Gabriels Gully - Pick and Shovel Monument

Gold discoveries in Otago, Westland & Thames changed New Zealand. The very first was here. Gabriel Read made his find in June 1861. By December 4000 - 5000 people were camped in this gully.

Part of the creek at Gabriels Gully is an area where anyone can freely enjoy panning for gold (fossicking) without a mining permit. Fossicking is searching for and collecting materials from the land surface or by digging by hand.

**Land that lured the long white crowd **

On 8 June 1861 the Otago Witness reported that Gabriel Read had found payable quantities of gold ‘shining like the stars in Orion on a dark frosty night’. It took a while for the penny to drop, but by December perhaps 14,000 people — several times Dunedin’s population — had pitched their tents on the Tuapeka and Waipori fields and staked out their 8 x 8 metre claims, 4000– 5000 of them at this gully and nearby Wetherstons alone.

The first of New Zealand’s three big gold rushes (Otago, Westland and Thames) was on. Dunedin almost emptied out before new waves of fortune-seekers, the ‘New Iniquity’, swamped the ‘Old Identity’. ‘We cannot resume our Arcadian simplicity: greatness is forced upon us,’ the Witness sighed as it and most of its readers happily pocketed the cash. Otago’s population soared by 80 per cent between 1861 and 1864, when Dunedin became our largest city.

Read’s fossicking in this undistinguished little gully would also transform New Zealand. It had taken twenty years for New Zealand’s European population to crawl from 2000 to 60,000; in the next twenty it would soar to 470,000, swamping another ‘Old Identity’, Maori New Zealand. The savage winter of 1862 bested ‘new chums’, driving 7000 of them out for good. The hardy stayers lived a distinctive lifestyle, clad in the goldfields uniform of moleskin pants, blue shirt, wide-awake hat and boots. ‘They spoke a common vernacular,’ Erik Olssen said, adding wickedly that they ‘appear to have contributed largely to the national skill at swearing’. After the easy pickings were cradled out, the big boys moved up the slopes with the stampers and sluicers that would bury the 1860s diggings beneath tens of metres of debris. Large-scale mining petered out early (in the 20th) century, although desperation drove some unemployed back here during the depression of the 1930s.

Things are quieter at the Gabriel Read Memorial Reserve today, where tourists photograph the current ‘pick and shovel’ erected for the centennial celebrations in 1961. It is worth taking time to explore further. Follow the loop track that leaves from the car park up Poland’s Hill, down into Munro’s Gully on the far side of Blue Spur and back via the Great Extended Mine Company mine site. There is plenty to see here and at the goldfields museum down the road at Lawrence.

© 2002 Original text – Gavin McLean.

Further reading: Tom Field and Erik Olssen, Relics of the Goldfields: Central Otago, John McIndoe, Dunedin, 1976; CFW Higham and B Vincent, Gabriel’s Gully, Anthropology Department, University of Otago, Dunedin, 1980.

Image Credit: Te Papa. Lucky claim, Gabriel’s Gully, Blue Spur; Muir & Moodie studio (photography studio), 1911, Dunedin