Transcript
THE AOTEAROA HISTORY SHOW
THE GOLD RUSH
MĀNI: In 1849 a whaling ship called the Amazon put ashore in Tahiti.
It had been built in Aparima, Riverton, and was captained by 40 year-old Englishman John Howell.
WILLIAM: Howell had run away to sea when he was 12 and had been operating out of Aotearoa and Australia for half his life.
MĀNI: His ship was mostly crewed by his Māori in-laws. Howell had married two Māori women, first Kohihohi of Ngāti Māmoe and then, after her death, Koronaki of Ngāi Tahu.
WILLIAM: Howell and his crew found Tahiti in an uproar. Gold had been discovered across the Pacific in California and the locals asked desperately if they would take them to San Francisco to join the gold rush.
At first, Howell wasn’t interested, he wanted to go back home
But his Ngāti Māmoe and Ngāi Tahu rellies talked him around. They were keen to see the wider world, and find out why people were so excited about California
So the Amazon sailed off to California.
MĀNI: When they arrived Captain Howell and his Māori in-laws joined in with the frantic diggers
And one day, as they washed the gravel through their pan there it was… Gold.
John Howell was speechless…. But his relatives just shrugged.
They asked why they had sailed thousands of miles to find gold in California when the same stuff could be found in the rivers back home in Aotearoa?
WILLIAM: John Howell asked his relatives where to find the gold, but they refused to tell him. Maybe they were worried about bringing home the chaos they’d seen in California.
MĀNI: But within 12 years, the secret was out and one of the world’s most significant gold rushes began right here in New Zealand.
INTRO STING
WILLIAM: There are three main ingredients you need for a gold rush: Geology, Culture and Capitalism.
First, geology. Cos you can’t have a gold rush without gold.
Gold mostly exists as tiny specks of metal locked up inside quartz rock.
To extract that gold you usually need expensive heavy equipment. But in a handful of special places, nature does a lot of the work for us.
Over thousands of years, quartz gets broken down by wind and rain, and washed into rivers.
The rivers jumble the rocks around and those gold specks become bigger flakes and nuggets that settle on the riverbed just waiting for someone to pick them up.
MĀNI: In 1852, a Ngāti Māmoe/Ngāi Tahu chief called Raki Raki told Pākehā gold seekers that he once picked up a nugget the size of a potato from a local river.
... Then he chucked it straight back in the water.
That’s cos the second ingredient you need for a gold rush is a culture that values gold. And Maori didn't.
Our precious mineral was pounamu, greenstone.
So there weren’t any gold rushes in Aotearoa until Europeans turned up.
WILLIAM: And actually, there weren’t really gold rushes anywhere in the world until the 19th century.
That’s because the final ingredient you need for a proper gold rush is capitalism.
For most of world history gold mining was controlled by powerful aristocrats. The people who did the digging were usually slaves or indentured labourers.
But with the rise of capitalism, it became possible for ordinary people to mine and sell gold themselves - provided they had the resources, the capital, to get it.
MĀNI: The place where all these ingredients came together for the first time was the United States in 1848.
WILLIAM: When gold was discovered in the rivers of California it was promoted by none other than US President James Polk in an address to Congress:
“The accounts of the abundance of gold in that territory are of such an extraordinary character as would scarcely command belief were they not corroborated by the authentic reports of officers in the public service.”
MĀNI: What happened next set the template for pretty much every other gold rush of the 19th century, including New Zealand.
Gold rushes were chaotic. Thousands of people headed into the wilderness, often without any experience in mining, or surviving outdoors.
WILLIAM: Without police or courts, diggers came up with their own rough and ready rules that became known as "diggers law".
MĀNI: The bonds between diggers could be extremely strong, but they could be vicious to those they saw as outsiders, like local Native American tribes and Chinese diggers.
WILLIAM: The next big gold rush after California was in Victoria, Australia. Authorities tried to clamp down on the chaos there using heavy taxes and strict policing.
But that sparked fierce resistance, including the famous Eureka Rebellion where at least 27 people were killed.
MĀNI: Despite the chaos, gold fever quickly spread to Aotearoa.
Poor colonists and more than a few Māori saw a chance for wealth and flooded over to Australia and California
Others started wondering what lay beneath the ground here.
WILLIAM: But when the first small gold discoveries were announced in New Zealand during the 1850s, not everyone was delighted.
Some Rangatira opposed gold mining. They worried the discovery of gold in Aotearoa would only increase Pākehā hunger for Māori land.
