Digging around for answers

The Central Otago landscape is littered with gold-mining relics, from eroded sluicings and neat stacks of stones to old water races and cottages. But what was life like on the goldfields and why did so many men swag up and tramp into the unknown back country during the gold rushes of the 1860s? Charmian Smith talks to Stevan Eldred-Grigg, author of Diggers Hatters and Whores: The Story of the New Zealand Gold Rushes.

Stevan Eldred-Grigg felt as if he heard hundreds of people speaking from the past, and saw throngs of people moving across wild landscapes when he was researching and writing his latest book about the New Zealand gold rushes.

A novelist as well a historian, Eldred-Grigg says. he wanted to show what it was like for people on the goldfields, as well as to analyse some of the reasons they went, and to look at the social issues of the time.

The book quotes from diaries, letters, newspaper reports and other contemporary writings.

One of Eldred-Grigg's favourite images is of a portly tradesman from Nelson toiling towards the Wakamarina field, leaning exhausted on a tree in the wilderness and asking where he could get a cup of tea.

While people from all walks of life went digging for gold, those who did best were used to physical work, but also had some technical skills and a little capital to buy equipment and supplies and to travel to the goldfields, he says.

Most hoped to make a nest-egg to enable them to return home and buy a farm or business and become a "free man".

What Eldred-Grigg found was that miners, except for the odd loner known as a "hatter", worked in groups, usually with a "pard" or partner, who might end up being a sexual partner as well as a working partner.

Small groups of diggers would join forces to build water races or other large works, then each group would use the water to do its own washing for gold.

"This was another thing that made me aware that an ordinary labourer didn't usually have the technical skills - he had the strength, was able to work long hours out of doors in all weathers, but he usually didn't have that extra layer of technical knowhow that a more skilled worker or a sailor might have.

"Sailors were very good at scanning the horizon and working out falls, so they did very well on goldfields. Very few professional engineers were working on the goldfields in that capacity during that early alluvial mining phase."

Life was hard, winters cold, summers hot and starvation was never far away.

With a diet of damper, tea and mutton, usually stolen from the sheep runs of the "wool lords", and little in the way of vegetables or fruit, healthy young men would become wasted and wan after a year or two on the diggings.

"It was even grimmer on the West Coast because few people knew how to shoot birds and they didn't know how to eat bush tucker and didn't eat fish much," he says.

There was no sanitation at the diggings, and excrement leached into the streams and drinking water, sickening many and killing others.

"People didn't keep clean anywhere in the Western world at that time and they were even less clean on the diggings. People stank in the 19th century, something we often forget when we look at costume dramas. Every house would have hundreds of flies buzzing around, and people's armpits would have been streaked with sweat that wouldn't be able to be washed out."

The gold rushes created tiny urban societies, instant towns in the wilderness, often built of calico.

"They were appalling not only for the diggers but for the camp followers. They were very gregarious, very sociable and very dynamic, then often the town would disappear and move on. The very same women and men would be found selling drink and running gambling houses, and in the case of the women, offering sexual services, on goldfield after goldfield throughout the new world," Eldred-Grigg says.

People had known about gold in Otago and other parts of New Zealand for a long time but the concept of a gold rush had not developed earlier.

"When people found gold in rivers in the Coromandel and Golden Bay and Otago, they thought it was an interesting but rather perplexing curiosity. And they would have thought in terms of 'could we establish a gold-mining company to dig holes in the ground?'.