​A HISTORY OF BLACKBALL: GOLD RUSHES IN BRITISH COLONIES, 1851-1856

The rush to California after 1849 was followed by rushes to colonies of the British Empire. British Columbia was the first, followed by New South Wales and Victoria. California was stirred by word of the new land of gold. Thousands thronged the wharves of San Francisco buying tickets for Victoria. George Moonlight was one, now well on his way to becoming legendary. James Douglas, a Marylander who had dug for gold and killed at least one man, set sail on a voyage bringing him closer to a murderous life on the goldfields of New Zealand.
     Europe was stirred deeply by the news of gold in Victoria. Young men in Hamburg, Liverpool, Dublin, Oslo and Marseilles bought tickets as eagerly as their brothers or cousins in the early days of California.
     Chinese diggers also began to be counted by the thousand on what they called New Gold Mountain. A good many sailed from San Francisco. Other young men started coming straight from Guangzhou and Hong Kong.
     New Zealand newspapers were in the words of one editor ‘bespattered’ with the word ‘gold.’[i] Māori bought tickets for Victoria. Parties of them worked together washing for gold and then, when they struck it lucky, send money home through trading banks.[ii] Pākehā also swarmed to the new diggings. Several thousand teenage boys and young men crossed the sea over two or so years from New Zealand to New South Wales and Victoria. Afterwards, those who had been lucky at the diggings often came back skiting.
     The colonial gentry looked on with dismay.
   A clergyman wrote worriedly about ‘horrid Gold mania’ sweeping through Auckland.[iii] A landowner wrote quite as worriedly about ‘the gold rage’ that had ‘seized on the people’ of Nelson.[iv] ‘Fellows come down here tossing their nuggets about,’ grumbled a landowner in Canterbury, ‘bidding at auctions for things they don’t want, in a filthy state of intoxication.’[v] The rich landholders who owned great flocks of sheep did not want gold diggings. They feared they would lose their shepherds and ploughmen to the diggings. They feared for law and order. They feared for the rights of property – above all, their own property.
     ‘The accounts from California are perfectly frightful,’ wrote one. ‘Murders, robberies, and executions by the mob, being the almost exclusive subjects.’[vi] A gold rush, wrote another, brought about ‘complete revolution’ in society. Outsiders from ‘every quarter of the globe’ flooded into a colony. Workers became ‘unsettled’ and ‘wandering.’ The land was no longer grazed calmly but instead dug up and ‘disfigured by the handy-work of man’ until nothing was left but ‘a ruinous desolate aspect.’[vii]
     A trading class of merchants, storekeepers, shipowners and brokers on the other hand were keen for diggings.
     Gold was ‘the great colonizer,’ claimed a newspaper in the trading town of Wellington.[viii] Julius Vogel, soon to rise with the rushes to become a spokesman of the trading class in the colonial parliament, worked hard to hype gold. The winnings of diggers, he wrote, brought civilisation to ‘scarcely before trodden wildernesses,’ causing wealth to be amassed and a springing up of city after shining city.[ix]
     A fair few people already knew that there was gold in New Zealand. Māori had seen it in the rivers for over six hundred years. Pākehā had come across it, too. Europeans seem to have found gold at Coromandel as early as the 1820s and a surveyor in 1843 picked up a nugget in the bed of the Aorere River in the province of Nelson.[x] Yet the colony had to wait for its gold rushes.
     Gold rushes happen not when gold is found but when crowds of young men are ready to rush – and when governments are willing to let them rush – and when newspapers and other sources of news or advertising are ready to ‘boost’ gold.
     Coromandel was the scene of the first rush in the colony. A thousand or so boys and men in 1852 crossed the Hauraki Gulf from Auckland and began shovelling at a wide sandy bay called Patapata. A tribal spokesman of the iwi that held the rohe over the goldfield later spoke about gold as an ‘ugly carcass … the misfortune of our forefathers.’[xi] The damage done at first, though, was slight.
     The truth was that the royal metal of Hauraki was not easily washed out of sand or shingle, for it was locked up in quartz.
     Quartz could only be worked by machinery. Machinery could only be bought with money. Auckland diggers lacked money and also lacked skill in mining and crushing quartz. Companies were thrown together by the middle class of the town, mostly on credit, to dig more deeply. Brokers and diggers and investors, in the words of a newspaper, ‘rushed into this and that without regarding the consequences, sinking expensive shafts here and costly drives there.’[xii] The companies went broke, for winnings were derisory.
     Coromandel diggings were a dud – or a ‘duffer’ in digger lingo.
      The next gold rush in the colony would be much more promising. Diggers in 1856 would find such good troves in the shingle beds of the Aorere and Takaka rivers that the royal metal would come to give its name to a district: Golden Bay. The rush to those rivers would bring crowds of diggers into the province that owned the western bank of the Māwheranui. Golden Bay would be the first step taken by goldseekers towards our valley.
     And after eight years some of those goldseekers would be rushing to Blackball.
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[i] Otago Witness, 12 June 1852.
[ii] Monin, Paul, Hauraki Contested, 1769-1875, Wellington 2001, p. 153.
[iii] Drummond, Alison (ed.), The Thames Journals of Vicesimus Lush 1868-1882, Christchurch 1975, p. 19.
[iv] Wright-St Clair, R E, Thoroughly a Man of the World, Christchurch 1971, pp. 163-4.
[v] J E FitzGerald, letter, 24 August 1852, Canterbury Museum.
[vi] Otago Witness, 1 November 1851.
[vii] FitzGerald, J E, editorial, Lyttelton Times, 14 September 1861.
[viii] Wellington Advertiser, 12 September 1861.
[ix] Otago Witness, 12 July 1862.
[x] The Thames Miner’s Guide, Auckland, 1868, p. 62.
[xi] Hori Watene, speaking in 1935 to a commission of inquiry into the Ohinemuri goldfield; quoted by Monin, Hauraki Contested, p. 252.
[xii] Daily Southern Cross, 26 August 1867.