Saddle Hill: Beyond Dunedin’s Disgusting Malodorous Effluvia and Pestilence of Blowflies. (2024)

Previously: But the Thief, Complete with Door, Outran Him and Disappeared into the Raggedy Ranges.

In these posts, I tell of two of my ancestors who, in 1861, arrived in Aotearoa New Zealand. My Irish great-great-grandmother Maria Dillon landed in January, just a few months before the gold rush that would utterly transform Dunedin and the province of Otago. My great-grandfather, the Scotsman Archie Sligo, was among the flood of hopeful diggers who disembarked in October of that year.

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I wanted to learn more about the forces that propelled them from their homelands, what attracted them to their new country, what happened here shortly before they arrived, and what they encountered as they set about making new lives for themselves.

This post reports on Jessie’s arrival in Otago, Dunedin’s hazards to health, the jack-of-all-trades lifestyle and mindset, extreme goldfield winters of 1862 and 1863, flood deaths and disasters, evolution of mining practices, and Otago’s wastelands caused by mining.

These posts reveal part of Maria’s and Archie’s stories.

In April 1862, the seventh year of Jessie and Archie’s marriage, the rest of Archie’s family were four among the 151 passengers on the voyage of the Eureka from Hobson’s Bay, Victoria, disembarking at Port Chalmers on the 29th. It was nearly seven months since Archie had seen them; it had taken this extent of time for these parents to assure themselves that they were justified in exposing their children to this land’s rigours.

With Jessie were their children Alexander, aged four, Willie, three, and James, now four months old, born 14 December 1861 in Ballarat in Archie’s absence. As the Eureka made its way up the Otago Harbour, if Jessie had had a moment from trying to keep her three active and excited infants in check, she might have felt she had come home. Even on the Philip Laing in 1848, it had been remarked how “many of our Highlanders, and most of our cabin passengers who had seen it, exclaimed ‘How like this is to the scenery of the Trossachs and Loch Katrine’.”[1]

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Otago Harbour. Photographer Dushan Jugum, 2015, cropped. Otago Harbour

One visitor from Scotland later remarked on how

[t]he high mountains locking in the harbour were decidedly Scottish in character, and had the fresh greenness, the bright look of home-country scenery. Everything was redolent on Scotland. The waves seemed to ripple tartan, the wind to moan with a Scottish accent.

At about the same time, another migrant said

[t]he scenery is simply Grand, the display is not unlike what one would see off the steamers decks on Loch Caterine, Scotland. Rugged hills covered with Rock and bush hover up on either side of the ship.[2]

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Sailing Ship Alcestis Run Aground, Probably in Otago Harbour, 1880s. Photographer David De Maus. De Maus Collection, National Library of New Zealand. Sailing Ship Alcestis

Along with its bracing climate, the newcomers encountered a more austere culture in Dunedin. In an 1861 article in the Melbourne Argus, Wheeler expressed how remarkable it was for the town’s citizens to be “almost wholly composed of the inhabitants of certain counties in Scotland”. In his view, “local customs, habits, rules of faith, and modes of religious observance, were rigidly adhered to throughout the settlement, much local jealousy being indulged in”.[3]

Jessie and Archie had married in the Presbyterian Free Church Manse in Melbourne but would find the local Presbyterians to be of sterner disposition. As outlined in earlier posts, the Free Church of Scotland adherents to whom Wheeler referred had sought a colonial asylum far from the disturbances within the reformed U.K. churches. For them, Dunedin was to be a pure and secluded place, devoted to their own style of worship, a haven where they could practise their beliefs in peace. Yet while more liberally minded Presbyterians’ advent in the town was initially confronting and perturbing, the severest Calvinist dictates gradually softened.

