Overview
In the heady, impulsive days of goldmining, wherever gold was struck a new town would spring up. And when there was no more gold left nearby, it would vanish as quickly as it had appeared. The rough-and-ready look of these settlements was sometimes vividly conveyed in their names – for example, Canvastown.
Collingwood, in the South Island’s Golden Bay, was New Zealand’s first goldmining town. By the late 1850s it was home to about a thousand miners. It was in the middle of nowhere, and the packtracks between the town and the diggings were just channels of mud.
The luckiest Collingwood miners lived in tents. Others built huts from natural materials or slept under the stars. There were hotels, and stores where the miners could buy supplies ... but not with money. Cut off from the outside world, only one thing could be used as currency, and so businesses had gold scales instead of tills.
The commercial buildings were as primitive as the miners’ homes. A visitor to Collingwood, Dr John Shaw, stayed at the Commercial Hotel – one of the town’s finest. He wrote, ‘The house itself was a wooden skeleton, merely covered with coarse calico or canvas, without mud, bricks, mortar, stone, thatch or tile, equally bereft of windows, and with only one door, so constructed as to let in from its numerous crevices, light, heat, and the sun ... the floor was as nature made it – the surface of the earth ...’ (1).
In 1858 over 4,000 diggers lived in Collingwood, collecting record amounts of gold. However, by the end of 1859, the population was down to 200. A flood had washed away many miners’ equipment, a fire had gutted the town’s main buildings, and the gold was almost gone. Within months, the town of Collingwood was little more than a memory.
Reference
(1) Fraser, Conon. (1971). Gold at Collingwood.. New Zealand’s Heritage: the making of a nation 2:25. p 694.
Text originally published in Tai Awatea, Te Papa's onfloor multimedia database (1998).