Driving through history
Those were different times: on 14 August 1862 Horatio Hartley and Christopher Reilly walked into the assay office in Dunedin with 40kg of gold they panned where the Kawarau River from Wakatipu meets the Mata-Au (AKA Molyneux or Clutha) River from Wanaka and Hawea at a place called Cromwell.
This find triggered the ‘Dunstan Rush’ and central Otago changed for ever.
The California gold rush started in 1848 and the Australian rush in 1851. Gold fever spread quickly around the world. Gabriel Read’s discovery near Lawrence on 25 May 1861 paled into insignificance when tales of shovelling nuggets off beaches in the Arrow River sparked a stampede to one of the most isolated, bleak and barren parts of New Zealand.
“On the first part of the journey, I was looking at all the life.” (Bunnell Dewey - America).
There were two common routes into the interior – the Pigroot following the Shag River inland from Palmerston (just north of Dunedin) to Kyeburn – and from the south following the Oreti or Mataura Rivers from Invercargill. The southern route stopped at Kingston on the southern shores of Lake Wakatipu with sheer cliffs dropping into the depths, but with gold fever in the air, “We haven’t got time for the scenic route, we’ll cut straight across”!
It’s hard to believe these days but with huge numbers of miners now arriving from the Australian and Californian gold fields and many becoming lost and dying in the inhospitable wilderness, a more direct road had