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Dunedin from Little Paisley, 1849. Artist Edward Immyns Abbot. Hocken Collections. Dunedin from Little Paisley

The town’s Scottish character and its predominant religion would seem welcoming to migrants from Scotland as the century progressed, with Presbyterian values and beliefs firmly enduring in the province.[4] The Scots comprised over twenty per cent of migration to New Zealand up to the century’s end. In addition, since Presbyterians constituted twenty-five per cent of the country’s religious membership by 1901, second-placed to Anglicans, Aotearoa emerged as one of the most Protestant British colonies.[5]

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Dunedin, circa 1856. From the C.A. Ewen Collection, State Library of New South Wales. Dunedin

Sickness and Health

On first seeing Dunedin, Jessie was worried by its squalor, and the threat to the lives of her three surviving children was fully evident to her. She felt she had experienced too much infant mortality first-hand due to woeful sanitation back home and then during her years on the Victorian goldfields. In Glasgow, Jessie had been alarmed at the inexorably rising death toll from the poorly understood illnesses of cholera, consumption (tuberculosis), diarrhoea and whooping cough.[6] In Scotland and Victoria, she had seen numerous infants die, including her first child Archie, with her friends mourning the deaths of too many newly born.

Jessie and Archie soon decided they had little incentive to settle in Dunedin. The town lacked any system to remove sewage or litter, residents threw rubbish onto the paths outside their shacks, and stagnant pools of animal and human excrement bordered the town’s winding lanes.

People thought nothing of gutting fish in the streets, and rat-infested rubbish dumps were the norm. Many Scots believed that this life’s difficulties and miseries should be endured stoically and, indeed, were justified as a necessary penance if you hoped for heavenly salvation.[7] Those suffering understood their first responsibility was to personally examine their conscience to ascertain what they may have done wrong to justify divine punishment.[8]

No council ordinances required industries, such as the breweries that were getting underway, to dispose of their refuse in any planned manner. Hence, industrial waste was thrown haphazardly into the many stagnant tracts of swamp while squalid pools of filth disfigured the town.

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Dunedin From Canongate, 1862, by William Meluish. Te Papa (O.001571) Dunedin From Canongate

Especially at risk was the lower portion of the town immediately alongside an expansive marsh. Seven formerly pristine streams wended their way down the hills but now discharged putrefaction into the wetlands. Given the absence of safer sources, most householders obtained drinking water from these streams. Particularly in the summer, the marshy lagoon became a breeding ground for infectious and contagious diseases: typhus, scarlet fever, diphtheria, and infantile dysentery, resulting in a mortality rate among children exceeding England’s. Throughout the town, a pestilence of blowflies burgeoned amid the muck, swarming upon any exposed food, assailing children, women, and men alike.[9]

It was also apparent to Jessie that there were no effective building regulations. Random jerry-built hovels, bizarrely constructed boarding establishments, and tents jammed up against one another. Across Dunedin’s steep hills, all manner of dwellings were shoved into whatever tight space they might fit, even spanning the polluted streams and ponds and meandering into what were supposed to be public reserves.[10]

Scarlet fever, then known as scarlatina, was contracted via poor sanitation. From 1862 to 1864, a prolonged scarlet fever epidemic caused many deaths. Today, the disease is readily treated with antibiotics, but then there was no reliable cure. Typically, this illness needed a very long convalescence, often for several months. Some were aware that the disease was associated with deficient sanitation and made strenuous efforts to prevent its spread by undertaking such hygiene as they could devise. Normally, this included burning the afflicted’s personal effects, such as their clothes.

However, such knowledge was not universal, for about this time, the Dunedin sanitary inspector commented on the high local mortality rate. He detailed “an almost utter disregard of cleanliness exhibited by hundreds throughout the city, inside or outside their dwellings”. “Much is required to be done by the inhabitants themselves”, he complained.[11]

Nor could improvements be delayed, as poor drainage, no adequate sewerage systems and lack of pure water caused endemic sickness. Dysentery and associated diseases were prevalent, and The Otago Daily Times referred to the “disgusting malodorous effluvia” in the streets, inviting pestilence to visit.

