When news of the true extent of the gold discoveries in California reached Auckland in early 1850 there had been great excitement. It has been estimated that of the 2,000 or so New Zealanders who were drawn to the diggings there, perhaps two-thirds came from Auckland. The discovery of gold in New South Wales in February 1851, then in Victoria later in the year, compounded the loss of men. The Southern Cross, mouthpiece of the Auckland merchants, complained in 1852 that:

With lands locked up [a reference to growing Maori resistance to land sales] California created a golden drain on the left, and Australia is now entailing another similar drain on the right hand . . . . but we cannot behold ship after ship stripping us of our truest and our staunchest colonists.41

In the same year the Southern Cross reported that nearly one hundred persons, including many heads of families, had left Auckland in the Moa and Iliomana for New South Wales, and added despondently that 'the town of Auckland [is] rapidly becoming depopulated, and it abounds with notices of shops and houses to let and entire streets are nearly deserted.42

This explains why settlers in Auckland were so anxious that the Coromandel field be opened, and why Wynyard took with him to the meeting at Patapata beach on 18 November 1852 a high-ranking official group to effect that purpose. Gold discoveries did indeed rescue the capital from its depression, but not finds made in diggings on Coromandel, rather those on the goldfields of New South Wales and Victoria. The demand for goods and food from miners there brought high speculative profits for Auckland merchants and a return of prosperity to the community at large.43 By 1856 this Australian market had collapsed,44 but the mystique of gold did not go away. The discovery of a large goldfield within reach of Auckland continued to be regarded, in the years ahead, as the panacea for all the economic ills of the settlement.

41 Southern Cross, 22 June 1852, p. 3, co1.3.

42 Kalaugher, Gleanings, p. 96.

43 Haglund, pp. 2-4.

44 Stone, Young Logan Campbell, pp. 185-86.

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