cubic yards had been washed out to sea with a further 60 million in the river. (The remainder was still on riverbanks). This had resulted in measured aggradation of the river bottom of as much as 5 metres.
Gold is still mined by OceanaGold in commercial quantities in Otago at one site - Macraes Mine inland from Palmerston, which started operations in 1990. Macraes Mine, an opencast hard rock mining operation, processes more than 5 million tonnes of ore per year and from 1990 through 2014, gold production has totaled about 4 million ounces.
The Otago gold rush in popular culture
Numerous folk songs, both contemporary and more recent, have been written about the gold rush. Of contemporary songs, "Bright Fine Gold", with its chorus of "Wangapeka, Tuapeka, bright fine gold" (sometimes rendered "One-a-pecker, two-a-pecker") is perhaps the best known. Most well-known of more recent songs is Phil Garland
Philip Humphrey Garland (9 February 1942 – 15 March 2017) was a New Zealand folk musician. He was awarded the Queen's Service Medal in the 2014 Queen's Birthday Honours for services to folk music, and was called the "Godfather of New Zealan ...
's song ''Tuapeka Gold''.
Martin Curtis wrote a folk-style song about the gold rush called "Gin and Raspberry." The lyrics are written in the voice of an unsuccessful gold prospector who envies the success of the largest gold mine in the Cardrona valley at the time, the "Gin and Raspberry" (supposedly so named because the owner would call out, "Gin and raspberry to all hands!" whenever a bucket of mined material yielded an ounce of gold. The singer laments, "an ounce to the bucket and we'd all sell our souls/For a taste of the gin and raspberry." The song has had several recordings, particularly by Gordon Bok.
Paul Metsers' song "Farewell to the Gold" is based loosely on a flood in July 1863, which killed 13 miners on the Shotover River. The song has been recorded by many, including Nic Jones, The Black Family, James Keelaghan, and Nancy Kerr and James Fagan.
1976 New Zealand children's television drama series '' Hunter's Gold'' was set during the Central Otago Gold Rush.
The Otago Goldfields Cavalcade
Otago (, ; mi, Ōtākou ) is a region of New Zealand located in the southern half of the South Island administered by the Otago Regional Council. It has an area of approximately , making it the country's second largest local government regi ...
has annually since 1991 retraced the routes of wagons across country to the Dunstan goldfields around Cromwell. The original route, which established Cobb & Co.'s coach service left Dunedin's Provincial Tavern on 22 November 1862. Cavalcade routes vary each year in late February so as to finish in a different host town. In 2008 plans were made for a heritage trail including Arrowtown, Kawarau Gorge, Lawrence and the Dunedin Chinese Garden.
See also
* Blizzard and Flood of 1863
* Mining in New Zealand
* West Coast Gold Rush
* Gold Fields (New Zealand electorate)
*Goldfields Towns (New Zealand electorate)
The Gold Field Towns electorate was a 19th-century parliamentary electorate in the Otago region of New Zealand. It was the second gold mining electorate in Otago, one of three special interest constituencies created to meet the needs of gold mine ...
Notes
References
Bibliography
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Further reading
*
* King, M. (2003). ''The Penguin History of New Zealand'',
* McLaughlan, G. (ed.) (1995). ''Bateman New Zealand Encyclopedia'' (4th ed.). Auckland: David Bateman Ltd.
* McLean, G. & Dalley, B. (eds.) ''Frontier of Dreams: The Story of New Zealand''. Auckland: Hodder Moa Beckett.
* Oliver, W.H. (ed.) (1981). ''The Oxford History of New Zealand''. Oxford: The Clarendon Press.
On life in mining communities
*Forrest, J. (1961). "Population and Settlement on the Otago Goldfields 1861-1870", ''New Zealand Geographer'', 17, 1, pp. 64–86.
*Glasson, H. A. (1957). ''The Golden Cobweb: A saga of the Otago goldfields, 1861–1864'', Otago Daily Times & Witness Newspapers, Dunedin.
*Harper, B. (1980). ''Petticoat Pioneers: South Island women of the Colonial Era'', A. H. & A. W. Reed Ltd, Wellington, New Zealand pp. 184–189.
*Mahalski, B. (2005). ''New Zealand's Golden Days'', Gilt Edge Publishing, Wellington, New Zealand.
External links
''Otago Goldfields'' on Te Ara
Otago Gold Rushes
''Dunedin's Golden History'' Gabriel Read and the Otago Gold Rush on DCC website
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History of Otago
1851 in New Zealand
1861 in New Zealand
Clutha River
Immigration to New Zealand
New Zealand gold rushes
1860s in Dunedin
Central Otago District
Economy of Dunedin