Pages tagged with: waiuta

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.

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.

A signature on letter written by Joseph Divis in 1957, when he was one of the few remaining occupants of Waiuta

A letter posted to Joseph Divis from Czechoslovakia in 1920.

Divis stands outside his cottage at Waiuta, which proved to be his last home.

The house occupied by Joseph Divis in his later years was one of the few buildings still occupied in Waiuta in 2008.

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.