140 Seddon Street, Waihi, Hauraki

Martha Mine

From 1881 until the 1950s, the Martha Mine was one of New Zealand’s most productive gold mines. The most spectacular relic of the mine is the gaunt shell of the No. 5 Pumphouse, used to pump water from the mine’s depths. Cyanide tanks and other relics of mining days can also be seen.

These days mining at Martha is by open pit methods. Ore and waste rock are crushed at the surface facilities area prior to transportation along a 2.7 kilometre conveyor.

In April 2016 a major rockfall occurred preventing mine operation

Martha Hill Mine, Waihi

New Zealand’s bitterest strike In New Zealand, the early Otago gold rushes had been alluvial but most late 19th-century mining there, at Westland and at Thames was in quartz country, which required expensive machinery. At Waihi, at the foot of the Coromandel Peninsula, the Martha Hill Mine (named after prospector William Nicholl’s sister) produced more gold than any other in New Zealand history — 224,000 g of gold and 1,680,000 g of silver — until it closed in 1952. The most famous — or infamous, depending on your politics — mine owner was the London-owned Waihi Gold Mining Company. This firm swallowed up many of its rivals and enthusiastically adopted modern technology (such as cyanide extraction) in its struggle to make a profit from the low-grade ores it mined. By the early 1900s its cost cutting put it on a collision course with its workers after it halved production and then provoked a traumatic strike. Abetted by thuggish Commissioner of Police John Cullen, the Waihi GMC’s actions led to riots and beatings. On ‘Black Tuesday’, 12 November 1912, strikebreakers murdered unionist Frederick George Evans, who Labour Party leader Harry Holland made a martyr in the bestseller The Tragic Story of the Waihi Strike. Waihi remains an active mining centre (opencast mining resumed in 1988). You can still see many relics from the earlier period in and around the township. The most impressive are the 14-metre high concrete cyanide agitation tanks on the Union battery site (1895) and the ruined Cornish Pumphouse (1904). Its massive horizontal beam pump once removed water from shafts almost 650 metres deep.

© 2002 Original text – Gavin McLean.

Further reading: Phil Moore and Neville Ritchie, Coromandel Gold, Dunmore Press, Palmerston North, 1996.

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