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Overview
This medallion commemorates the Tuapeka gold rush of 1861. The medallion was struck by the Gabriel's Gully Pioneers’ Association in commemoration of their jubilee in 1911, and as a memento for members.
Gabriel Read
Gabriel Read, a prospector from Tasmania, found gold in a gully near the Tuapeka River on 25 May 1861. He wrote that he ‘shovelled away about 2 ½ feet of gravel, arrived at a beautiful soft slate and saw the gold shining like stars in Orion on a dark frosty night.’ (quoted in Te Papa 1998). Read reported his find to J.L.C. Richardson, the Superintendent of Otago, on 4 June 1861, and by December approximately 14,000 people were trying their luck on the Tuapeka or Waipori goldfields (McLean 2013).
Gabriel's Gully
Read was by no means the first to discover gold in Otago. Local Māori had long been aware of the presence of gold in the Mata-au/Clutha River, and had shared that information with new settlers and whalers decades before Read arrived in New Zealand (Carpenter 2013, 107). Numerous individuals had reported gold discoveries in the 1850s, and in fact Read had been drawn to the Tuapeka area by the success of a prospector from India named Edward Peters, who found a workable goldfield there in about 1858 (Carpenter 2014, 34-35).
Historians have offered various explanations of why Read’s discovery triggered a gold rush when earlier finds had not. Some have suggested that prior to 1861 local landowners and politicians suppressed the news of gold, trying to avoid a gold rush because they feared it would diminish their power and the religious values of their ‘Presbyterian idyll’ (Carpenter 2014, 25-26). Stevan Eldred-Grigg argues that Peters, a shepherd known locally as ‘Black Peter,’ ‘was not looked upon as someone whose winnings or words were worth a good deal [and] gold needed to be found by somebody with good connections, backed by those in authority’ (Eldred-Grigg 2008, 76). More recent analysis suggests that the recession of early 1861, marked by decreasing prices for export commodities and rising unemployment, created incentives for seeking gold that were not present in the 1850s. By the time Read announced his find in May, suggests historian Lloyd Carpenter, ‘his audience were ready, willing and (with Read’s tuition) able to exploit a field’ (Carpenter 2014, 37).
For whatever reason, Read was credited with the discovery of gold in Otago and that association remains to this day, reinforced by commemorations and commemorative objects like this one.
Pioneer’s Association
In 1911, more than 200 of the 1861 ‘pioneers’ returned to Lawrence for the Jubilee of Read’s discovery, and participated in a grand procession through the town. A Gabriel's Gully Pioneers Association was established to celebrate and record the early history of the goldfield, and in 1913 the Association arranged for 320 bronze medals like this one to be issued to members (Bruce Herald, February 20, 1913; Tuapeka Times, July 9, 1913). They also arranged for a cairn to be erected in Lawrence to the memory of Gabriel Read and the ‘old pioneer miners of 1861’ (Evening Star, May 27, 1914).
The late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries saw a burgeoning of early settler societies, an outpouring of books of pioneer reminiscences, and a number of public commemorations dedicated to pioneers or ‘Old Identities.’ As Fiona Hamilton notes, these activities were a crucial part of the process of colonization, creating Pākehā foundation narratives that emphasised industriousness and cooperation while obscuring memories of disruption and displacement (Hamilton 2002, 72, 77). This medallion and the activities of the Gabriel's Gully Pioneers’ Association can be viewed in that context, revealing something of how histories of gold, Pākehā ‘discovery’ and settlement have been constructed.
References
- Carpenter, Lloyd. 2013. Finding ‘Te Wherro’ in Ōtākou: Māori and the early days of the Otago gold rush.’ MAI Journal: A New Zealand Journal of Indigenous Scholarship 2 (2): 105-120.
- Carpenter, Lloyd. 2014. A Conspiracy to Silence: Reports of Otago gold prior to 1861. Journal of Australasian Mining History 12 (October): 23-44.
- Eldred-Grigg, Stevan. 2008. Diggers hatters and whores: The story of the New Zealand gold rushes. [Auckland]: Random House.
- Hamilton, Fiona. 2002. Pioneering History: Negotiating Pakeha Collective Memory in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. New Zealand Journal of History 36 (1): 66-81.
- Hearn, T.J. 1990. Read, Thomas Gabriel. Dictionary of New Zealand Biography. Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand. https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/1r3/read-thomas-gabriel
- Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga. Gabriel’s Gully. List Entry Information. https://www.heritage.org.nz/the-list/details/7789
- McLean, Gavin. 2013. Gabriel's Gully. New Zealand History website. Ministry for Culture and Heritage. https://nzhistory.govt.nz/media/photo/gabriels-gully
- Te Papa. 1998. Biography of Thomas Gabriel Read. Collections Online website. https://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/topic/1376
- Walrond, Carl. 2006. Gold and gold mining. Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand. http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/gold-and-gold-mining