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Stafford Street, Dunedin, 1862, photographers Burton Brothers, William Meluish. Te Papa (O.000803) Stafford Street

The town had built a large hospital at the junction of the Octagon and Stewart St. Rudimentary in its resources, by early 1862, it was attempting to care for over 100 patients while a long waiting list sought admission. At the lower end of the property was a sprawling, foul-smelling cesspool. When the resident surgeon, Dr Yates, was asked about it, he agreed it was certainly a great nuisance and offensive to patients yet thought it unnecessary to have it removed.[12]

The town’s unsanitary conditions triggered a typhus epidemic, then the likelihood of typhoid fever. Even by 1867, little progress had been made in draining the foul-smelling swamps in the town and providing reliably clean water to the citizens. Consequently, substantial numbers still died from diseases such as scarlet fever, chronic diarrhoea, and typhoid fever.[13]

Maintaining a healthy and safe living environment for their families was crucial for the pioneer women. Their men were mostly elsewhere prospecting. Jessie had learned of typhus epidemics’ murderous effects from her upbringing in Glasgow and her experience on the Victorian goldfields. She well knew how a high standard of cleanliness and sanitation could ward off disease, understanding how stringent her sanitary arrangements had to be.

In her previous city life in Glasgow, facilities such as running water and sewerage systems had been mainly available, even if often unsafe and in basic form. Yet her seven years coping with the rudimentary conditions of the Victorian fields in Yan Yean, Ballarat, and Lethbridge had equipped Jessie with much-tested practical knowledge and capabilities.

However, this young woman in her mid-twenties faced immense challenges without other family members for support. Her role was to create a home in her new alien environment, with relatively few possessions, a husband mainly absent on the goldfields, and active little boys aged four and three, plus a four-month-old infant.

She resolved that she had not faced the perils of sailing the hazardous oceans as far from Scotland as you could go to see more of her children succumb and die from preventable diseases. Accordingly, she insisted that her family relocate beyond the town, escaping the worst risks to find a more secure environment.

Saddle Hill

Shortly after the family’s disembarking in 1862, Archie and Jessie made their home at Saddle Hill, outside Dunedin’s swampy miasma. The place was also known as Pukemamaku, the hill of the black tree ferns. Ngā tāngata pora, the European shipboard people, first called it Saddleback Hill, but Ngāi Tahu might have told them that the two substantial humps that to Europeans suggest a saddle are Pukemakamaka and Turimakamaka.[14] These are said to be the remains of a famous taniwha, the spirit guardian of a Ngāti Māmoe chief, and Saddle Hill was where the taniwha came to die after it had created Otago Harbour.[15]

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Saddle Hill/ Pukemakamaka-Turimakamaka, Otago. Photographer Benchill, 2009. Saddle Hill

As well as being safely removed from Dunedin’s open sewers, Saddle Hill’s other advantage was that it was en route to Central Otago’s burgeoning goldfields. Some indications are that Scottish new arrivals, such as Jessie and Archie, were open to learning from mana whenua about locally appropriate gardening practices. These included elevating seed potatoes in mounds above the ground at planting time and utilising fern-covered land in ways not employed back home.[16]

From Collingwood at the top of the South Island, in 1861, Elizabeth Curtis wrote invitingly to her sister how

[w]e have got a snug house of our own and a small piece of land ... it is like beginning the world anew. The children and me are getting a nice garden ... I am sure that you would like it better here than where you are.

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Mining Claim, Collingwood. Artist James Crowe Richmond, 1873. The Suter Art Gallery Te Aratoi o Whakatū. Mining Claim, Collingwood

Yet she had to pay the price for being without her husband’s support. He had been absent for over a year while he and his bullock team were labouring on the Central Otago diggings in the distant south: “When he once comes home it will be a long time before I let him go away again so far”.[17]

By early 1863, Archie and Jessie must have had some success and given a good report of their lives in Otago. On 7 March, Archie’s older brother, Alexander, left Melbourne on the Eli Whitney, his occupation listed as a miner. In Otago, Alex tried his luck on the goldfields but, like most others, did not win vast wealth. Fairly soon, he returned to his trade of bookbinder and stationer for seven years with Mr. A.R. Livingston. In 1871, Alex established his own business as a bookseller at 42 George St.

