Once again, New Zealand is in the middle of a goldrush. The price of the lustrous metal has more than doubling in the last three years and there is fresh interest in masses of land, largely in Otago, which have gold-bearing potential. Both public and private property is being ‘pegged’, the first step in the complicated process of obtaining a permit to extract. Right now, there’s a stoush going on in the hills near Cromwell where an Australian company wants to create a large open pit mine in a landscape coveted by many locals, including Sir Sam Neill.
Great time, then, to publish a book about gold, even though the subject of Digging Deep: Women on New Zealand’s Goldfields by Julia Bradshaw is historical. She discusses the largely-forgotten women who were present at the 19th century goldrushes.
Before I gave up skiing—I’d wrecked my back helping a neighbour move a piano—I would hole up with friends at the Cardrona Hotel in Queenstown. We’d enjoy groomed runs and then hit the pub’s fragrant mulled wine. In those days, the late 1980s, there was nothing more to Cardrona than the hotel and the ski-field. A little tourist village has grown up around them since, but it’s nothing like the bustling town that existed in 1863 when the hotel was built. Gold had been discovered in the Cardrona river and a rush developed. According to the late John Lee, who created the ski field on his sheep station, there were very soon 2000-3000 (mostly) men picking, panning, dredging, and sluicing. Schools, banks, and a post office quickly popped up along with butchers, smithies, and general stores. Huts, houses, and hotels —eight of them—accommodated the miners and their families. The mining lasted for nearly 50 years; by 1910 the town was empty and abandoned.
Bradshaw returns to the boom times in her entertaining book. Digging Deep concentrates on the 20-year period between 1857 and 1876. The first part of the book feels as if she’s found every woman who existed on the fields, and that almost every one of them ran a hotel or a shanty’ and that very many of them used a variety of surnames and their obituaries were “sanitised”. Her stated mission is to give each woman the recognition they deserve but that no-one else has bothered to. She even apologises for leaving some out where she feels there’s not enough to write about.
And she’s not above having a crack at a fellow historian she thinks has erred. Very early on she writes: “In Skippers: Triumph & Tragedy, Danny Knudson recorded that Magaret and John Balderston arrived at the Shotover goldfield together, but they did not. The ‘fair and charming’ Maggie arrived in 1862 and set up a hotel or shanty at the Green Gate, where the track crossed a saddle to avoid cliffs. She did not join forces with John until 1864 and did not legally marry him until 1867. Assuming that Maggie and John arrived together makes Maggie seem a passive companion rather than the hardy entrepreneur that she undoubtedly was.”
The author started her research while working at Arrowtown Lakes District Museum. It was Bradshaw’s first museum position; she subsequently spent 17 years as director of Hokitika Museum and is currently a senior curator at Canterbury Museum. She has written or edited seven previous books, three related to mining in Otago and the West Coast.
I found the relentless rollcall and forensic detail in Digging Deep a bit of a slog to begin with. I can sympathise with the temptation to use everything one discovers—the ReadingRoom reviewer of my own recently-published book chided me for sometimes ladling my research on a bit thick. But I very soon came to admire her women with their bigamist, drunken husbands and their 18 children and their sanitised death notices. And I very much enjoyed the yarns, particularly the one about Ellen O’Donnell who, while struggling to keep her “small, probably unlicensed” hotel solvent, was gaoled for 14 days for stealing a hen. And Mary Ann Spencer from Essex who came to Auckland in 1868 with her young son and a man, Job Tyler, who was not her husband. Five years later, in Thames, separated, the pair existed as neighbours, she running a hotel, he a smithy, until an antagonistic Tyler burned the uninsured hotel down. Mary Ann promptly re-built, re-married, and bought and sold a couple of hotels which she ran alone. Apparently her obituary, when the time came, noted that she was “a splendid helpmate to her husbands.”
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Digging Deep is in four parts. Part I covers the rushes—broadly at Otago, Marlborough, Coromandel, and the West Coast. Part II is called Boundaries, and its chirpy chapter titles somewhat bely what lurks within.
It’s a bit gloomy. Mere children get pregnant, often to married men. The rules of marriage heavily favour the male, with many just up-and-leaving for the next rush. There seem to be almost as many hotels as miners. There’s a general air of sadness and hardship. Even a newspaper advertisement for something that should be fun can’t quite summon the energy: “Mrs Thomson of the Star Hotel in Larrikins invites all her friends to a Ball. Good Music. An efficient M.C.”
And in the dozens of portraits, no-one smiles. There are theories as to why smiling was not a thing in early photography. They range in likelihood from the camera’s requirement of a lengthy exposure, to portraiture being a serious business, to the population’s poor dental health. All those glum looking faces sure add to the sense of despondency—but maybe that’s exactly how it was.
