A HISTORY OF BLACKBALL: GOLD RUSHES IN NELSON PROVINCE, 1856-1861

The border of the province of Nelson during the early colonial period ran down the middle of the Māwheranui. Blackball lay within the province. Nelson sponsored the first South Island gold rushes when a committee of merchants in the provincial capital made up their minds in 1856 to ‘boost’ gold already known to be cached in the river shingles of Golden Bay. The committee offered a reward for the discovery of a good goldfield.
     A group of Māori soon afterwards led two Pākehā prospectors into the valley of the Aorere where they pointed out gold in gully after gully.
     Yet the province was by no means in agreement about whether it would welcome a goldfield.
     The ‘higher class or aristocracy’ of the province was a charmed circle of big landholders who held great grassy tracts of territory grazed by sheep and staffed by shepherds. Wool was the yield they wished to bring forth from their paddocks. They did not want lesser folk to poke about for gold.[i] Lawlessness, high wages, riot, unbridled freedom – all this and worse had happened in California. Victoria had scarcely offered any solace. What democratic terrors might gold bring in its train if it were found and rushed in Nelson? The Nelson Examiner, the voice of landholders, slated digging as a ‘pursuit analagous to gambling,’ drawing to gold provinces ‘scum of evil character.’[ii]
     The ‘state of social ferment’ stirred up by rushes, added one landholder, led to ‘plunder … and impunity.’[iii]
     The landholding group however did not control the provincial council, which was elected by the trading middle class as well as the landed wealthy. William Perry Robinson, leader of the council and owner of a sawmill, was no friend of the gentry. The landholders ‘never quite forgave him,’ wrote one of his backers, ‘for his interference with their monopoly of power and privilege ’[iv] Robinson wished gold to be won by what he called ‘men of little means.’[v] At first he did nothing about proclaiming a goldfield. Officially, there was no goldfield. Yet workmen early in 1857 began wandering hopefully with shovels and pickaxes into Golden Bay. The gold committee rewarded a prospector who struck it lucky at Parapara, to the south of the Aorere. Hundreds of young men after a few weeks were digging at Parapara.
     A whole sequence of rushes now began, drawing more and more newcomers to Golden Bay.
     Māori, British, Irish, French, German, Scandinavian, Yankee and Dixie diggers came by the shipload. One thousand boys and men  were on the fields by autumn, while two thousand or more were digging early the following year. At the mouth of the Aorere on a low marshy peninsula a new town of canvas and wood fluttered up on sticks amidst reeds, rushes and flax. Men and boys disembarked at the rickety town, soon to be called Collingwood. They sought mates, formed parties and began the tramp to the diggings.
     Quite a few, when they got to the diggings, washed out rich troves. One man, a Briton working with a cradle on the Slate River, won up to four kilos of gold a day.[vi] A day’s work, in other words, could yield him more than most workmen saved in a long lifetime of wage labour. Two Germans said to a visitor: ‘the country is magnificent, the climate splendid, and we are getting plenty of gold.’[vii]
     Townships sprang into tawdry life amidst the thick of ancient forests. Fluttering with harlequin flags, they sported the gilded signs of inns and shops. Quarrels over rights to dig the banks of the Anatoki broke out between Māori and Pākehā diggers in the spring of 1857, ending with the Pākehā being driven away.[viii] The provincial government managed to talk the two sides into agreeing to share the goldfields.[ix]
     As the easy river shingles were washed clean of ore, however, diggers began drifting away from Golden Bay.
     The bolder or more footloose were drawn to faraway new rushes in British North America, where gold began to be dug during 1858 from sand bars along the Fraser River in territory belonging to the British Hudson Bay Company. Queensland drew goldseekers for the first time when finds were made in 1858 at Canoona. Young men two years later swarmed to Kiandra and Lambing Flat in New South Wales. Cornelius Higgins, a farm labourer in the province of Canterbury, was so fed up with the way his boss had cut his wage that he took ship with others for Kiandra. All that glistered, however, was not gold.
     ‘[T]hey are very poor diggings indeed,’ he wrote glumly.[x]
     Golden Bay meanwhile seemed more and more lacklustre. A German traveller in 1859 found only a few hundred men shovelling and washing on its diggings. One or two other small rushes followed in quite another quarter of the province of Nelson. Valleys opening off the upper reaches of the Motueka River had been dug in a very quiet way even before Golden Bay. The first stirring had been in 1855, when news had spread through the settled districts of the province that gold could be won in the valley of the Baton. One hundred or so diggers washed for gold. A few were lucky.
     Now came a little rush to nearby Wangapeka.
     ‘We heard that by pulling up the grass,’ wrote one digger, ‘gold could be shaken out of the roots in quantity.’
     Wangapeka was talked up by boosters throughout the colony. The field supposedly would be ‘richer than anything’ known in New Zealand. Diggers were ‘doing remarkably well.’[xi] Yet it failed to draw crowds from outside the province, proving not very rich, hard to reach and hard to work. Nelson goldfields nevertheless were much the most lucrative found so far in the colony. Shingles and clays and conglomerates during the first five years of digging and washing yielded yielded gold worth well over one hundred times what had been found at Coromandel.
     Nor were these early diggings going to be the end of the story.
     ‘The New Zealand diggings are yet destined to create a stir in the world,’ wrote Edwin Hodder, a young clerk who had been trying the diggings.[xii]
     No sooner had he put pen to paper than a new fever broke out, a fever fated for two or three years to overshadow every other and bring a horde of tens of thousands of hopefuls flocking into the colony.
     Nelson province lost the limelight, almost overnight, to Otago.


[i] Hodder, Edwin, Memories of New Zealand Life, London 1862, pp. 50-2.
[ii] Nelson Examiner quoted by Hill, R S, Policing the Colonial Frontier, Wellington 1986, p. 511.
[iii] Otago Witness, 16 January 1863.
[iv] Saunders, Alfred, History of New Zealand, Christchurch 1896, p. 332.
[v] Robinson quoted by May, P R, The West Coast Gold Rushes, Christchurch 1967, p. 72.
[vi] Washbourn, Reminiscences, pp. 5, 20.
[vii] Quoted by Haast, H F von, The Life and Times of Sir Julius von Haast, Wellington 1948, p. 34.
[viii] Nelson Examiner, 24 October 1857.
[ix] Nelson Examiner, 7 November 1857.
[x] Cornelius Higgins, Letters, Canterbury Museum, ARC 1900.259, p. 20.
[xi] Nelson Examiner, quoted by Otago Witness, 13 April and 11 May 1861.
[xii] Hodder, Memories, p. 226.