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ADDISON'S FLAT
On 18th May 1867 gold was discovered about eight miles south of Westport on Waite's Pakihi near the foot of a hill behind the place where the school master's house was soon to be built. A
negro, Addison and his party sank a shaft about thirty feet deep and struck gold in
wash dirt that was four feet thick. The next day a digger named Barkley bottomed a shaft on a blue pug reef and had a rich find. The ground was easy to reach by road or boat and within a fortnight there was a large shantytown around the diggings.
Everybody was optimistic on account of the depth of the wash dirt and the equal prospects on all sides and the large area to be opened up, though there were more miners than could hope to get payable claims there being nearly 7, 000 of them on the ground (1 ). Gold was found at the bottoms of most of the shafts sunk during the first few weeks. Though there was no mention of
"pile" claims from which the owners would make fortunes, the gold was being found in payable quantities.
There was as much as seven feet of
wash dirt in places yielding 3 grains of gold per shovel for one party, and 2 grains per shovel for another party; but whereas the diggers around Charleston were not able to get water with which to sluice the ground in their claims, the claims at Addison's Flat were flooded and the diggers could not get rid of the water.
In June one hundred men were cutting a tail race, 400 to 500 yards long and 25 to 30 feet wide in a co-operative effort to try to drain the whole Flat (2).
The diggings were not fabulously rich and as Warden Giles reported to Commissioner Kynnersley(3) the large expanse of the Flat and continuous heavy rain had made the ground throughout the whole of the diggings so thoroughly wet as to defy the efforts of the miners to work it with advantage and profit.
For months after the opening up of the field the men held their claims in the hope of finer weather and in the belief that the ground contained gold enough to repay them for their patience. About Christmas time when they might have expected finer weather and the ground to become dry, the weather became worse and the claims were swamped. The men, instead of abandoning the ground, co-operated to dig
surface drains, flood races and storm channels big enough to carry off any sudden and heavy rainfall and to prevent inundation of the claims.
While other parties drove long tunnels on a level with the bottom of the claims, to carry the water away to the nearest gully. Younghusband and party
tunneled 1300 feet in two months at a depth of 60 feet to drain their ground and the ground of other miners in the area.
A second tunnel 1,400 feet long was rapidly approaching completion when Warden Giles prepared his annual report in March 1868.
Warden Giles thought fit to grant extended claims to the parties who carried out these works. These drains were effective in some degree and allowed the miners to prospect for gold and the diggings to spread out over
Waite's Pakihi. The average yield of gold per man per week at this time was £5 or £6 though some parties were getting more than this.
Virgin Flat
There were five main "leads" or seams of gold running, from southeast to northwest across the flat at various depths from fifteen to sixty feet, and some hundreds of yards apart, The leads were named Wilson's,
Gallagher's, O'Toole's, Virgin Flat, and Addison's. The richest lead was O'Toole's lead, which was worked for nearly forty years. When O'Toole's men were working there, they were at times, able to look down
upon their tables from the banks of their claim and see a sheet of gold on the miner's plush, so thick that many hundreds of pounds worth of gold were lost off the tables.
The miners also worked the gold deposits in the hills by tunneling, and in some cases Four ounces of gold were
"got" to each "set" of timber; that would mean £16 to every four feet of earth dug out of the hill; and good men made £15 for each day they toiled(4). The party system of working the claims was a success during all the years of gold mining in the district.
(1) Grey River Argus 29 May 1867. A digger reported the population as being the largest he had seen on any one goldfield on the West Coast. (2) Nelson Examiner 18 June 1867
(3) Westport Times 17 March 1868
(4) Moloney, D. Unpublished papers
Natural degradation over the last one hundred years has seen a local creek
wearing down the creek bed to such an extent that it now flows majestically
through one of these old drainage tunnels and emerges in all its glory over half
a kilometer away along the same path as the former mining fly-catcher tables
exposing their piles as it goes.
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