Part III: Surviving and Thriving examines the fact that not every woman on a goldfield ran a hotel or bar or brothel. “Most women on the goldfields contributed to the family’s income in some way,” the author writes. “Many ran business ventures from home while others entered the public world and made money by nursing, dressmaking, teaching and running newspapers. Unmarried women and widows could do so as femes sole, but the law of coverture meant that the contributions of married women to family finances and businesses have been hidden.”
We learn, too, that general stores were popular, as were pawn shops and post offices because a family could live on the premises. Women were midwives, bookkeepers, stitchers of canvas hoses for the gold sluices, as well as actual investors in mining companies and equipment providers.
There’s a chapter on barmaids and dance girls, introduced thus: “The motivation to become a gold-rush barmaid was straightforward: it was one of the best-paid jobs a woman could get. Such was the demand that barmaids often earned more than male servants and even the miners themselves.”
However: “Being a barmaid was not considered a respectable job. It was unseemly for unmarried women to be too familiar with men and to hear the kind of things they talked about. John G. Wilson, the son of a well-to-do Englishman who was working as a cadet on a station near Wānaka, scandalised his friends when he married a barmaid and took over the Kawarau Hotel in Cromwell.”
If the barmaids were regarded as somewhat disreputable, and the dance girls even more so, spare a thought for the prostitutes. Although they were “generally accepted as part of the goldfields life” and there was sympathy for the plight of some of them, they were also widely derided. The chapter title, ‘Living freely and fast’ is a quote from a Hokitika newspaper reporting the death of 26-year-old Christina Bennett in 1871. The following year, the Westport Times went further, describing prostitutes as “abandoned vagrants whose presence on the goldfields and seaport towns is inevitable. They come flocking thither bringing with them, in most cases, a brood of illegitimate offspring…”
Lots of hookers, lots of harrowing detail. My notes from chapter 12, Troubled lives: “Lots of drinking! Mental health. Illness. Sickness. Asylums. Names: Larrikin Liz, Dirty Mary.” I’ll leave it at that.
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“The goldfields were a tough environment,” begins Part IV: Out of the Shadows, “but also a place where some women, Big Maggie, Little Biddie and others, found the freedom to do things differently and become miners themselves.” Women’s gold claims were commonly in a husband’s name, we’re reminded, even if there was no actual husband. Often, claims worked by a husband and wife had the woman’s name struck out.
Bradshaw writes a series of what she calls “longer biographies”. The aforementioned Little Biddy cuts an impressive figure across several pages as she lives up to being “New Zealand’s most famous female miner”. Irishwoman Bridget Goodwin arrived at Marlborough’s Wakamarina goldfields in the mid-1860s via Bendigo in Australia. She was accompanied by two men known as Jack and Bill with whom she apparently lived and mined for around 30 years, foraging extensively down the Buller River and ending up in a hut near Lyell. Biddy was remembered for keeping her male ‘mates’ well in check and for drinking her whisky neat, as well as for her home baking and business acumen.
Quoted by the Grey River Argus after she died in Reefton in 1899, Biddy reminisced: “It was a hard rough life for a woman. I seen us working all day long up to our hips in water and in all sorts of weather, but me and my mates stuck together, and we managed to make sufficient for tucker, and something over, and we go to Lyell and sell our gold to the banker there. After buying tucker we knocked down the rest of the money in a long booze, and when it was all spent we would stir ourselves up a bit, swag our tucker on our backs, and return to our hut and to our claim and begin fossicking for more gold.”
Bradshaw herself has fossicked out a lot of information about a busy, socially and politically active woman called Ellen Brown, “whose obituary gave no clues about her remarkable and useful life.” I sensed the author taking the “rather bland” death notice personally. “This is a case of a disappeared life,” she writes bluntly.
‘Disappeared life’ made me wonder if some of the men were disappeared or sanitised too. Miner Albert Hunt, for example, who had a big reputation and was credited with discovering the first ‘payable’ gold on the West Coast. He later vanished as hundreds of miners followed him to a location he’d apparently claimed, inland from Bruce Bay between Haast and Ōkarito. It was a false claim, or ‘duffer’, and caused a major riot in the settlement that had sprung up at the beach. There is considerable doubt about Hunt’s alleged successes; he seems to have had significant help from local Māori prospectors. Nevertheless, a large monument to him still stands proudly near the town of Kumara.
In 1973 the NZBC screened a television drama about the Bruce Bay incident: Hunt’s Duffer. My father, Ron, plays the titular lead. It features a budding young actor by the name of Sam Neill. I pop up here and there as an extra. In the 43-minute film, one woman appears twice. She has a speaking part as a barmaid, ‘Annie’. The actor is not credited.
Digging Deep: Women on New Zealand’s Goldfields by Julia Bradshaw (Canterbury University Press, $60) is available in bookstores nationwide.