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Alexander Sligo account book. Photograph by the author.

A future post will report on Alex’s time as an M.P. for Dunedin in the country’s parliament of 1897 to 1899.

On 8 April 1864, Grace Anna, Jessie and Archie’s first daughter, named after Archie’s mother, Grace Skelly (or Skellie), was born at Saddle Hill. Up to that point, Archie’s primary focus had been exploring for gold, but on Grace’s birth certificate, his employment appears as a labourer. The national census asked citizens to state only one profession, meaning that it is often challenging to learn from nineteenth-century records how people earned their living. A trend was occurring towards greater specialisation in the U.K., so it was probably more accurate in that country to report someone’s line of work as falling within a single category.

However, in Aotearoa, it was far more common for people to work in multiple roles during that century. Except in recessionary periods, skilled workers were in demand, so labourer may have been just one of the positions that engaged Archie at the time. The trials of pioneer work taught migrants to develop capabilities across diverse fields, enabling them to find opportunities as they emerged.[18]

As described in earlier posts, the new arrivals were highly motivated by the prospect of winning independence. They had much respect for self-employment and relatively little esteem for those who occupied industrial capitalism’s pinnacle. Many, such as Archie, had left home to escape large-scale urban capitalism and the constraints of minimally paid manufacturing businesses. They sought out opportunities and focused more on getting on than looking back.[19]

When self-employed, the Scottish and other migrants shunned too narrow a category of work, instead developing assorted skills, becoming adept at many varied activities on their property and in the growing townships. They cultivated extensive gardens for growing vegetables and fruit, and also, as noted, both women and men built a broad spectrum of capabilities. Since the early settlements’ retail establishments were few and far apart, you either made, repaired, or did without.[20]

Towards the end of the 1860s, many former full-time miners became part-time diggers, especially during the warmer months. They might take up allotments of around 15 hectares, first leased, later bought as freehold. They could graze horses, cattle, or sheep on commonly held land by purchasing a miner’s right. Frequently, they grew crops, helped neighbours with harvests, shore sheep, made themselves available for wage work, or set up as contractors.[21]

Many assembled a comprehensive skill base, including stonework, roadbuilding, engineering, or carpentry, having needed to be jacks-of-all-trades as they made what usually had been a challenging transition into a digger’s life. A jack-of-all-trades mindset, the number-eight-wire mentality, and some suspicion of those claiming expert status still hold their place in the national psyche, even though specialist expertise has become inevitable and predominant within a twenty-first-century economy.

A previous post reported how young Scotswomen’s decisions about whether or not to venture to the colonies were strongly influenced by insights from those who had already departed. Hence, during the 1860s and 1870s, Jessie’s knowledge about life in Otago was to be eagerly sought by friends and family back home. Jessie’s perspective was valuable since she had learned how to survive in Victoria and Otago, understanding both colonies’ desirable and less advantageous aspects.

Goldfield Winters

But the Otago winter in 1862 was unusually frigid, so the family, accustomed to the more temperate Victorian climate and possibly initially living in a tent, would have been shocked at the severity of their new environment.[22] One miner said:

Tent life was miserable … the temperature went down to Arctic coldness. Boots and clothes were frozen like boards overnight, and had to be taken under the blankets and thawed in the morning … the only alternatives were work or bed. Saturday evening was sometimes spent at a public house, cowering for warmth over a stove burning lignite with a sulphurous stench.[23]

The 1862 winter was so severe that the nearby Lake Waihola was wholly frozen. Skaters could traverse three miles of ice, an extent of sustained cold not known since.[24] That winter, Archie and Jessie’s first in New Zealand, brought extreme weather conditions that probably few migrants had encountered before in Victoria or California.[25]

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Lake Waihola, South Otago. Photographer TimGrin, 2004. Lake Waihola

Yet Central Otago’s following winter in 1863 was more brutal again. In July that year, after a deceptively dry summer, unprecedentedly heavy rain fell without a break for six days, releasing the snow from the hills above. Even diminutive creeks became menacing floods, and every hillside and river terrace poured avalanches of mud and water into the streambeds.

