A HISTORY OF BLACKBALL: GOLD RUSHES IN OTAGO AND MARLBOROUGH, 1861-64

The border of the province of Nelson ran down the middle of the Māwheranui. All the land to the north and west was controlled by the provincial government of Nelson. All the land to the south and east of the Māwheranui was controlled by the provincial government of Canterbury.
     The people of each of the two provinces were divided in their opinion about gold diggings. Wealthy landholders and other conservatives feared diggers and diggings. Merchants, shopkeepers, tradespeople, small farmers and workers, on the other hand, longed for diggings.
     At the same time, the two provinces were bleeding young men to the southern province of Otago. The southern province began to be rushed by goldseekers in the winter of 1861, when crowds started washing for gold in the Lindis Pass. A far bigger rush then broke out at Gabriels Gully. Commerce and farming stopped in their tracks. News of the diggings spread through the colony. Hopefuls crowded onto ships. Canterbury workers began throwing down their tools.[i] Nelson diggers struck their tents, swagged up, tramped down to the coast and took ship for Otago. Elbowing them between decks were millworkers and clerks, storekeepers and farmhands. Nelson men were followed soon by men from Victoria, New South Wales, North America and Europe.
     Otago was a far richer field than any others had been so far in New Zealand.
     Gold overnight became a huge industry. One out of every four members of the whole colonial workforce at the time of the census in the spring of 1861 was a digger in Otago.[ii] Otago goldfields were of such ‘great extent and richness,’ wrote a journalist, they ‘immeasurably’ surpassed the Victorian or Californian diggings.[iii] Valleys of gold were found almost weekly. Diggers worked their way inland. A series of rushes in the winter and spring of 1862 led throngs to steam across the sea from Melbourne. Victoria, wrote one digger, was ‘in a blaze of excitement’ about Otago. Queenstown sprang up beneath remarkable peaks known simply as the Remarkables. The province as a whole was on a wild roll, for by the end of the year about 85,000 goldseekers and camp followers had disembarked from ships at anchor in Otago Harbour. Other thousands had landed at Bluff.[iv]
     ‘The nineteenth century is sometimes termed the Age of Iron,’ boasted one writer, ‘but it might with still greater emphasis be called the Age of Gold.’[v]
     Marlborough was the next province to draw by the goldseeking throngs. Wakamarina was rushed in the middle of 1864 when new finds were ‘boosted.’ Thousands of diggers bolted from Otago. Wakamarina and other fields in Marlborough were soon ‘crammed full of diggers.’ After toiling away, shovelling and washing, most learnt that the field was not rich and was hard to work. Diggers packed up their kits. They trekked away. Some went back to Otago. Others gave up goldseeking altogether, at least for now.
     The mass, however, swarmed off to what were said to be wonderful new finds elsewhere – glitteringly rich diggings in Southwest Nelson and in West Canterbury.
     Or in other words, the West Coast.
     The big landholders throughout the southern provinces had been wondering worriedly where the next rush might break out. Would gold once more overthrow the pastoral peace of Nelson? And what about Canterbury? A ‘proud and sensitive Province,’ in the words of a goldfields editor, Canterbury had been ‘founded under aristocratic auspices’[vi] and its governing cliques looked very askance at gold. ‘Aristocratic and conservative Canterbury,’ wrote another third editor, saw gold diggers as ‘rough, half-civilized’ members of the ‘dangerous classes.’[vii] And as for the thick bush and wild rivers and endless rain of West Canterbury – conservative people looked upon it as an unwanted orphan, the dark side of the glowing moon of open, orderly Canterbury. Samuel Butler, novelist and large landholder, seated at a writing table on his Canterbury sheep station, wondered about the faraway, almost unknown land across the Alps.
     ‘[T]he West Coast remains,’ he wrote, ‘the tower in which the slumbering princess lies whom none can rescue but the fated prince.’[viii]
     The prince would prove to be gold.


[i] Hosking, P L, ‘The Impact of the Otago Gold Rushes on Canterbury, 1861-1864,’ MA extended essay, University of Canterbury, 1978, p. 12.
[ii] Sedgwick, C.P. and Thorns, David, Understanding Aotearoa/New Zealand: Historical Statistics, Palmerston North 1997, p. 61.
[iii] Otago Witness, 30 November 1861.
[iv] 64,000 came from the colonies of Australia, 12,000 from the other provinces of New Zealand, and 9,000 from the United Kingdom during the years 1861-1863; May, P R, The West Coast Gold Rushes, Christchurch 1967, p. 462.
[v] Otago Witness, 3 September 1864.
[vi] West Coast Times, 16 December 1865.
[vii] West Coast Times, 23 September 1865.
[viii] Maling, P B, Samuel Butler at Mesopotamia, Christchurch 1960, p. 54.