MĀNI: And they had an unlikely ally: Rich Pākehā landowners - especially the big sheep farmers known as wool lords or sheep barons.
WILLIAM: Now you might be thinking: Wouldn’t the sheep barons just get richer if gold was found on their land?
Well, the thing is under British law, gold is a “royal metal” - no matter where you find it, it belongs to the Crown.
So the last thing the sheep barons wanted was their property seized by the government and turned into a goldfield.
And respectable colonists weren’t keen on the sort of drunken riff-raff they associated with gold digging.
So they did their best to block the search for gold in New Zealand.
MĀNI: For a while, the government went along with this. After all, many politicians in this era were sheep barons themselves.
But the lure of gold was too much. Eventually, provincial governments stopped blocking prospectors and started offering rewards for the discovery of profitable goldfields.
In June 1861 Gabriel Read, a veteran of the Californian and Victoran goldfields wrote a letter to a local official.
It was later published in the Otago Witness.
‘I take the liberty of troubling you with a short report on the result of a gold-prospecting tour ... in one place, for ten hour's work with pan and butcher's knife, I was enabled to collect about seven ounces of gold.’
WILLIAM: To put that in modern terms, Gabriel Read dug up about 17 thousand dollars worth of gold in a single day.
The spot where Gabriel was digging is just outside what’s now the town of Lawrence in Central Otago. It was given the name “Gabriel’s Gully”.
But it wasn’t really discovered by Gabriel at all.
The first person to find gold at this gully was a shepherd called Edward Peters.
He’s thought to have been from Mumbai and might have dug for gold in California before coming to Aotearoa.
Gabriel Read followed up on Peter’s discovery and was the first to promote the field more widely.
MĀNI: In any case, the Otago Gold Rush was on. Three weeks later, the Otago Witness reported...
“Gold, Gold, Gold, is the universal subject of conversation ... The fever is running to such a height that, if it continue, there will be scarcely a man left in town"
WILLIAM: The rush quickly spread beyond Gabriel’s Gully as gold was found in valleys and streams all over Otago, and in Southland, Marlborough and on the West Coast.
MĀNI: Settlements sprung up, sometimes on or near pre-existing kāinga Māori.
Digger camps formed the foundations for towns which are still around today.
Queenstown, Arrowtown, Cromwell, Westport, Greymouth, Hokitika, the list goes on and on.
WILLIAM: People swarmed the South Island looking for gold.
19th century population stats are notoriously inaccurate but what figures we do have suggest the Pākehā population of New Zealand more than doubled in ten years, and many of those migrants came chasing gold.
This was one of the biggest influxes of people in New Zealand History, and it solidified Aotearoa as a Pākehā dominated country.
Hundreds of Pākehā diggers would join the Colonial Militia to fight Māori in the New Zealand Wars in exchange for promises of land.
MĀNI: So who were the diggers?
They weren’t the poorest of the poor. Those in extreme poverty couldn’t afford to get to the goldfields in the first place.
But they weren’t all that rich either. Adventuring upper-class men often tried digging only to find they weren’t cut out for the grinding labour.
WILLIAM: Most successful diggers were small farmers, or sailors - or skilled craftsmen like carpenters and masons. People with a bit of cash to get them started and who were used to working outdoors.
Many seized gold-digging as a chance to escape wage labour, and work for themselves.
MĀNI: And while they all hoped to strike it rich, most had realistic expectations - One traveller said this about the goldseekers in California:
‘Some are young men from the country who are bound to the mines in hopes of gathering sufficient of the [gold] dust to enable them to return home and buy a farm ... Others are broken down store keepers or mechanics who find that there is little or no prospect of saving enough for a rainy day, and are bound for California in hope of … amassing enough to make the future look more comfortable.’
WILLIAM: Where did the first waves of diggers come from? All over the world, but mostly England, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Scandinavia, Scotland and the United States.
MĀNI: Māori were extensively involved in Otago’s rushes too, all the major southern Ngāi Tahu chiefs took part.
Some modern linguists think the distinct New Zealand accent and dialect first evolved from all these cultures mixing on the goldfields
WILLIAM: How old were the diggers? Most were very young - boys in their teens and young men in their twenties.
They grew their hair and beards long, and almost never washed.
MĀNI: On the Otago goldfields they dressed like pirates in high boots, tight velvet trousers and loose shirts - often dyed red, pale yellow or blue. They accessorised with silk, sashes, gold rings and watch chains.
As the Otago Witness explained, fashion was a way of signalling your success.