One night, the Clutha River rose by seven metres and the Shotover by amounts estimated at nine to eleven metres. A confused mass of rudely constructed huts, tents, gold cradles, tools and diggers’ gold stashes tumbled into the seething torrents. Uprooted trees crashed downhill, demolishing the miners’ river reworkings. A massive Arrow River dam collapsed, tearing apart even terraces far above the flood mark, chewing out their gravel footings and dispatching densely packed huts and tents into the turbulent waters.[26]

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Arrow River, January 2010. Photograph by the author.

Numerous flimsy shelters in the Arrow River gorge, including eight huts from just one river beach, collapsed and vanished into the violent flume. On the Shotover at three a.m., men sleeping at a level they thought was safe were swept away, never to be seen again. The Dunstan township’s correspondent for the Otago Witness guessed that about 100 diggers died that night.[27]

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Shotover River, Otago. Photographer Bernard Spragg, 2014. Shotover River

Fresh adversity befell the miners that winter as heavy snow immediately followed the rains, lying two metres deep in many places. Very few diggers had proper clothing or equipment to shelter them from the glacial blasts that swept down from the alpine heights and into the narrow gorges. Men and women suffered frostbite and semi-starvation, and since some hundreds were trapped, unable to escape their high-altitude refuges, many fell ill with scurvy and other diseases as their food ran out. For years later, in remote places, skeletons were found of those who had decided that death on their feet was preferable to death sitting down and resolved to force a passage through the blizzard.[28]

In the 1862 and 1863 winters, Otago’s Kawarau and Clutha rivers featured abrupt rises in water levels following heavy rain or snow thaws in the mountains above. The miners could do nothing but watch as surging water levels undid in just a few hours all their previous days’ and weeks’ labours. Their newly exposed gold reefs and crevices through which they accessed the gold were suddenly swamped with deposits of gravel and silt metres deep. Many gold cradles, tents, and wood-framed calico huts were smashed and swept away.

Especially in the unprecedented floods of 1863, 1878 and 1893, many diggers also lost personal gear such as mining equipment, clothing, food supplies and stores of painfully won gold. In those years, an unknown number of lives were squandered as the torrents swept into the makeshift tunnels and caves that men had dug into the riverbanks.[29]

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Lake Wakatipu. Photographer Bernard Spragg, 2018. Lake Wakatipu

The year 1878 was to break all records as early spring rains alternated abruptly with heavy snow. Central Otago rivers swamped lower-lying settlements, floodwaters ascending to unparalleled heights in late September. Arrowtown’s main street went underwater, while in Queenstown, Lake Wakatipu rose until two metres of water inundated the Eichardt Hotel.

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Alexandra Bridge, photographers Burton Brothers. Te Papa (O.030059) Alexandra Bridge

The torrents demolished all bridges between Queenstown and Arrowtown. Once the floodwaters reached the middle of the Roxburgh bridge, its central structure broke and sailed off “most majestically”, as one observer put it.[30]

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Roxburgh Bridge, Otago, 1905, photographers Muir & Moodie. Te Papa (PS.001546) Roxburgh Bridge

People in the Landscape

Panning with a metal dish was both back-breakingly hard work and inefficient in its inability to capture a high proportion of the available gold. However, should that remote river bend on which you were prospecting yield signs of colour, you could employ more systematic and efficient ways to win the precious metal.

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Panning For Gold, Mulgrave River, Queensland, circa 1888. Photographer unknown. State Library of Queensland. Panning For Gold

The first alluvial claims in Otago were allocated at 24 feet square, later 30 feet square. These were tiny allotments with uncertain outcomes for getting gold, frequently causing disputes among adjoining claimholders.[31] For example, in such restricted individual areas, the miners found it very difficult to find anywhere to deposit their tailings, the dross from which they had extracted gold. Under that detritus you had just dumped might be gold-bearing soil.

