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. Now you can read their story in a new virtual comic book.

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.

Tasmanian Gabriel Read claimed a £1,000 reward when he found gold ‘shining like the stars in Orion on a dark, frosty night’ near the Tuapeka River.

New Zealand’s heaviest recorded nugget was found at Ross on the West Coast. Weighing 2.81 kg, the nugget was named the 'Honourable Roddy' after the Minister of Mines, Roderick McKenzie.

Gold miners from Victoria flooded to Otago during the gold rush era

Virtual comic book telling the story of the Maungatapu murders committed by the Burgess gang in 1866

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.