New Zealand gold nuggets

On 23 May 1861, Gabriel Read struck gold in Tuapeka, Otago. Within weeks, New Zealand’s first big goldrush was on, and Otago’s economic, social, and political life was changed forever.

There had been minor goldrushes in this country before – first to the Coromandel Peninsula in 1852, then to Onekaka in 1855, and Collingwood in 1856. But these were nothing compared to the Tuapeka rush.

The first goldseekers often found gold just lying on top of the ground! Once that had all been gathered up, they panned for gold in the riverbeds. This involved scooping up sand and shingle into a dish (or ‘pan’) and swirling water around in it until the dirt washed away, and only the heavy grains of gold were left at the bottom.

After the miners had found all the precious metal there was in the surface of a riverbed, they dug deeper. For this they used a ‘cradle’. They shovelled riverbed soil into the box of the cradle, poured water on by hand, and rocked the cradle until the finest dirt particles dissolved, leaving only solid matter, which could be examined by hand.

To get even more gold from the rivers, miners sometimes used a ‘spoon dredge’. This was attached to the back of a boat, and as the boat moved forward, the ‘spoons’ dug into the riverbed and scooped up the river shingle, which was then dumped on deck ready for the miners to sift through.

Where there was nothing to be found in rivers, miners sluiced for gold: they washed away whole hillsides, and sent the dirt to chutes at the bottom of the hill, where they cradled it.

In many parts of Otago, gold was embedded in quartz, but to reach it, miners had to tunnel underground. With picks and shovels, they gouged out promising rocks, then hauled them to the surface on a pulley and crushed them to get at the gold. Underground mining was a dangerous business, and carelessness often led to fatal cave-ins.

The first miners came from Britain, the United States, Europe, and Australia. Then in 1866, a party of Chinese miners arrived in Otago. The Chinese were both famed and feared for their industriousness on the goldfields, and they met hostility and violence from other miners.

Mining camps were primitive places with their own sets of rules. Generally, the miners were a rough-looking lot. They had long untrimmed beards, and often carried sheath, or Bowie knifes. They wore moleskin trousers, and loose blue or red serge shirts. Most were men, but not all. One legendary early goldminer was Bridget Goodwin, or Biddy of the Buller, who worked a claim on the South Island’s West Coast.

Many miners had thrown in good jobs in their homelands to try their luck on the goldfields. Some regretted it. In 1857, a Nelson miner wrote ‘Some men…have ... gone home disgusted; some to their mothers, and others to their wives. Perhaps if they were to eat a sheep’s pluck every morning, so as to acquire that very necessary characteristic of a digger, they might come and try the diggings again ...’ (1).

After 1869, returns from the major goldfields dropped, and in order to earn a living, many independent miners were forced to become labourers for large goldmining companies. The last big nineteenth-century goldrush to this country was to the Hauraki, Thames, and Ohinemuri goldfields in the Coromandel, in 1867–68.

The gold nuggets pictured were displayed in Wellington’s Colonial Museum. They were intended to entice overseas visitors to move here permanently and seek their fortunes on the goldfields. Unfortunately, by the time they went on display, many goldfields around the country had already been stripped bare.

Reference
(1) Fraser, Conon. (1971). Gold at Collingwood. New Zealand’s Heritage: the making of a nation 2:25. p 693.

Text originally published in Tai Awatea, Te Papa's onfloor multimedia database (1998).