“There were,” he concluded his staccato report, “no fights.” Then our Man in Mackaytown strikes out for Paeroa.
“Everybody had a swag but me and I carried a box with 2 gentle doves soothed with their cooing and whom I meant to carry the latest intelligence from the summit of Karangahake. Something like a rush from the Thames, 1st man I saw toiling along the dusty road with a swag, His Worship the Mayor of Thames, Mr Davies, quiet, unobtrusive but his appearance taken as symbolical.”
* * *
My imagination has always been caught by gold rushes. Once, when I spent a summer in Northern California and Nevada, I panned for gold in the Feather River Canyon and explored Bret Harte country full of the ruins of Wells Fargo towns with names like Red Gulch, Timbuctoo and Rough and Ready. Coromandel town still has a little of that quality, once the brief flings at Christmas and Easter are over, which pack Te Kouma and its own harbour with boats and the peninsula beaches with camps and caravans. For twenty miles or so you take the beautiful road that hugs the rocky shore of Thames Estuary until it begins the long climb towards abrupt and jagged ranges. It is pastoral country, sheep and dairy. You will not see much traffic during the week. At Manaia, a Maori settlement, we passed a swaybacked horse with three merry urchins on his back and, further along, a roadman chipping at weeds, his expression detached and solitary.
A signpost points to Kuaotunu, once a mining township with sufficient population to attract the Kennedy Concert Company, the London Bellringers, even an Opera Company. The Coromandel County News and Kuaotunu and Mercury Bay Mail (a test piece for a newsboy’s yodel) of 28th March, 1898, announced that “A.W. Whitehouse is about to exhibit his wonderful electric kinematograph and Duplex Photograph Machine.”
The days I have spent at Coromandel have all been locust-buzzing, quiet and hot with an early tide that laid the muddy bed of the harbour bare. Eight thousand people have become 800 and not many of them have been about. Of the baker’s dozen of pubs only two are left, a sagging structure called the Golconda and the Coromandel, shorn of its second storey. The Star and Garter’s one-time Public Bar is painted blue and white and serves milkshakes and hamburgers instead of Black Heart Rum and local whisky.
There is the post office with a green in front of it and the war memorial. All the gold towns had a school of mines and Coromandel’s is in a white churchy-looking building that has been turned into a museum. The walls are hung with a remarkable collection of photographs — bullock teams dragging boilers to a battery at Tokatea Hill, where the biggest strikes were made, pocked with warrens and tunnels and with the miners standing about in the formal-looking, leather bowlers of their trade. There are glass cases full of minerals, axes, little candle lamps the miners wore on their billycock hats, leather water bottles, a model of a battery with cottonreels for stampers and more photographs of bands and picnics and Labour Day processions with garlanded banners. There are newspapers too — the Coromandel Argus that began in 1870, the Mail which succeeded it and the longest-lived, the Coromandel News and Peninsula Gazette which ran from 1887 until it ceased publication in 1930.
The curator and moving spirit of the museum is Mr Gordon Alington who was a prospector in Papua before he came to the Thames and then to Coromandel nearly forty years ago. He is an enthusiast for the future as well as the past of Coromandel mining and, like many as well qualified as himself, he believes more gold is left than ever came out of the richest strikes. The museum came to life seeing it with him and then talking to Mr Alex McNeil who is, he told me, the oldest surviving Coromandel-born graduate of the School of Mines. As he remembers hearing the Tarawera eruption in 1886, there cannot be many graduates who are senior to himself.
We strolled out in the sun and across the road to a neat cottage, once the offices of the Hauraki Mining Company which realised in two years bullion worth £193,677.17.2d. In the cottage lives Stan Horne, a grandson of Charles Ring who discovered gold in Coromandel in 1852. Mr Horne came down the path to join us and Mr McNeil pointed with his stick to where Toptown, the upper part of Coromandel, used to be, with more pubs and banks and streets of houses and a school. They talked as if all those places were still there or had only gone since yesterday.
“First drink I ever had” Mr Horne was saying “was up at Toptown. You know, the Tramway Hotel, Ma Doyle’s place.”