By 1866, miners’ protests had resulted in allocations of 100 feet square. Once they had claimed their site, the diggers quarried gold-bearing “dirt”, as it was known, typically river gravel, from the pits they sank into their allotments, hauling dirt buckets from below via an arrangement of mānuka poles and counterweights. They poured the gravel into wooden sluice boxes or cradles, the bases lined with thick matting, sacking cloth, or other material that might be available. Miners used a cradle to separate gold from dross with a sideways rocking action and a little river water. Heavier than any other metal, gold always worked down to the bottom.[32]

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Digger Using a Gold Cradle. Artist Henry Sandham. From The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, January 1883. Digger Using a Gold Cradle

Even as the alluvial gold slowly played out, the volume of gold won throughout Otago remained constant by the technological advances that the miners invented and adapted. The next stage in gold-winning technology was the sluice box, an artificial conduit lined with gold-catching riffles and matting. The diggers channelled water from wooden causeways, propelling lighter materials like sand and gravels from the box but leaving heavier materials such as gold in the riffles.[33]

Such devices radically boosted productivity. While an experienced digger using a pan might expect to work through about one cubic yard of gravel daily, the sluice box permitted the same quantity to be processed in just an hour. A larger and more advanced variant of a sluice box was the long tom, a device handled typically by miners who had become more specialised in their work, some removing rocks and others maintaining a sufficient water flow.

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Gold Sluicing, Dillman Town, West Coast NZ, circa 1880s. Photographer James Ring. NZ National Library. Gold Sluicing

By 1862, the Otago diggers realised that using pick and shovel was an extremely laborious way to find gold deposits. When mining in the Bendigo and Ballarat goldfields in Victoria, Archie had seldom seen anyone sluicing for gold since the state’s rolling hills were not appropriate for this method of extracting gold. However, those who had learned their trade in the 1849 Californian gold rush had seen how impressive was the power of water in tearing open hills to uncover their gold.

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Water Race at a Gold Mine, Round Hill, Southland. Photographer William Williams, 1900. NZ National Library. Water Race

In Otago, the miners formed syndicates to dam rivers and streams high in the hills, diverting them into wood and stone water races, painstakingly excavated for miles across the landscape to channel water from the swift-flowing waterways to the gold-mining sites. All dug by pick and shovel, wending their way around steep bluffs and through Central Otago’s sharply undulating topography, they demanded immense labour to construct and maintain. From these races’ remains, it is still evident that “many show an uncanny engineering skill and an eye for the levels that would be the envy of many qualified civil engineers”.[34]

The water was thus forced into iron pipes and then canvas hoses, enabling jets to be fired at enormous pressure into gravel terraces and blow them apart. The water jet’s extraordinary power was enough to kill a person, but incautious diggers not uncommonly were buried when terraces collapsed.[35]

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Sluicing for Gold at Round Hill, Southland, 1900. Photographer William Williams, NZ National Library. Sluicing for Gold

Hydraulic mining that enabled diggers to find troves of gold was part of the first transition from individuals or small gangs, poor man’s mining, to large-scale syndicates. Sometimes, this was called rich man’s mining and was increasingly needed as the easily found alluvial gold petered out, improving efficiency and productivity. Yet, gold remained for more systematic and highly organised teams, especially Chinese, who followed in the Europeans’ footsteps, to obtain in later years.

On the debit side, the miners’ relentless reworking of the landscape disfigured tracts of ground. Even to the present, ugly, unproductive scars can be seen across thousands of hectares. Land that could have been generating valuable harvests resembles a wasteland of rocks and stones, growing little besides broom, blackberry, gorse, and sweetbrier, planted by colonists as an ornamental rose and source of vitamins to fight scurvy, now running unchecked.

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Blue Lake near St Bathans, Central Otago. Photographer Sam Genas, 2012. Blue Lake

Kilometres of dredging tailings are seen along Otago rivers, while adjacent unscathed banks reveal the successful cultivation of orchards and vineyards.[36] The miners could see how they had impacted the earth by delving into and recasting its terrain.

