A history of Blackball - Gold rushes in British Colonies. 1851- 56.

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DescriptionThe 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. Europe was also 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, too, began to be counted by the thousand on what they called New Gold Mountain.
New Zealand newspapers were in the words of one editor ‘bespattered’ with the word ‘gold.’ Māori bought tickets for Victoria. 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.
The colonial gentry looked on with dismay. A landowner wrote worriedly about ‘the gold rage’ that had ‘seized on the people’ of Nelson. ‘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.’ The rich landholders 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. A gold rush, wrote one, brought about ‘complete revolution’ in society. Workers became ‘unsettled’ and ‘wandering.’
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.
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 while a surveyor in 1843 picked up a nugget in the bed of the Aorere River in the province of Nelson. Gold rushes happen, though, 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. They were out of luck. The royal metal of Hauraki was not easily washed out of sand or shingle, for it was locked up in quartz. 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 good troves in the shingle beds of Golden Bay. The rush to that bay would bring crowds of diggers into the province that owned the western bank of the Māwheranui.
And after eight years some of those goldseekers would be rushing to Blackball.
Pic: a young man washing for gold, Victoria; artist S.T. GillDate of Photo1851 - 1856Map^[1]ContributorStevan Eldred-Grigg

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Location (city or town)Blackball

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Category TagGoldmining

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Date Created9th March 2021

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A history of Blackball - Gold rushes in British Colonies. 1851- 56.

Editing is temporarily disabled