Mr Alington is in charge of the only battery still in operation here. It was paid for by public subscription in 1900, in hopes that the mines would revive and he renovated it twenty-five years ago. It is a rare sight to see a battery in action and when we watched it work it had not been going for two years or more. It is housed in a big corrugated shed at the foot of the Tokatea Hill and you turn off on a grassy track beside a vast cemetery almost overcome by bracken, whose tall croziers nod over the winged angels and oak leaf and anchor embellished headstones. It was very dark inside the shed, even when the shutters were taken down. A Victorian steam engine provided the power, the quartz was spilled into a ball mill and thunderously ground to a fine mash, which was washed over the copper plates of the mercury-coated amalgamation tables. Then it was washed again and spilled over trays lined with a densely woven corduroy. Strakes, they are called. The strakes were washed and what was collected finished up in a berdan, a slowly revolving bowl with a spindle in the centre with twelve to fourteen pounds of mercury in the bottom of it. Mr Alington ran up steps, pulled levers, went up to his arms in the berdan like a washer-woman with her linen and then we peered inside.
“If there’s any gold” said Mr Alington, “it sticks to the mercury. They have an affinity — like whisky and water.”
But not that day. We saw no telltale glint, which Gabriel Read said shone brighter than the stars of Orion.
The bush is coming back on Tokatea Hill, hiding the old workings. We followed Mr Alington, who darted nimbly along forgotten tracks and pointed into the mouths of tunnels and drives whose names he knew as you might the streets in your suburb. He showed us heaps of tailings and a few bricks on a clay bank — all that remains of a big hotel.
People lived all over the slopes in shacks and shanties and the hill would have echoed to the clank of quartz trucks, the thud of explosions and the stamping dance of the batteries. Far below, Coromandel and Webster’s Whanganui and the other little offshore islands were bathed in haze. I smelled the gorse; someone was ploughing a field far down in the valley and a hawk hovered against the blue sky as if a thread suspended him from heaven.
* * *
You see Thames a long way off across the plains before you come to it, stretched along the flat by the estuary and climbing the abrupt slopes of the ranges pressing close behind. When Cook and co. sailed up the Waihou river in the Endeavour’s pinnace, the plains were a standing forest of kahikatea. After the forest was felled there came a mosquito-ridden swamp. Eventually a government drained the swamp and chopped it into dairy farms, most of whose cow sheds were built from the kauri planks of demolished Thames town pubs.
You cross the Piako river and then, a few miles further on, the Waihou, a brown and sluggish waterway spanned by a humpbacked iron bridge. On the Thames Bank is a funny little memorial like an incinerator chimney, which marks the spot where the party off Endeavour are supposed to have pulled up their boat and, a mile before the town limits, a neat A.A. sign points to a turnoff reading “Te Totara Pa”. From the highway it does not look like the terraced fort we have seen so often in the islands. One side of the hill has been cut away and the bush growing up here is tall enough to hide the summit where, in 1821, the bloody action took place between Ngatimaru and Ngapuhi.
Sarah Mathew hiked up to the top nineteen years after the battle, with her husband for company and Mr William Webster as a guide. She wrote: “Their bones lie in every direction, some in the enclosure, others down the side of the hill or hidden in some wooded recess as if the poor wounded wretch had dragged himself off to die in peace. The greater number of these bones are scattered round the ovens where the horrid banquet w
as prepared and devoured.”
The warlike character of Te Totara has quite gone. A cemetery, suitably enough, stretches over the broad summit. If you look again, you see the trenches and breastworks of the fortifications, overgrown with tall grass and nasturtiums, running in deeply cleft terraces down the slopes, with shells embedded in exposed patches of earth.
As well as the austere tablets and neat lawns of the newer cemetery there is another, wilder part. Some of the tall Gothic memorials have inscriptions in Maori and you must wade to them through a clutching sea of blackberry canes and fern, all tangled with convulvulus and honeysuckle, periwinkle and meadowsweet and, near the dark limits of the bush, hemlock and deadly nightshade. The only other sign of the pa is here — two splintered posts, which must have been part of the palisades and criss-cross tracks running up the banks where Hongi’s warriors crept that night. I was back at my old habit of exploring cemeteries and, in spite of a feeling that you should not eat things growing near graves, I ate a ripe blackberry and came to no harm.
