You can purchase Nieuw Zeeland An English-Speaking Polynesian Country With A Dutch Name: A Humorous History of New Zealand by Geoffrey Corfield from Amazon today.
It certainly does seem at times in New Zealand history, that the North Island and the South Island really have very little in common other than they’re both in the same country, and they’re both each other’s closest big neighbour. But twins they’re definitely not. And in 1860 they both go off in two completely different directions once again
The North Island goes back to war with the Maori. But the South Island has gold rushes, agricultural prosperity, and a population increase that sees it overtake the North Island and make it for the first and only time in New Zealand history, the most important island. The South Island forms a Southern Separation League, holds meetings proposing to separate from the North Island (1862), and is only kept in the country when a separation resolution lead by Canterbury and Southland is defeated by the unity side lead by Auckland and Otago (1865).
The BFD. Illustration by Inkblot
Gold
The New Zealand Gold Rush comes after the California and Australia gold rushes (1848, 1851), and before the South Africa and Yukon gold rushes (1886, 1896).
The first gold found in New Zealand is at Golden Bay, South Island (1843, 1856), and Coromandel, North Island (1852); but the really big New Zealand Gold Rush is in Otago, South Island (1861).
Gabriel Read, A Tasmanian gold miner (or digger), goes to the California and Australia gold rushes, hears about gold being found in New Zealand, goes there, and at Gabriel’s Gully near Lawrence, Otago, finds gold “at a place where a kind of road crossed on a shallow bar I shovelled away about 21?2 feet of gravel, arrived at a beautiful soft slate, and saw the gold shining like stars in Orion on a dark, frosty night” (27 May 1861).
Unusual for a gold miner, Read writes a letter to the Dunedin newspaper about his find, collects the reward offered by the provincial government, and starts The New Zealand Gold Rush.
Two months later there are 11, 472 gold miners in 175 square miles of Otago, twice as many people as there are in Dunedin (those that are left). Farmers leave fields, townspeople leave towns, churchgoers leave church (“Sunday attendance consisted of the minister and precentor”), and in all New Zealand “society is temporarily unhinged”. New Zealand has Gold Fever.
By the end of 1861 Otago contains one third of the total New Zealand population, and Dunedin is its biggest city. Eight years after that Dunedin has many of its famous lovely stone buildings, and New Zealand’s first university, high school for girls, and cable trams.
The BFD. Illustration by Inkblot
They find gold at Clyde, Queenstown, Arrowtown, Hokitika, Reefton, and lots of other places; but by 1870 the main excitement is all over. The New Zealand Gold Rush was notable however, for its design and innovation of river dredging machinery (barges with steam-powered “spoons”; “bucket-and-lad- der” and “paddock” dredges); and for its relatively little violence. Although Chinese miners are attacked at Naseby, and Irish gangs called “Tipperary Men” cause trouble at Arrowtown, the New Zealand Gold Rush is “the best-behaved gold rush in history”.
The BFD. Illustration by Inkblot
The main hazards to miners are floods, avalanches, freezing and starving. At Millers Flat near Roxburgh in 1865, William Rigney finds the body of a dead miner and buries him, marking the grave with a wood slab on which he burned the words: “Somebody’s Darling Lies Buried Here”. When Rigney himself died he asked to be buried next to this grave with a headstone engraved: “Here Lies The Body of William Rigney, The Man Who Buried ‘Somebody’s Darling’.”
They were a different kind of gold miner in New Zealand.
You can purchase Nieuw Zeeland An English-Speaking Polynesian Country With A Dutch Name: A Humorous History of New Zealand from Amazon today.
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