People radically reshaped the land, but in turn, it changed them. Many diggers were well familiar with the Old Testament, and Central Otago’s intense light, starkness and aridity recalled what they had read of the Holy Land’s deserts, where humankind’s paltry schemes are meaningless in the purpose of an all-powerful Jehovah. The region, with its desolate “golden ochres and blacks and browns, and strange rocks sculpted by wind and rain across the centuries, has claimed the spirit of many and the passing affections of most”.[37]

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Cromwell Gorge, Central Otago. Photographer AnnWoolliams, 2022. Cromwell Gorge

Coming up in future posts:

“Well, No”, Countered the Digger, “But I’ll Give You Sixpence if You Polish Me Boots”.

A Burden Almost Too Grievous to be Borne and Making Shipwreck of Their Virtue.

The Irish Spiritual Empire, a Cycle of Sectarian Epilepsy, and a Certain Fat Old German Woman.

Better at the Language Than Those Who Owned It and Equally Determined to be Both Themselves and to Conform, Fit In.

I Found It a Matter of No Small Difficulty to Collect the Bills Due by Females Who Have Been Assisted to the Colony.

Her Skirt Would Stand up Straight By Itself and Have to be Thawed Out.

His Wife Burst into Tears, Saying She Had Already Mortgaged Their Home so She Could Pay for Her Own Dredge Speculations.

An Irresistible Feeling of Solitude Overcame Me. There Was No Sound: Just a Depressing Silence.

Norman Conceded in His Mind that the Boomerang Would Crash Home Before He Could Snatch Out His Revolver.

The Sin of Cheapness: There Are Very Great Evils in Connection with the Dressmaking And Millinery Establishments.

The Poll Tax: One of the Most Mean, Most Paltry, and Most Scurvy Little Measures Ever Introduced.

Holy Wells: We are Order and Disorder.

After Some Debate, They Agreed That Killing the Priest Would Probably Bring Bad Luck.

God is Good and the Devil’s Not Bad Either, Thank God.

Dunedin’s Journalists, 1860s: Vapid Editorial Storks Who Can Scarce Write a Grammatical Sentence and are Singularly Devoid of Any Sort of Literary Talent.

Notes

[1] Bueltmann, Scottish ethnicity and the making of New Zealand society, p. 60.

[2] McCarthy, Scottishness and Irishness, p. 176.

[3] The New Zealand goldfields, 1861, p. 19.

[4] Davidson & Lineham, Transplanted Christianity, p. 90.

[5] Patterson et al., Unpacking the kists, p. 20.

[6] Devine, The Scottish nation, a modern history, pp. 334ff.

[7] Devine, The Scottish nation, a modern history, p. 372.

[8] Devine, The Scottish clearances, p. 304.

[9] Olssen, A history of Otago, p. 83; McLintock, The history of Otago, p. 474; Wood, Victorian New Zealanders, p. 5.

[10] McLintock, The history of Otago, pp. 473-475.

[11] Reed, Annals of early Dunedin, p. 76.

[12] ‘The Dunedin hospital’. Otago Witness, 18 October 1862, p. 3.

[13] Reed, Annals of early Dunedin, pp. 19, 97.

[14] Griffiths & Goodall, Māori Dunedin, p. 49.

[15] Pybus, The Māoris of the South Island, p. 33.

[16] Brooking, ‘Weaving the tartan into the flax’, pp. 194, 202.

[17] Simpson, The immigrants, p. 145.

[18] Lenihan, From Alba to Aotearoa, p. 120.

[19] Brooking, ‘Weaving the tartan into the flax’, p. 184.

[20] Phillips & Hearn, Settlers, p. 190.

[21] Eldred-Grigg, Diggers, hatters & whor*s, p. 189.

[22] Salmon, A history of goldmining in New Zealand.

[23] Wood, Gold trails of Otago, p. 17.

[24] Gilkison, Early days in Central Otago, p. 27.

[25] Davy, Gold rush societies and migrant networks in the Tasman world, pp. 9-10.

[26] Gilkison, Early days in Central Otago, pp. 52, 53.