* * *
Thames’ goldmines produced ore worth seven million pounds and, while it was once the fastest growing town in the colony, it also had, in 1933, the unique distinction of going bankrupt. It was placed under commission control at its own request and, when all the debts had been paid off, returned to the management of its affairs in 1947, the same year that the last mine of all, the Sylvia, closed down. Thames prospers now on the more solid returns of dairying, fishing and growing local industries. At the entrance to the town is a big new factory where Peugeot cars are assembled, built not far from the old Shortland Wharf where, on 1st August, 1867, Commissioner Mackay and an advance party of sixty experienced miners stepped ashore from the Enterprise.
On 10th August, one of their number, William Hunt, struck the fabulously rich Long Drive reef, the first of Thames’s run of bonanzas. By 1868 Thames was the fifth town in New Zealand, eleven thousand miners’ rights had been issued and the population was 18,000. There was a courthouse, a post office and customs house all in a neat one-storeyed building, a theatre, four banks, five hotels, four churches and a newspaper called the Thames Advertiser. As the canvas town became a wooden one, the skyline was marked with the clanking poppet heads of the mines and Thames children grew up to the constant thud and thunder of the stamper batteries crushing the gold from the ore.
The wide streets still have a look not quite of other New Zealand towns; the pillarboxes are beehive shaped with V.R. stamped on the clearing notice; a fine horse chestnut in the middle of Pollen Street is reputed to have sprung from a chestnut brought back from the Champs Elysées and, if the streets are no longer lined with pubs, in a few buildings you glimpse a leopard with vastly altered spots. A garage was obviously a hotel once, as the first floor makes plain, but the ground floor has been sliced away and a motor showroom put there instead. In the early seventies Thames had eighty hotels crammed into an area two miles by half a mile, which beats the West Coast towns of Hokitika and Greymouth which could only muster fifty-five and thirty-nine respectively.
Don and I had gone to film some preliminary material for a television series. I had some photographs with me of old Thames and we drove about trying to match them with the present. We climbed the little tributary roads up the hillsides; a few curiously shaped cottages are still there roofed in rust rather than iron, but there were far more pretty new houses with wide lawns and gardens. We came down again and drove beside the estuary and then out on the coast road. We passed a fine new Civic Centre, saw the immaculately ordered museum housed in the old School of Mines (the mineral and rock samples here are superb, exquisite quartz streaked with amethyst, cornelian and rose, or glittering gold) and we found more fragments of the past and more pretty houses with jacarandas in flower and apricots ripening. The tenor of life is languid, with companionable knots of people with time to chat on corners, and we gave way to a spry old gentleman bowling along on a splendid tricycle which he parked at the T.A.B.
I found a better picture in the pages of old newspapers. The first, printed on 11th April, 1868, was the Thames Advertiser and Miners’ News.
“Alfred Wood, Town Crier and Bill Poster, may be found at Messrs. Hogg & Co. by interested parties,” it announced.
“At the Northumberland Hotel, for the amusement of Diggers, a FREE & EASY is held every evening. A first class pianist presides.”
“An old Etonian and classical scholar is willing to read with students preparing for examinations.” Any budding classicists could apply to Z, care this paper.
There was regular information about the mails to San Francisco and advertisements for Miners’ Boots, Quartz Crushers and pots of Holloway’s Ointment the Miner’s Friend, which cured everything from King’s Evil to a flea bite. Even kidney stone responded to Holloway’s — “rubbed on the skin it seeps through to the affected part”.
In April 1868, the governor, Sir George Bowen, visited Thames and was shown the workings at Hunt’s Long Drive whose proprietor, shortly after, bought a gold-fitted carriage and glittered about the streets of town in it.
Judging from the papers, miners were a patriotic band and, when the news arrived from Sydney of the attempted assassination of the Duke of Edinburgh aboard his ship the HMS Galatea, a public indignation meeting was proposed and advertised. The next packet from Australia brought word that Prince Alfred was recovered and that “when he showed himself to his men on the Galatea he was so moved by his reception he had to retire to his cabin to hide his manly tears.” Thames, equally moved, declared a public holiday.
In 1869, the Prince came to Thames and her citizens could show their loyalty in person. The Prince for his part returned his thanks when he bought a modest parcel of shares in the Long Drive Mine.