“You can tell the good claims from the general appearance of the men working them, they are well dressed, wearing their silk and sashes and gold chains while at work.”
WILLIAM: Diggers sang and shouted to each other as they worked - and when someone struck gold they celebrated wildly.
George Holmes said this about the moment his mate got a lucky find at Moke Creek near Queenstown.
“I thought he’d gone crazy, he seized the basin and ran round and round with it, pretty nigh delirious with joy.”
MĀNI: We’ll never know how much gold was extracted by these boys and men.
Official yields peaked in 1863 at almost 18 thousand kilos. But gold was also smuggled out of the country secretly to avoid taxes.
WILLIAM: Digging wasn’t all fun and games, it was hard work in brutal conditions. Knee deep in freezing cold rivers, choking on dust and tormented by blood-sucking sandflies.
MĀNI: Many diggers lost their lives... and a lot of it was down to really bad timing.
WILLIAM: In the summer of 1863 the rivers ran low and diggers pitched tents close to the water
But in July, disaster struck. Here’s how historian Stevan Eldred-Grigg describes it.
“Cold cloudbursts drove down for six days. Shingle and mud crashed into the gorges and staunched rivers with rough rubble dams behind which floodwaters began banking up quickly. Storms dumped still more downpours. Overnight, the dams burst. Waves like walls up to six metres from trough to crest came slamming down the valleys.”
MĀNI: A British digger called Bob was sleeping in his tent beside his friend, Bill, as the water came crashing down..
“I realised our situation at once, and caught Bill by the shoulders and shook him; he only muttered something about sister Mary, I felt the water rising on my legs; there was not a moment to lose.”
WILLIAM: Bob dragged his mate out of bed and made a run for it, but when he looked behind, Bill had vanished.
MĀNI: His body was later found 70 kilometers downriver.
“I thought of poor young Bill, so happy and merry, carried away by that horrid rapid river, I could not restrain my tears.”
WILLIAM: Bill was one of maybe a hundred diggers killed by floods in 1863. Hundreds more drowned in the years that followed. In fact, drowning was so common throughout early colonial New Zealand it became known as “The New Zealand Death.”
MĀNI: Many others lost fingers and toes to frostbite in winter. Some froze to death.
WILLIAM: Hastily dug pits and tunnels often collapsed, burying men alive.
MĀNI: In such harsh conditions, the diggers clubbed together, living in small groups. Usually two to seven men.
WILLIAM: The phrase at the time was that they “went mates” - and of course Kiwis and Australians still call each other mates. Much of that tradition of close, blokey friendship was born on the goldfields.
These sometimes became sexual relationships too.
MĀNI: There were only a handful of female Pākehā diggers - most of them working alongside their husbands.
But thousands more working women followed men out onto the goldfields.
WILLIAM: As Stevan Eldredd-Grigg says, those women were looking for exactly the same thing as the men - wealth and freedom
“A woman on the goldfield could make very good money. Her scarcity value was so high during the first year or two that a ‘slipshod, slatternly, stockingless, insolent servant woman’, moaned a diggings newspaper, could pocket ‘two to three pounds a week as wages besides her keep.’”
MĀNI: Women filled all kinds of roles - merchants, hotel keepers, washerwomen, sex workers.
Young women were always in demand by pubs as dancers and barmaids to encourage the men to buy drinks.
WILLIAM: Like there was one popular song on the West Coast which went like this…
“Nancy’s smiles are quite beguiling
To make some fun she’s willing, oh!
You give a rap, she turns the tap
And thanks you for your shilling, oh!”
MĀNI: Life on the goldfields could be an exciting escape from the drudgery of factory work, domestic service or marriage - but, just like gold digging, it was risky.
Some women made money, but only a minority got rich from their shops, brothels and pubs.
WILLIAM: Same went for the men… Most diggers never found enough gold to make their fortune.
MĀNI: Not that it stopped people looking. Gold was found at the top of the South Island in the mid-1850s - enough to earn the area the name ‘Golden Bay’ but not so much that it drew more than two thousand miners.
WILLIAM: Quite a few of those diggers were Māori.
They worked differently than Pākehā. Instead of going mates in small groups of men, they often worked collectively as a whānau or hapū … The strongest shoveling, the nimble-fingered washing gravel through pans, and the rest cooking and cleaning back at camp.
MĀNI: Some Māori diggers worked their way south down the western coast. But the discovery that finally triggered the West Coast gold rush was down to a group of Māori who weren’t looking for gold at all.
