The Bendigo area, located high on the arid Dunstan Range in Central Otago, was not an inviting place to live. Bendigo was not used as a significant camping area or as a source of food by Maori greenstone parties heading to and from the main pounamu areas of Wakatipu and the West Coast from Moeraki. According to the Department of Conservation, however, when William Rees bought the first flock of sheep over what would later be called 'Thomsons Pass', he followed an established Maori trail. It is likely that this was a 'back up' route used when the Clutha was in flood and the Gorge became impassable.
Gold mining is one of the major themes in New Zealand’s history and has a ‘great impact on New Zealand landscape.’ Central Otago was one of the principal areas of mining (along with the West Coast and the Coromandel). Mining took two forms – alluvial gravels and quartz bedrock mining. In Central Otago, one of the most important areas of quartz bedrock mining was at the Bendigo reefs, nearby modern day Cromwell. Quartz mining required money, men and equipment – the rock had to be mined, crushed, and treated to extract the gold. Such processing required large plants and buildings, as well as motive power such as water power and steam power using coal as fuel. Both alluvial mining and quartz bedrock mining left characteristic landscape effects: alluvial mining left its logical sequence of water races, reservoirs, sluicing faces, tailings and tail races, while quartz mining left shafts and adits, mullock heaps and battery sites. At Bendigo Reefs where there is a historic reserve, visitors can see the remains of alluvial mining and bedrock quartz mining, as well as the ruins of the associated townships, roads and residences.
Alluvial and Quartz Mining at Bendigo
Mining at Bendigo followed on from the rush to Cromwell Gorge in 1862 that saw prospectors swarming the hills and gullies looking for gold. Historian Lloyd Carpenter writes that the find caused ‘some miners to coalesce into a restless mass, swarming across the province, flitting from one field to the next. Whole towns of tin and canvas were dismantled or erected ‘according to the collective whim of this mob.’ Miners explored the foothills, gullies and ridges of the Dunstan Range and surrounding countryside looking for the dream of El Dorado – one of these areas was the rocky barren Dunstan foothills that became known as Bendigo after the Bendigo goldfields in Victoria, Australia.
The first references to mining in this general area were at Rocky Point and Amisfield Burn around September 1863, but the field at what became Bendigo seems to date from late 1864. Bendigo is close to the Rocky Point Ferry, established to allow safe passage for miners coming inland from the port of Oamaru via the Lindis Pass. It was also alongside the Thomson Pass between the Maniototo and the Upper Clutha. The earliest primary source reference to ‘Bendigo Gully’ is in the police Occurrences Book in September 1864, while the earliest newspaper reference is February 1865.
Water and gold shaped the landscape – all mining needed water: alluvial mining and sluicing brought water to claims to wash out the gold bearing gravels, while the later hard rock miners needed water to power their stamper mills that crushed the ore. Water consequently allowed the field at Bendigo to be opened up. In the headwaters of Bendigo Creek, at Rise and Shine Creek, a group of Scandinavian sluicers set up a claim and built a race that would bring water to Bendigo. In December 1864, Christian Hansen and his Swedish compatriots known as the Rise and Shine Company, applied to bring 12 heads of water westwards into the headwaters of Bendigo Creek. The increase in flow meant that downstream and through the hills at Bendigo claims could be worked that would have defeated earlier miners – this was crucial to the development of quartz mining at the Bendigo Reefs.
While linked to Bendigo by gold and by water, the Rise and Shine Company’s claim was isolated on the pass between the Maniototo and the Upper Clutha. This was a long lasting and successful claim that gave rise to its own settled community. The Otago Witness reported in 1881 that ‘The Rise and Shine sluicing party have been at work for many years in their claim nearly at the summit of the Dunstan Range. Their claim has always and is now paying good wages, and a more isolated and better-contented party of miners cannot be found in New Zealand. With their wives and families they form a small, select, and happy community.’ This was one of the longest running sluicing claims in Otago. The claim finally wound up in the 1890s after sluicing magnate John Ewing purchased a share in the claim and took over most of the water right. The Rise and Shine Company’s claim has left a cluster of stone residences, sluicing faces, dams and water races on the landscape, a reminder of this significant undertaking that opened up the Bendigo reefs to other miners.
Down Bendigo Creek at the rocky outcrops overlooking the Clutha River, surveyor Coates made his first official report on the Bendigo quartz reefs in 1865, where over 100 miners worked. By 1866, most of the easily won alluvial gold had been won, and groups of miners worked together to work the harder ground – syndicates such as the Aurora, that built another race to bring water in from Devil’s Creek. Other miners left, drawn by the call of gold to other fields such as the West Coast.
