A HISTORY OF BLACKBALL: GOLD RUSHES IN SOUTHWEST NELSON AND WEST CANTERBURY, 1864

The first groups of men and boys methodically washing for gold in the rivers of the West Coast were Māori parties in the late 1850s who worked their way southwards from Golden Bay. They were making the most of knowhow they had won on the goldfields of Hauraki, the Aorere and the Takaka. The goldseekers followed the old Māori walking tracks that twined through the thick forests of Te Tai Poutini. Washing creek after creek, they began to win good gold. Tarapuhi and Ihaia Tainui, skilful young diggers, tramped east across the alpine passes in 1858 to speak to Pākehā colonists in Canterbury. They told them that there was an ‘immense abundance’ of gold on the West Coast.[i]
     The provincial council of Nelson in the winter of 1859 sent a surveyor to sail by sea to the mouth of the Kawatiri. John Rochfort, shrewd and observant, was then paddled up the river in a waka by a crew of Māori. ‘The royal mineral,’ he wrote, ‘was lying on the edge of the river, glistening in the sun.’
     A few bold white diggers took ship to the mouth of the Kawatiri during the early months of the following year, though after several months they still numbered only twenty or thirty, far fewer than the Māori. One party of Māori diggers walked through the forests carrying on their backs a weight of several kilos of gold shovelled from the shingle reaches of the river to be sold far away in Collingwood.
     Reuben Waite, a storekeeper, already had his eye on the Kawatiri. A jovial veteran of California and Victoria, a booster, a blowhard, provoked now by those kilos of gold, he made up his mind to grubstake an expedition to the West Coast. A few diggers were found by trawling the taverns of Nelson. Waite, setting up store at the mouth of the Kawatiri, sent out his diggers to shovel and wash. The men bore back gleaming grains and nuggets. Māori diggers also began to bring kits laden with gold from the headwaters to sell at the store. A village grew up, known as Westport. One traveller, having sailed into its wide estuary and admired its many inlets and islets, thought that it might become a city on the water, a new Venice.[ii]
     Birds sang, rain fell, sandflies whirled, mosquitoes whined. Word of the gold kept spreading slowly.
     One hundred or more white diggers, together with about two hundred Māori, were washing for gold by the time of the rush to Gabriels Gully. The following autumn, when yields began to drop on the southern fields and the slack was not yet taken up by the dazzling finds about to be made in the Dunstan, bands of hopefuls took ship to the Kawatiri from Otago. Westport thrived in a small way. ‘Public houses Butchers and Bakers shops horses spring carts sheep and cattle Ladies riding out on horseback,’ wrote a bewildered wanderer who in the winter of 1863 limped into town; ‘the night that i arrived there was a grand Ball given on the opening of a fine large Billiard room.’[iii]
     ‘Things are looking first-rate here,’ wrote a digger. ‘There is not a man idle, and the Maoris are doing first-rate.’[iv]
     Newspapers printed more and more stories about the likely wealth of the West Coast. A big nugget found early in 1863 weighed in at nearly two kilos. ‘It is a mass of pure gold,’ noted newspapers, ‘shaped like a pistol.’[v] Goldseekers kept finding their way to the field whenever yields waned in Otago. And then, in the middle of 1864, shipload after shipload set off for the West Coast. At first they rushed the shingle beds of Greenstone Creek near Hokitika. Other rushes followed quickly. Te Tai Poutini over the next few years would attract nearly twenty thousand Māori, Irish, English, German, Scottish, Scandinavian, Yankee, Southern and other goldseekers – and with them a throng of storekeepers, gold buyers, drink sellers and prostitutes.
     The valley of the Māwheranui began to be washed for gold when the pushy storekeeper Waite jollied seventy diggers from Canterbury into crowding the decks of a steamship and setting sail for the mouth of what most people were now calling the Grey. The pā at the rivermouth was still cultivating taro and potato gardens and there was a village of what one observer called ‘some forty low huts’ between marshy flats and a wall of thick greenery. Terepuhi, the leading rangatira of the village, was tall and athletic, ‘of handsome countenance,’ always with ‘two or three young men in attendance.’[vi] Waite rigged up a store. Diggers were kitted out. Waite watched them tramp off through the forest and, although a troop was soon back at the store talking angrily of lynching him, in time all made their way inland to Greenstone Creek.
     Other rushes followed swiftly. Ships battled the river bars, dropping off more and more people looking for gold, or selling to those looking for gold. A prospecting party, only a few months after Waite set up his store at the mouth of the Māwheranui, found the glistening ore at a spot about twenty-five kilometres upriver from the pā.
     A spot they called the Blackball Creek.


 [i] Lyttelton Times, 3 April 1858.
[ii] John Rochfort, quoted by May, P R, The West Coast Gold Rushes, Christchurch 1967, p. 52.
[iii] Quoted by May, Gold Rushes, p. 71.
[iv] Otago Witness, 21 February 1863.
[v] Otago Witness, 9 January 1864.
[vi] Dobson, Sir Arthur Dudley, Reminiscences, Christchurch 1930, pp. 53, 92.