In February 1864, four Māori were hunting for pounamu along Hohonu Creek -
Iwikau te Aika, Ihaia Tainui and Irihāpeti Pātahi of Ngāi Tahu, plus Irahāpeti’s husband, Haimona Tuakau of Ngāti Kahungunu
They found a large pounamu boulder, and when they lifted it up, the sand underneath was sparkling with gold.
WILLIAM: When news made it to Otago, diggers flooded West. Many were drowned in shipwrecks on the rugged coastline, or frozen to death hiking through the Southern Alps. Or starved to death when they ran out of supplies.
But lots made it, and that sparked intense demand for Māori land near the site of the diggings - Poutini Ngāi Tahu ended up losing a fair chunk of it to squatters and government agents.
MĀNI: The boom on the West Coast was also bad news for Otago.
Gold had made the province insanely wealthy, supporting shopkeepers, craftsmen and hospitality workers.
As the diggers went west, their customers vanished.
WILLIAM: But they were replaced by a new wave of diggers, many of them Chinese.
Chinese diggers were encouraged, in part, by the Dunedin Chamber of Commerce, which asked Chinese merchants in Melbourne to help promote the Otago Goldfields.
MĀNI: The merchants agreed, but only so long as Chinese diggers were promised equal treatment under the law, protection from violence and not subjected to extra taxes.
WILLIAM: Chinese diggers were a huge part of the Gold Rush in California and Australia. Most came from Guangdong Province in Southern China.
They usually came from families that were neither rich nor very poor. Families and clans often pooled resources to send men to the goldfields on the condition they send a chunk of their winnings home to support the community.
MĀNI: We don't know for sure how many came to Aotearoa, but at least 8 thousand arrived in Otago, and thousands more went to the West Coast.
WILLIAM: They were often very successful, whereas Pākehā usually worked in groups of two to seven, Chinese diggers operated in larger crews, typically 40 to 50 people.
MĀNI: Many had experience working with water to irrigate farmland back home.
They put this expertise to work on the goldfields, building dams, blasting away with water cannon, and dredging on floating platforms.
WILLIAM: This allowed them to access gold which European diggers had assumed was too difficult to reach.
One of their most ambitious projects was to divert a channel of the biggest river in the South Island: Mata-Au, the Clutha, so they could mine the riverbed.
Every year they piled up rocks to redirect its flow, and every year their efforts were destroyed by flooding.
MĀNI: But to the astonishment of Pākehā witnesses, they kept at it. As one wrote....
“These [Chinese diggers] are above all plucky, and incapable either of admitting failure, bowing to difficulties, or sitting down to hard luck. They are above all things stickers and are besides very ingenious or resourceful in work of this kind.”
WILLIAM: Chinese diggers sometimes spoke fondly of their experience in New Zealand. One named Ah Teng told the Otago Daily Times,
"Plenty of [Chinese people will] come by and bye. [The] Country [is] much better than Victoria"
MĀNI: And as another said, there was
“Plenty wood, plenty fire, plenty tucker”
WILLIAM: But Chinese immigrants also copped plenty of abuse.
They were often harangued in the street and occasionally assaulted by young thugs, and sometimes by women and Māori too.
MĀNI: Chinese people were also excluded from some colonial settlements. For example, they were forbidden from living in the town of Lawrence, and had to set up camp on the outskirts.
WILLIAM: And the discrimination got worse over time.
A prominent anti-Chinese politician was Richard Seddon, who became a local body politician towards the end of the Gold Rush in the 1870s, and rose to Prime Minister in 1893… our longest-serving Prime Minister.
MĀNI: Seddon set a lot of the groundwork for New Zealand's modern welfare state. He’d been a digger himself on the West Coast, and his working class sympathies made him a champion of poorer Pākehā.
But he also won supporters through vicious anti-Chinese speeches and policies.
WILLIAM: By the time Seddon made it to Parliament, gold was running thin, an economic depression had hit and many Pākehā feared competition from Chinese people for jobs and business - especially as Chinese people left the goldfields to set up shops and market gardens.
Unashamedly Anti-Chinese groups such as the Anti-Chinese Association and the Anti-Asiatic League grew up.
MĀNI: Many Pākehā opposed such prejudice, but in 1881 parliament had the numbers to pass the Chinese Immigrants Act. It required Chinese migrants to pay a 10 pound poll tax and ships could only carry one Chinese person per 10 tonnes of cargo.