From the river gravels, miners looked to the rocky outcrops of the Bendigo hills, turning their eyes to the gold contained in quartz. Quartz bedrock mining was expensive, requiring substantial investments of time and money. Syndicates were formed to prospect Bendigo’s quartz reefs. Early efforts were not successful - the first quartz mining company, the Bendigo Quartz Mining Company formed by a group of Dunedin businessmen, applied for a 16 ½ acre (6.7 hectare) lease, but failed to find a payable reef.
Prospectors Thomas Logan and Jack Garrett were to have more luck. Logan, who had mined at Ballarat and Bendigo in Victoria, had followed the call of gold to the Cromwell area in 1863, working on the river terraces of Clutha, Lowburn and Kawarau. He also prospected for auriferous quartz in Tinkers, Blacks and Thompson’s Gully, before arriving in Bendigo in mid-1866. He found a promising reef and invited Jack Garrett to develop his claim, and the pair registered their quartz claim in July 1866. The pair lived on the edge of financial ruin and on the beneficence of the storekeeper, until joined by another partner, Brian Hebden. Hebden’s extra money allowed the company to develop the claim. Prospecting the area, they knew they had found good stone. Another serious investor was needed to take the next step, to buy a quartz stamper mill, the water rights to drive it, men to run it and to build a road to the claim. Canadian George Goodger was just the man. Experienced in goldfields in California and Victoria, he had moved to Cromwell in 1862, where he had continued mining, became involved in local politics and indulged his entrepreneurial spirit.
The Cromwell Quartz Mining Company
The new company, the ‘Cromwell Quartz Mining Company’ (‘Cromwell Company’) was registered in July 1868. They bought a stamper battery and water wheel from Hindon and moved it to Bendigo, then started to process stone. Rumours of great wealth began circulating shortly afterwards – followed by Vincent Pyke’s announcement that ten day’s crushing had yielded triple the most profitable yield per ton previously declared by any Otago quartz enterprise.
When the Aurora Syndicate found a reef parallel and to the north of the Cromwell Company reef, more prospectors came to Bendigo. The Cromwell Company’s Bendigo mine ‘proved to be the richest in Otago.’ The three surviving shareholders (Garrett died in 1869) retired wealthy men. By 1869-70, Bendigo had become ‘famous as a quartz mining area.’
Logantown and Welshtown
By 1869, a bustling town had grown up on the flat ground between Logan’s and Colclough’s reefs. The town became known as Logantown, after resident Thomas Logan. There were stores, hotels, a butcher and a baker, as well as a clothier and a blacksmith. Five hotels were open by 1871.
Another population centre, known as Welshtown, developed further up the hill. McKay’s 1876 map of the Bendigo Reef shows Welshtown with its houses, gardens, and huts and stables. By the end of the 1870s, all residents were directly or indirectly dependent on the Cromwell Mining Company’s operations.
The early 1870s hinted at the declining returns that would mark the later years of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. In 1871, with the exception of the Cromwell Quartz Mining Company, the local quartz companies reported poor returns, rising development costs and demands from shareholders. In the face of such threats to profitability, the company dropped wages. The miners at the four main companies (Aurora, Colclough, Aurora and Alta) expressed their concern and threatened to strike, but in the end capitulated and accepted the reduced rate. The money saving efforts did not rescue the companies from falling returns, and with the exception of the Cromwell Quartz Mining Company, each claim was abandoned or worked on tribute (working the mine for a percentage of the value of the ore raised) by the end of 1871.
In 1876, the Cromwell Quartz Mining Company was registered as a public company, with 12,800 shares of £6 each. The major shareholders were Borthwick Baird (who had purchased Hebden’s holding), Goodger and Logan, with Dunedin businessmen making up the remaining shareholders. The mining operation was also reorganised, the Aurora battery (sold by the defunct Aurora Company) was moved to the main shaft, where two houses were built nearby – an office and residence of the manager and a store. Charles Todd was appointed as the new manager. The company erected another steam-powered battery in June 1878, and it was operating in early December, the company employing seventy men by early 1880. Shortly, though, falling gold returns would affect operations.
In March 1880, the Cromwell Argus reported that the company was planning to raise less stone, and concentrate on milling selected stone nearby, aiming to maintain returns while reducing production costs – the company laid off 40 men, and then, failing to find good stone, reduced the miners’ wages. The miners went out on strike in June 1881. By July 1881, the dispute was bitter, and the manager issued trespass notices to all miners who had dwellings built on the company’s mining lease. If the dwellings were not moved, miners who remained on the land would pay rent equivalent to a day’s wages. Miners received a hand-delivered letter instructing them to move their house within six days – the company’s lease was over half the settlement of Welshtown.
One miner A. McKenzie wrote to the Dunedin Herald,
‘Few of us had any means of paying rent for the privilege of living in our own houses, and were compelled to pull them down, and carry the timber and iron thereof elsewhere. Many of these cottages were substantial structures.
