There's gold in them thar hills!

And coal... and silver... and kauri gum... and titanium... and mercury... and uranium... RACHEL MACDONALD looks at the history of mining in New Zealand.

New Zealand is a young country of great geographical variety, with a rich and ongoing tectonic history. This makes it a sitter for a mining industry – small on global terms, but highly active – dating back well before the first arrival of colonists from Europe. In fact, it’s a sector that’s been so important to the shaping of the nation that miner’s hammers were incorporated in our national coat of arms.

James Hector, first director of the New Zealand Geological Survey, presents in his journal an impressive list of metal ores discovered here by 1870, including gold, silver, copper, lead and iron. He notes the presence of chromium, zinc and antimony, and describes the beginnings of a burgeoning mining industry. In fact, in his time, all the major gold and coalfields had already been mapped, and that was just the start.

A hundred years after James Hector, more than 20 metallic and non-metallic minerals had been explored and mined. This left many others that still occur in quantities too small to warrant the effort, or which are cheaper to import and process than it would be to extract them from our own bedrock and soils.

Historically, the first documented New Zealand miners were the Maori. Archaeological evidence shows that greenstone – nephrite and bowenite – obsidian and adzite had been widely distributed around the country by 1400, or within 150 years of the commonly accepted date of Maori settlement. In the absence of the use of metals, these stones enjoyed wide use as tools, weapons and ornaments, and were widely traded or snatched as spoils of war.

Because of its lack of economic relevance, Maori placed no value on gold, which was to become such a driver of mining in New Zealand. In fact, in the early 1800s, an Otago whaler was simply informed by a local chief that the yellow metal seen on the watch-seals of the new arrivals could easily be found on the beaches of the Clutha River. This was backed up in 1852 when a member of a local tribe, upon seeing a lump of Tasmanian gold, recounted how he had once picked up a potato-sized nugget from the banks of the Clutha and tossed it into the waters.

Of course, the European settlers, while primarily seeking agricultural opportunity, were inevitably on the look-out for gold and coal as the staples of a familiar marketplace. It’s said that the first gold was discovered in the Coromandel in the 1820s. However, exploration increased along with the population size in the 1840s, culminating in the gold rushes of the 1860s in the previously remote areas of Otago, the West Coast, and more of the Coromandel.

And it showed itself to be a search ideally suited to fostering the sheer gritty innovation for which the country has since become so well known. It could be said that New Zealand has always been a leader in mining technology, from the development of the first gold dredge on the Clutha River, to the first commercial use of cyanide gold extraction at Karangahake in 1889, right through to the first commercial use of recycled cyanide at the Golden Cross mine in 1991.

Who were these determined treasure-hunters, though? After the sealers, whalers and farmers who looked to make New Zealand a new permanent home, the miners drawn to the What’s Hot favourite of the mine vine were a mixed lot. Most famous, but probably the most under-represented were those nicknamed the Californian forty-niners, notorious for being part of the 1849 Californian gold rush. However, by far the greater proportion of hopefuls came from the Victorian goldfields, which had proven attractive to British miners in the 1850s. Hence Bendigo and Ballarat Creek in Central Otago. As hospital records of the time show, the rest were largely from the US, Scotland, Ireland and England, with a smattering of workmates from Germany, Scandinavia, France and Italy.

China also featured strongly, with a government initiative to tempt men over from Guangdong province in southern China to replace the Europeans who left the Otago fields in 1866 for new rushes on the West Coast. The Chinese built up their own communities, including shops and businesses, which have since been recreated in destinations such as Arrowtown. They also brought with them the distinctive dish, chop suey – now considered an American invention – which is actually not found on any self-respecting Chinese menu. While the origin of the name remains under debate, chop suey is essentially the Oriental version of bubble and squeak – left-overs in broth, served on rice or noodles... and invented by miners far from home.

Not many miners brought their families to work with them – this was only commonly the case on lucrative goldfields and hard-rock mines that were going to last beyond a few years. The fact that living conditions were extremely basic didn’t escape those wives, often with young families, who chose to join their husbands. One miner’s journal ruefully notes his wife’s tears as she gloomily surveyed the damp cave that would be home for their family for the next four years.

And for the single guys, the chances of finding a partner were lean, so that any female newcomer to the local township could get herself spoken for as quickly as she wanted. This posed a considerable employment issue for local businesses. There are newspaper advertisements from pubs in Otago at the height of the gold rush, discriminating frantically on the behalf of ugly, inarticulate barmaids, but even these still married too fast for their employers to find replacements.

Without its mineral resources, the young land of opportunity that was New Zealand would have developed a very different social and economic footprint, for Maori and European alike. And it’s a sector that continues to drive a significant portion of our GDP today, not only in terms of extraction itself, but also in its supporting markets and its ongoing development of highly exportable innovation.