WILLIAM: In 1896 those barriers were raised to one Chinese person per 200 tonnes and a 100 pound tax ... 20 thousand dollars in today's money.
MĀNI: More were soon added. Chinese alone were banned from becoming British citizens and required to pass English language tests before entering the country.
WILLIAM: These policies formed the bones of what became known as a “White New Zealand Policy”.
It was outlined bluntly by Prime Minister William Massey in 1921 when he spoke out against Chinese migration, saying:
“Nature intended New Zealand to be a white man's country, and it must be kept as such”
The Chinese poll tax was only removed in 1944, with Deputy Prime Minister Walter Nash calling it ‘a blot on our legislation'. The New Zealand government officially apologised for it in 2002.
But stigma against Chinese people as “outsiders” is still a in Aotearoa. As Race Relations commissioner Meng Foon wrote in 2020…
“Despite being in Aotearoa for more than 150 years, Chinese continue to be racially profiled as “perpetual migrants”.”
MĀNI: The last major hunt for gold happened in Te Tara-o-te-Ika a Māui, the Coromandel peninsula. Coromandel had been a focus for gold prospectors on and off since the 1850s. But the hype never really paid out.
As one visitor from the West Coast wrote... ‘There are some very good claims, but where there is one good claim there are fifty that never see a speck.’
WILLIAM: Frustrated diggers often assumed the next valley over must be full of gold. If only local Māori would let them look!
MĀNI: But Marutūahu, the confederated tribes of Coromandel, were reluctant to open up more land to diggers.
Even when individual Māori consented, the wider hapū didn’t always accept that decision.
Like, in early 1867, Mere Kuru Te Kati, a rangatira of Ngāti Tamaterā led about 20 other women to drive Pākehā surveyors out of Ohinemuri.
She also threatened to throw the Māori man who sold the land into the river.
WILLIAM: The government stepped in. In 1870 the Native Minister, Donald MacLean, urged rangatira to allow gold extraction in Ohinemuri, saying:
“What good do you derive from the gold underground, which neither you nor your ancestors ever dreamed of? Let your relatives derive benefit from the treasures which lie [hidden] in their land.”
But a high ranking chief, Te Hira Te Tuiri, the brother of Mere Kuru Te Kati still refused, saying:
“There is evil in Hauraki … Of what is the use of the land after it is broken? When the land is broken, the owner perishes.”
MĀNI: Eventually the government had its way, and the Coromandel was opened up to mining.
It turned out there was plenty of gold, but virtually all of it was locked up in rock, and could only be extracted using massive stamping batteries.
That made mining settlements in what's now Thames pretty unpleasant. As Stevan Eldred-Grigg notes:
“The field was deafening … 693 stampers were pounding away ... The rock was crushed around the clock, night and day. Smokestacks belched black soot into the sky.”
WILLIAM: This heavy equipment was expensive, which meant Coromandel mining was quickly dominated by corporations rather than plucky individuals or informal partnerships.
MĀNI: Increasingly, gold diggers gave up on looking for gold themselves, and many worked for these companies for wages.
WILLIAM: But they didn’t lose the pioneers’ bolshy attitude.
Miners played a central role in the early labour movement. They formed some of our first unions and participated in some of the most famous strikes - like the 1908 Blackball coal miners strike, and the 1912 Waihi gold miners strike.
MĀNI: The Waihi dispute lasted 8 months and became increasingly violent.
Armed non-union workers, police and strikers fought at the Miner’s Hall, leaving unionist Fred Evans dead…
WILLIAM: By the late 19th century the New Zealand Gold Rush was over, but it utterly transformed Aotearoa.
In just a couple of decades, it helped turn what had been a small, isolated colony of the British Empire into a relatively large and prosperous one.
MĀNI: Many of Dunedin’s oldest and grandest buildings were built with money from the gold rush. Mining is still a big part of the Otago, West Coast and Coromandel economies.
WILLIAM: Politically, those hordes of rowdy diggers helped shift the balance of power away from the aristocratic sheep barons towards the working class - solidifying some of the egalitarian ideals in New Zealand’s national identity.
MĀNI: They also changed the physical landscape. You can still see the scars left from gold digging all over the South Island… huge tracts of shingle tailings dumped by gold dredges on the West Coast … the ruins of old Chinese miners huts in Arrowtown... and massive stamping batteries in the Coromandel.
WILLIAM: And many Pākehā can trace their first ancestors to those thousands who came here in that wild hunt for gold, including me.
MĀNI: Thanks so much for watching our show.
