Gold rush in Otago

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Gabriel's Gully, Otago, New Zealand (ca.1875)

The gold rush in Otago from 1861 to 1863 was New Zealand 's largest and most important gold rush and had a lasting impact on the city ​​of Dunedin, founded by Scottish settlers, and the Otago region on the South Island of New Zealand .

The rush of gold

Gabriel's Gully, littered with tents and churned earth.

In the 19th century, looking for gold was the most popular individual way of getting rich legally, or at least getting the chance to get rich. Thousands of people were infected by the gold fever , worked under the toughest conditions, lived in poor accommodation and were often exposed to catastrophic hygienic conditions. Wealth and poverty, success and failure were very close together at the time. The Otago gold rush shaped Otago and Dunedin like no other time later.

Gold finds before 1861

The first documented gold finds in New Zealand go back to the beginning of the settlement of New Zealand by the Europeans. Around 1842, whalers found small amounts of gold on the Coromandel Peninsula and Scottish settlers in the Nelson area. In 1852 there was a first minor three-month gold rush on the Coromandel Peninsula in which gold worth £ 1,500 was found. Finds in Onekaka followed in 1855.

In 1856 the first notable discoveries were made in the valley of the Aorere River, near Collingwood and around Nelson. The following year, the gold prospecting community in Collingwood- Takaka District swelled to 1,500 in a few months. After three years and £ 150,000 worth of gold mined, the deposits were also exhausted. At that time it was already known that gold could also be found in the Otago and West Coast regions . The discoveries made did not induce any farmer to give up his employment.

In 1860 the rumor spread that large amounts of gold had been found in the Mataura River in the southern part of Otago. In September 1860, the Australian gold prospector Thomas Gabriel Read heard this rumor.

Gold rush 1861–1863

Thomas Gabriel Read

Read reached Port Chalmers on Otago Harbor in February 1861 . In the meantime, however, it turned out that the gold finds in Mataura River were not worth the trip. Read made his way south anyway and came into contact with John Hardy, farmer and member of the Otago Provincial Council . He firmly believed in the existence of gold in the area around the Tuapeka River near the present-day city of Lawrence . Read followed his recommendation and finally found it in the area on May 25, 1861. Searching with a spade, bowl and butcher's knife, he found seven ounces of clean gold (~ 200 grams) within a few hours . Read immediately reported the findings and came back with two helpers. In a fortnight they had grown over three kilograms of gold.

The news about the gold discoveries got into circulation in no time and the prospectors came just as quickly. Gabriel's Gully , named after Gabriel Read, was the name of the place where Read made the historical gold discoveries. This place is located about 6 km northwest of Lawrence . At peak times, over 1,000 prospectors came to Otago every day. In the second half of 1861 the population had already more than doubled to 30,000. The population of the Gabriel Gully gold field rose from close to zero to around 11,500 in one year, twice the number of Dunedin residents at the time. From 1861 to 1867, over 50,000 Australians came to the country alone.

The technique of prospecting for gold in Otago also changed very quickly, from leaching the gold in the river bed to open-cast mining and mining. The first miners came mainly from Australia, Europe and the United States . From 1866 miners came from China . They were famous and feared for their hard work. To do this, they had to endure hostility and violence in the gold fields.

After 1869, when large mining companies took control of the gold fields, the Otago gold rush was finally over. Many prospectors moved on, some stayed and became miners employed by the mining companies. For gold panning on an industrial scale, powerful floating dredgers with integrated gold panning were developed, which in the coming decades spread from Otago to other gold regions around the world.

Effects and aftermath

The traces of the gold rush in Otago could not be overlooked. Wherever people dig, nature has been destroyed. Wherever you gave up, you simply left everything behind. For decades, parts of Otago resembled a lunar landscape. Aside from the destruction of nature, there have also been numerous human tragedies. Many gold prospectors left home and yard and sometimes good jobs in the hope of getting rich quickly here. If the success did not materialize, there was no longer any guarantee. The dealings among the gold prospectors were rough and envy and resentment often led to conflicts, which were often also carried out with violence. The Chinese immigrants should be mentioned here in particular, some of whom had to work under the worst conditions and were badly treated.

Most of the positive effects of the Otago gold rush were seen in Dunedin . Even if the growth and the sanitary conditions in the city were not able to cope with the onslaught of the fortune-seekers at that time, the gold brought money into the coffers of the city and brought craftsmen, businessmen and bankers to Dunedin. In a short time almost all of the big well-known companies were represented in Dunedin and most of them used to have their headquarters in the "Golden City". Dunedin became New Zealand's largest and richest city for a couple of decades after the Otago gold rush.

The history of the gold rush in Otago, with all its facets and effects, has been very well documented and illustrated in the Otago Settlers Museum in Dunedin.

Gold mining today

Gold production in New Zealand (1855-2006)

The Otagos region is still the site of gold diggers today. But today it is the excavators of a multinational company that mines gold there with great technical and financial effort. OceanaGold Corporation operates the Macraes Gold Mine , 55 km north of Dunedin, which is now New Zealand's largest and most successful gold mine. More than two million ounces of gold have been mined here since 1990 and at least another four million ounces are believed to be in the years to come. With around 170,000 ounces of gold mining per year, this source of income will probably remain in Otago for the next 25 years.

The simple gold prospectors of today have become the tourists who like to take advantage of the tourist offers of gold prospecting in Otago. As in the old days, they shovel, dig and wash in the hope of catching a little bit of luck and finding some gold. It also seems interesting that Crown Minerals , a department of the Ministry of Economic Development of New Zealand, secured 0.5 hectares of land with the name "Gabriel's Gully" for another 10 years on January 12, 2006 , exactly the area from which the Otago gold rush started.

literature

  • Gavin McLean, Dunedin - History, Heritage & Wildlife , University of Otago Press, Dunedin, New Zealand, 2003. ISBN 1-877276-61-8
  • New Zealand Encyclopedia , 5th Edition, David Bateman Ltd., Auckland, New Zealand 2000. ISBN 0-90861-021-1
  • OceanaGold Concise Annual Report 2006 , Ozeana Gold Ltd., Melbourne, Australia, 2006.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Whykickamoocow - curious New Zealand placenames - McCloy, Nicola, Random House New Zealand, 2006