How the Special Character of Thames Impacted upon Relations between Crown, Colonists and Tangata Whenua

Distinctive makeup of Thames mining community

In one important respect, and this was recognised at the time, those who flooded to Thames had a different social background from the diggers who had rushed the South Island goldfields earlier in the 186os. Most of those who went to the Otago diggings, or subsequently to the West Coast, came from outside the boundaries of the province where they started to prospect; indeed, a sizeable number came from abroad. Much of the growth of the Thames population, however, arose out of a redistribution of Auckland's existing provincial population, most markedly the unemployed from Auckland town, or 'struggling settlers' from the country.158 The winter of 1867 had been the nadir of the depression overwhelming Auckland in the mid-186os. Labourers in the town were starving, soup kitchens ineffectually ministered to the needy.159 Mackay said that when the news of the first discovery at Kauaeranga came through, he and Pollen were 'besieged' with applications of unemployed to go to the diggings.160

Country settlers, some of whom had been recently placed on confiscated land, were equally in sore straits. Nona Morris in her history Early Days in Franklin speaks of settlers in the Pukekohe, Pokeno, Tuakau region on ten-acre blocks, some of which were heavily bushed. These men 'not possessed of means' and with little or no opportunity for supplementary work, writes Morris, greeted 'the great news of the gold discovery at Thames' as 'salvation', and 'flocked to the fields'.161 Vicesimus Lush, vicar of Thames, recorded that within a year, some of these settler-diggers had built up a small stock of capital and had been able to send 'sufficient money home to their wives to purchase cows, pigs etc.'162

Technological distinctiveness of Thames

Neither colonists nor Maori (especially) had anticipated the extent and rapidity of growth of the settlement that rose at the Thames diggings in the late 1860s. Equally unforeseen was the technological character of the mining industry that took shape.

The first diggers who rushed the Thames, as at Coromandel, had looked for alluvial gold, hoping for a poor man's field where riches could be won with equipment as rudimentary as a pick, a shovel and a prospector's pan. Before 1867 was out, the field had

158 New Zealand Herald, 7 Nov. 1867, cit. Dunstan, 'Colonial Merchant', p. 107.

159 Journal of Auckland Provincial Council, 1867 (Session 1), Appendix 1A.

160 AJHR, 1869, A-17, p. 4.

161 Nona Morris, Early Days in Franklin: A Centennial Volume, Auckland, 1965, pp. 162, 167.

162 Ibid., citing Lush. See also Drummond (ed.), The Thames Journals of Vicesimus Lush, excerpts on pp. 15.16.

163 Salmon, A History of Goldmining, pp. 182-85.

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