While the work of demolition was going on, a most sickening spectacle met my gaze. In one of the doomed tenements resided a very delicate young mother, with a little firstborn babe, who had to gather up her little all while her husband’s mates carry the roof of his comfortable house and placed it on other walls for the poor invalid’s reception.
The sight made many shudder… and yet with barefaced impudence the Cromwell Company asked for and obtained police protection while they carry on the work of spoliation… Such conduct as the above should make the company stink in the nostrils of miners so long as it has an existence…these facts will help throw Irish evictions and landlord terrorism in the shade.’
The strike ended in August 1881, with the company agreeing to retain the 10 shillings a day wage for miners working at the mine face, with other workers forced to accept a cut to 9 shillings a day. The strike left a legacy of ill feeling, and signalled the ultimate demise of mining at Bendigo.
Historian Lloyd Carpenter writes that the strike ‘tore the small Central Otago community apart, featuring scenes reminiscent of Highland Clearance and Irish Land League struggles, with armed police, the destruction of houses and the eviction of families.’ This was not the first miner’s strike (there was a struggle between coal miners and employers in Kaitangata in 1873), but Carpenter writes, that at ‘over nine weeks in length, it was the longest and arguably the most bitter mining strike in nineteenth century Otago.’ He argues that it was significant ‘for the way nineteenth-century tensions between landowner and tenant reminiscent of an earlier British era were suddenly and cruelly manifest in the new gold-made colonial Otago. The events shocked everyone with their suddenness, brutality and the extremity of the positions adopted by all sides.’ For many years, the subject was painful for local people, the descendants of both the strikers and the employers, and it is only recently that more than a passing account has been written.
In the timeline of New Zealand’s labour relations history, it is significant that the 1881 strike at Bendigo was ten years before the gold miners at Thames and Waihi first organised a union, three years before the West Coast coal miners were organised, and nine years before the seminal Maritime Strike of 1890.
Returns fell and gold production was relatively low in the following years. There was not the money to open up new areas for development. Share values fell and in January 1884, the Cromwell Company went into receivership. The company was sold in December 1884, with the plant, lease, water rights and races, and buildings sold to a Dunedin syndicate for only £1,075, less than the cost of a second-hand quartz battery.
The company was restructured again in 1898 as the Cromwell Proprietary Mining Company, but was not successful and the mine closed in 1900. At the end of 1901, the mine was let on tribute. The rights of the Matilda battery tailings were sold to the Bendigo Tailings Syndicate, who intended to treat the tailings using the cyanide process. By 1903, both the work in the mine, and the work at the tailings had ceased. In 1904, the Cromwell Mine Syndicate let the mine out again, and then sold it to J. Stevenson of the Dunedin Engineering Works who intended to use the water right and races to sluice the terraces along Bendigo Creek. Sluicing continued until 1907.
In the early years of the twentieth century, the Cromwell Mining Company ran out of rich stone, and the mine was abandoned, as were the settlements of Logantown and Welshtown. The townspeople dismantled and shifted the hotels. Anything of value was removed; buildings were left as stone shells.
In 1910, the Cromwell Gold Mines Development Company was formed, with the intention of driving low level adits to intersect with the existing shaft. In the end this company also failed, and the mine and plant were offered for sale in 1913.
Charles Todd, son of the mine manager from 1878-1883 – and a founding member of the Todd motoring dynasty, revived the mining in the early 1930s. Todd drove horizontally from Specimen Gully into the Cromwell Company Mine, completing a 2,300 foot (701 metre) adit, with the assistance of a Government Unemployment Board subsidy. But, ultimately, mining ended at Bendigo, leaving the traces on the landscape recalling the work and lives of the miners and companies on their alluvial and quartz bedrock claims. The mining sites (with their hazardous adits) were absorbed into Bendigo Station until the tenure review process began in the 1980s that identified the historic values of the area, and land was set aside in recognition of the mining history.
The importance of the Bendigo reefs and its rich wealth of history was recognised when the area was gazetted as a historic reserve in 1997, and further expanded in 2000. The initial boundaries of the reserve were influenced by the Mines Inspector of the day who would not let the Lands and Surveys Department have areas that he believed still had good gold deposits.
In recent years, the area has attracted a different visitor – people interested in the golden history of the Bendigo reefs. Carpenter writes that Bendigo (as a gold mining location) is ‘iconic’ in both New Zealand and Australia, and ‘unique to the pioneer ‘goldfields narratives’’ of both countries as a place where ‘tough and manly miners created a viable community under the twin pressures of a harsh environment and oppressive officialdom.’ In New Zealand, Bendigo in Central Otago was more a talisman, as Carpenter writes, a ‘touchstone for good fortune’. Walking tracks guide visitors through the dramatic landscape, and clear of the many mining shafts, dotted amidst the rocks and vegetation. In 2014, Bendigo Reefs Historic Area is a site of dramatic beauty, and remains an attraction to those interested in goldfields history.