Mining shares were as brisk a business as the mines themselves and the junction of Albert and Brown Streets was called Scrip Corner because of the business transacted on the pavement. The usual broking rate was 2½% but a Mr Wickham cut his rate to 1¼% and, as well, printed a local version of the Financial Times called the Thames Exchange. The names in its pages have a romantic ring — Bright Smile, Morning Star, Multum in Parvo, Dauntless, Candlelight, Lucky Hit and the Sons of Freedom. Not only did their names ring; the Moanataiari opened to nearly £400,000, the Caledonia, which produced half a million pounds in six months, had her shares listed on 15th June 1871 at £212.10.0 each and the Queen of Beauty provided seven shareholders with the royal sum of £173,000.
On holidays and Saturdays the miners in their blue shirts, their sashes and their doeskin breeches, their knee-high boots and their wideawake hats came down from the hills to do the town. At night, when the hills behind Thames flickered with the glow-worm lights of lanterns and campfires, there was considerable theatre life.
BUTTS AMERICAN THEATRE
Prop. Captain J. Butt
Jolly Joe the Cabman — Comic one-act drama
Horse Physic — A Farce
and the Sterling Old English Farce —
The Lottery Ticket
Stalls 2s.
Pit ls.
Another of Butt’s playbills (the theatre was part of his hotel) advertises a double bill of Tarring a Sailor and The Trial of Tompkins and, while a weekly change of play was the management’s policy, a perennial attraction was “a double Irish Jig danced in Character by Mrs Clifford and Mr Jo Hooper”.
For more refined patrons, Mrs Blanche Fane gave “her celebrated Japanese Impersonations” at the Academy of Music.
In 1871 a Shakespearian company headed by William Hoskins, a well-known actor of the day, and Miss Florence Colville gave Much Ado about Nothing one week and Othello the next. Mr Hoskins was reported equally fine as Benedict and the Moor.
At the Theatre Royal which declared itself “Unquestionably the only Legitimate Temple of Drama in the District”, a contemporary piece was the rival of the Hoskins-Colville company, Dion Boucicault’s Formosa or the Railroad to Ruin. The next week the Theatre Royal presented A Foul Pla
y by Charles Read (which gave a local critic an irresistible opportunity) and “concluded with a Gorgeous Burlesque and Extravaganza ALI BABA AND THE FORTY THIEVES which will be produced on a scale of Magnificence never before attempted on the Thames. Beautiful as a fairy dream.”
Unhappily I could not find a report to see if the attempt had succeeded.
The American Theatre promised its loyal patrons, who were still applauding Mrs Clifford’s double Irish Jig, that soon they would see The Ticket of Leave Man, Under the Gaslight and THIS WEEK VICTIMS OF FRAUD — with THE GREAT FIRE SCENE!!!!!!!
Thames people had no need to go to the theatre to see a fire; they had them all the time. There was the Great Fire of 1872 which started in a barber’s shop and the most tragic fire of all was when Ehrenfried’s Brewery burned and ignited its rival, the Phoenix. Rivers of beer went coursing down Mackay Street while desperate citizens strove to save what they could in buckets and pannikins.
An iron tower still stands in Pollen street, with a big bell at the top of it, but a friendly passerby told me that the brigade have a siren now and the bell is tolled only when the funeral cortege of a fireman passes by.
Someone directed us to the old shaft of the Queen of Beauty Mine. The building that used to house the municipal power plant was built around it, a derelict basement place, with cobwebbed hulks of machinery lying about and big berdans and even a little waggonette with skinny iron wheels. The shaft was like a well, overgrown with rank wild trees. I could not say how deep it is but far, far down was a black oily eye of water and a rat was sitting on a ledge nibbling his whiskers.
We drove along the waterfront. No ships were at anchor, nor was there a sail on the bay. Once there would have been paddle steamers like the Whakatiri and the Royal Alfred, or the Lalla Rookh bound for Melbourne, the Boomerang, the Hero and Lady Bowen. Fishing boats were moored at the wharf where Mackay and his jubilant party of diggers landed and, on the foreshore, were bleached wooden racks with the nets thrown over to dry. They drifted like veils in the light wind, their colours the faded hues of lichen, green and ivory and pale dull brown. A band of white shingle lay against the dark stumps of mangrove, scrawny little cats sniffed after scraps and the fishermen sat talking as they worked at the homely and beautiful task of mending their nets.
Islands of the Gulf Page 23