[27] Murray, Costly gold, pp. 30, 31.

[28] Murray, Costly gold, p. 31.

[29] Murray, Costly gold, pp 5, 6.

[30] Murray, Costly gold, p. 32.

[31] Wood, Gold trails of Otago, p. 7.

[32] Salmon, A history of goldmining in New Zealand, p. 19.

[33] Ell, Gold rush, p. 59.

[34] Sinclair, Kawarau gold, p. 13.

[35] Eldred-Grigg, Diggers, hatters & whor*s, p. 186.

[36] Murray, Costly gold, p. 82.

[37] Field & Olssen, Relics of the goldfields, p. 74.

References

Brooking, T. (2006). ‘Weaving the tartan into the flax: Networks, identities, and Scottish migration to nineteenth-century Otago, New Zealand’. In A global clan: Scottish migrant networks and identities since the eighteenth century. A. McCarthy (Ed.). Tauris Academic Studies, pp. 183-202.

Bueltmann, T. (2011). Scottish ethnicity and the making of New Zealand society, 1850-1930. Edinburgh University Press.

Davidson, A.K. & Lineham, P.J. (1995). Transplanted Christianity: Documents illustrating aspects of New Zealand church history, 3rd. ed. Department of History, Massey University.

Davy, D. (2021). Gold rush societies and migrant networks in the Tasman world. Edinburgh University Press.

Devine, T.M. (2012). The Scottish nation: A modern history. Penguin Books.

Devine, T.M. (2019). The Scottish clearances: A history of the dispossessed. Penguin Books.

‘The Dunedin hospital’. Otago Witness, 18 October 1862, p. 3.

Eldred-Grigg, S. (2008). Diggers, hatters & whor*s: The story of the New Zealand gold rushes. Random House New Zealand.

Ell, G. (1995). Gold rush: Tales and traditions of the New Zealand goldfields. The Bush Press.

Field, T. & Olssen, E. (1976). Relics of the goldfields: Central Otago. John McIndoe.

Gilkison, R. (1958). Early days in Central Otago. 3rd ed. Whitcombe & Tombs.

Griffiths, G. & Goodall, M. (1980). Māori Dunedin. Otago Heritage Books.

McCarthy, A. (2011). Scottishness and Irishness in New Zealand since 1840. Manchester University Press.

McLintock, A.H. (1949). The history of Otago: The origins and growth of a Wakefield class settlement. Whitcomb & Tombs.

Murray, J.S. & R.W. (1977). Costly gold: Clutha riches and their human toll. A.H. & A.W. Reed.

The New Zealand goldfields, 1861: A series of letters reprinted from the Melbourne Argus. (1976). Victorian New Zealand - A Reprint Series No. 1. R.P. Hargreaves & T.J. Hearn (Eds.). Hocken Library.

Olssen, E. (1984). A history of Otago. John McIndoe.

Patterson, B., Brooking, T. & McAloon, J. with Lenihan, R. & Bueltmann, T. (2013). Unpacking the kists: The Scots in New Zealand. McGill-Queen’s University Press & Otago University Press.

Phillips, J. & Hearn, T. (2008). Settlers: New Zealand immigrants from England, Ireland and Scotland, 1800 to 1945. Auckland University Press.

Pybus, T.A. (1954/ 2002). The Maoris of the South Island. Reed/ Cadsonbury.

Reed, A.H. (1973). Annals of early Dunedin: Chronicles of the eighteen-sixties. A.H. & A.W. Reed.

Salmon, J.H.M. (1963). A history of goldmining in New Zealand. Government Printer.

Simpson, T. (1997). The immigrants: The great migration from Britain to New Zealand, 1830 - 1890. Godwit Publishing.

Sinclair, R.S.M. (1962). Kawarau gold. Whitcombe & Tombs.

Wood, J.A. (1971). Gold trails of Otago. Wellington: A.H. & A.W. Reed.

Wood, J.A. (1974). Victorian New Zealanders. A.H. & A.W. Reed.

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