A HISTORY OF BLACKBALL: LIFE ON THE GOLD DIGGINGS, 1865-1869

We don’t really know how many goldseekers dug in the shingles of ‘the Black Ball’ in the 1860s. Diggers were a restless crew. They swarmed in suddenly. They swarmed away suddenly. ‘The largest population at any time was about 150,’ noted the West Coast Times.[i] A goldfields commissioner estimated at the end of the third year of the diggings that the tally had dropped to only one hundred.[ii] At the end of the decade there were only about thirty-five men and boys.[iii] Yet one or two thousand must have spent at least some time digging and washing on Ford Creek and Blackball Creek.
     Almost all worked together in gangs. Only a very few diggers chose to work alone, which was so odd that they were known as ‘hatters’ – they were thought to be ‘as mad as a hatter.’ A working gang might be three men or it might be twenty men and was known as a ‘party.’ A party was a little democracy. All members of the party were equal owners of the claim, which they had to register with the provincial government of Nelson. All members of the party voted on what to do.
     Although a lot of us have a vague idea that those who rushed to the diggings were driven by the wish to win the jackpot, most diggers were not so silly. Gold digging was an investment. You needed a few hundred pounds to become a digger, which made it beyond the reach of the unskilled working class. Almost all diggers came from the skilled working class or the lower middle class. Almost always they hoped to find enough gold to allow them to buy a small farm, to set up a workshop, or to buy a pub or a shop. The dream was not to become rich but to become ‘independent,’ as people said in the nineteenth century. Or in other words, to make their own living without being beholden to a boss – to free themselves from having to work for a wage or salary.
     How much money did they make from digging at Blackball? A few found big nuggets. One ‘curious piece of auriferous timber’ unearthed in 1867 was a stick or root nearly half a metre long, ‘much contorted and water-worn,’ embedded with ‘nuggets and specks of gold.’ One nugget on the stick looked like ‘the breast-pin in a very quiet old gentleman’s cravat.’[iv] A lot more found small nuggets, flakes and specks plentiful enough to make a good living. A provincial official reported in the fourth year after the beginning of the rush that diggers were earning on average ‘£4 per man per week’ at Blackball Creek.[v] A very good wage by the standards of the day. ‘I could mention many rich claims throughout the district,’ wrote an official the following year, ‘but … £4 to £5 per man would represent the average weekly earnings of every miner at work in my district.’[vi] A good many diggers made so little, though, that they gave up, packed their kits and trekked off to another diggings – or threw in their hand altogether and went back to wage or salary work.
     Or they were killed by the work. Gold digging was dangerous. A digger could be drowned by a sudden flood. ‘I cannot advise anyone to try their luck here, as there is too much water,’ observed a newspaper correspondent from Blackball.[vii] A digger could also be buried alive under a shingle fall.
     The end of some careers on the diggigns was to be driven in a hearse through the streets of Greymouth and buried in the town’s raw new cemetery


[i] West Coast Times, 19 October 1870
[ii] Bowkett, Alexander, Centennial of Blackball 1866-1966, Greymouth 1966, p. 5.
[iii] West Coast Times, 19 October 1870
[iv] Southland Times, 19 August 1867
[v] Bowkett, Alexander, Centennial of Blackball 1866-1966, Greymouth 1966, p. 5.
[vi] Grey River Argus, 8 June 1869
[vii] Evening Post, 28 May 1866.