The heyday of New Zealand's gold rush may have passed, but there's still gold in those rivers - if you know where to look.
Justin Eden has spent forty years mining gold both here and in Australia.
He owns The Gold Shop on Arrowtown's main street, but when he's not there, you'll probably find him working his claim up Skipper's Canyon.
With the borders closed to international travellers, the Central Otago town is still heaving with domestic tourists - many keen to try their luck at panning some gold flakes - or better yet, a nugget, from the Arrow River.
Gold has always been a store of value, he tells Nine to Noon.
“It’s virtually indestructible, there’s nothing naturally occurring in the earth which will affect it so a nugget could lie there for the next ten million years and be exactly the same as it is today.”
Arrowtown has a stretch of river beside it which is free for anyone to pan, and he says it’s proving very popular with domestic tourists.
“Arrowtown has 2km of the Arrow river just behind the town but anyone can hire a pan or bring their own go to the river and spend a day, a week, a month, a year just panning and it’s absolutely no charge and any gold you find is yours.”
The lure of gold is enduring, he says.
“There’ll spend all day in the river, forget to eat, forget about the sand flies and forget about the kids probably and spend all day in the river.”
After lockdown many locals, some newly unemployed, turned to the river as a source of income, he says, finding enough to pay the grocery bill.
“It’s virtually history repeating itself, that gold was there at a time when these people needed it exactly the same as it was in the 1930s and the Depression.”
He had been mining in Otago since the early seventies when he saw an article about gold prospecting in WA describing new metal detection technology that filtered out other metals and allowed gold to be found in areas that had long since been worked.
So he headed off to WA and spent 15 winters in the outback prospecting.
“It was everybody for themselves, you had to look after yourself, you had a 4-wheel drive truck and long-range fuel tanks a 150 litres of water and enough food for a month.
“That was it, you had a map and headed outback into some of the old gold fields and just used your detector technology find gold.”
He said there was gold everywhere.
“The first winters were just crazy because we were some of the first out there with these detectors and the gold was virtually everywhere. We never went for a day without finding anything, every day was just how much would we find, it was just hugely, hugely exciting.
“Some of the pieces we found were pretty big.”
When he started out in the 1970s, he knew old gold miners from the 1930s.
“A lot of those gold miners especially the early ones, the gold they found it was so plentiful they wasted it, they just blew it, they thought it was never going to end.
“The trick is when you find some gold like that put it away and use it to buy a house, buy a farm, something that will appreciate rather than go to town and blow it on gambling or something.”
His gold haul from WA went into buying a farm, he says. Nevertheless, he learnt a lot from those old timers.
“Where to look for gold, in the river and in the mountains a lot of old stories, a lot of how to look after yourself in the mountains.
“These guys cooked on open fires, they didn’t have electricity, so I learnt to make a loaf of bread in a camp oven and turn out a good batch of scones on a wood fire and how to burn a billy properly.”
These men were born to the work, he says.
“Those conditions suited them, they were in their element, they were at home.”
The amount of gold in the Arrow river is constant, but what changes is the location of that gold, he says. For example, a spring flood can move the gold to a spot where there was none before.
“There’s no new gold coming down, that was done millions and millions of years ago when the glaciers moved through. Any remaining gold in the rivers is just being redistributed through flood.”
And with the price of gold so high, areas once deemed uneconomic are now being worked he says.
“More and more lower grade ground can be worked now. And it’s mined in such a way that the land is restored sometimes better than what it was originally.”
