Pages tagged with: goldfields

Today Waiuta is a West Coast ghost town. But from 1906 to 1951 it was the company town for the South Island's largest gold mine and home to 600 people. The superb photographs of Czech immigrant Joseph Divis provide a fascinating glimpse of Waiuta in its heyday.

The 'Burgess gang' murdered and thieved their way around the South Island during the 1860s. Their most notorious crime was five killings over two days in June 1866, on the Maungatapu track near Nelson.

Richard Burgess, the gang's ringleader, originally known as Richard Hill, had been transported from London to Melbourne for theft at the age of 16, arriving in 1847

For a few short months the Burgess gang embarked upon a crime spree along the west coast of the South Island that would culminate in the murder of five men on the Maungatapu Track.

A small prospecting group discovered a gold-bearing quartz reef in the upper reaches of Blackwater Creek, a tributary of the Grey River, on 9 November 1905. 

As more houses were built, Waiuta started to look less like a mining camp. It always had the appearance, though, of a frontier town dominated by wood and corrugated iron.

The outbreak of the Second World War led to a gradual decline in the number of miners.

Waiuta in 2008 – a view over part of the historic reserve.

The 1931 Waiuta jubilee celebrations had an extended prelude in the form of a Queen Carnival, with local organisations competing to see which could raise the most money and have their queen crowned on the big day

Whether they came from along the road or far away, everybody attending Waiuta’s 1931 jubilee strictly observed the dress code of the day.

The 1931 jubilee, marking 25 years since mining and settlement had begun, was the greatest event in Waiuta's history.

All done up in their best, the Jones children (Betty, Jim, Bill, Amy, Myrtle, Ron on the trike, Irene and Joyce) would have been a delight to any Mum's eye.

Even in a town where every celebration was done with style, the 1931 wedding reception for Laura Beckwith and Ernest Wallenburg rated as lavish.

There was style from head to foot in Waiuta's well-equipped barbershop, where the decor included a Divis print of a local social event.

Harry Gardner named his alluvial gold claim the ‘Sons of Freedom’, but enlisted two of his daughters to help work it.

With three classrooms and a ‘murder house’ (dental room), Waiuta School was as well equipped as any in the country during the 1930s.

These Waiuta miners outside their union hall look cheerful enough, considering they were in the process of voting to strike.

As somebody brought up not far from the Austrian Alps, Divis would have felt quite at home in conditions like this.

Joseph Divis did not need to move far from home for this study, dominated by the Blackwater mine poppet head and chimney.

Just as Divis' camera technique captured the ‘Dark Satanic Mill’ atmosphere of the Snowy battery, his mode of dress in this shot could be said to have enhanced it.

The largest room in the battery building held the stampers, seen here at the top end, where camshafts lifted and dropped the heavy stamp rods.

In the Snowy River valley south of Waiuta, quartz was pounded to powder by heavy stamps and the gold was saved through various processes.

The aerial ropeway carrying quartz from the new Prohibition  was a brief feature of the Waiuta landscape, but Divis documented it thoroughly

Waiuta miners prepare to start their shift in the mine, some stocked with fuse wire and candles.

Mine manager Tas Hogg surveying in the mine at Waiuta

‘Crib time’ in a mine drive in 1934, where the sandwiches were washed down with tea, pre-heated by hanging the enamel flask over a candle on one of the roof supports.

The undoubted star of the show is the gold-bearing quartz reef, which did not need the added illumination of the candle at the centre to make it gleam.

On the job in the Blackwater Mine with Bill Houghton and a pneumatic drill.

Joseph Divis and a companion overlooking the headworks for the Blackwater mine at Waiuta

Joseph Divis in his characteristic safari suit, with the Blackwater mine poppet head and the prominent mullock (waste) heap.