The first prospectors to dig for gold at Blackball Creek ‘will never be known for sure,’ says Alexander Bowkett in our centenary history.[i] Māori goldseekers, whose forebears had known for hundreds of years that flakes and nuggets were plentiful in many of the shingle riverbeds of Te Tai Poutini, were the first to dig on several fields – among them Blackball Creek. A Māori traveller, reported the West Coast Times, dug for gold in Blackball Creek while ‘making his way overland from Nelson to the West Coast.’ Afterwards he went on his way. A group of Europeans who ‘came the same way afterwards’ in the spring of 1864 saw that someone had been digging. The group ‘threw down their swags and commenced prospecting.’[ii] George Cundy, one of the group, found a nugget in the creek weighing over six hundred grammes and took it down to Greymouth. He sold it to the merchant Reuben Waite.
     ‘Only a small rush followed because of the difficult access, isolation, inclement weather and the competition from easier diggings,’ notes the Blackball History Group. ‘A second rush occurred in early 1865 and it is recorded that an ounce a day was being won from the field.’[iii]
     Word of big finds, whenever and wherever they occurred, were swapped hastily up and down the streets of the ragtag townships hurtling into life at Kawatiri, Māwhera and Hokitika. Diggers loaded up their kits. They were paddled and then poled in waka up the Māwheranui. Or they tramped inland by way of the old Māori track on the northwest bank. At last they pitched their tents on the banks of Blackball Creek. The creek was ‘a large stream,’ observed the West Coast Times. ‘The gold found there has been of a coarse shotty description.’[iv]
     The Māwheranui valley, meanwhile, was now known to most people as the Grey valley.


[i] Bowkett, Alexander, Centennial of Blackball 1866-1966, Greymouth 1966, p. 5.
[ii] West Coast Times, 19 October 1870
[iii] Blackball History Group, Historic Blackball. A brief history of Blackball, Roa and Moonlight Districts, Nelson 1993, p 6.
[iv] West Coast Times, 19 October 1870

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.
 
 

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.
 
 
 

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.
 
 

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.
​


[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.