A HISTORY OF BLACKBALL: GOLD DIGGINGS AT THE BLACK BALL, 1864-1865

The first prospectors to dig for gold at Blackball Creek ‘will never be known for sure,’ says Alexander Bowkett in our centenary history.[i] Māori goldseekers, whose forebears had known for hundreds of years that flakes and nuggets were plentiful in many of the shingle riverbeds of Te Tai Poutini, were the first to dig on several fields – among them Blackball Creek. A Māori traveller, reported the West Coast Times, dug for gold in Blackball Creek while ‘making his way overland from Nelson to the West Coast.’ Afterwards he went on his way. A group of Europeans who ‘came the same way afterwards’ in the spring of 1864 saw that someone had been digging. The group ‘threw down their swags and commenced prospecting.’[ii] George Cundy, one of the group, found a nugget in the creek weighing over six hundred grammes and took it down to Greymouth. He sold it to the merchant Reuben Waite.
     ‘Only a small rush followed because of the difficult access, isolation, inclement weather and the competition from easier diggings,’ notes the Blackball History Group. ‘A second rush occurred in early 1865 and it is recorded that an ounce a day was being won from the field.’[iii]
     Word of big finds, whenever and wherever they occurred, were swapped hastily up and down the streets of the ragtag townships hurtling into life at Kawatiri, Māwhera and Hokitika. Diggers loaded up their kits. They were paddled and then poled in waka up the Māwheranui. Or they tramped inland by way of the old Māori track on the northwest bank. At last they pitched their tents on the banks of Blackball Creek. The creek was ‘a large stream,’ observed the West Coast Times. ‘The gold found there has been of a coarse shotty description.’[iv]
     The Māwheranui valley, meanwhile, was now known to most people as the Grey valley.


[i] Bowkett, Alexander, Centennial of Blackball 1866-1966, Greymouth 1966, p. 5.
[ii] West Coast Times, 19 October 1870
[iii] Blackball History Group, Historic Blackball. A brief history of Blackball, Roa and Moonlight Districts, Nelson 1993, p 6.
[iv] West Coast Times, 19 October 1870