George and Rebecca's place: The story of a New Zealand gold rush icon

Abstract

In early 1867, George Butler Bond and his wife Rebecca sold their mining, toll-bridge and hotel businesses at Queenstown's Arthur's Point, to move to the nearby Cardrona Valley. There they built the Empire Hotel and developed a substantial gold claim, but in 1876 their fortunes turned. George drowned after a drunken fall, leaving his wife to raise seven children without him, in a business that was barely paying its way, in a goldfield well past its best. Nevertheless, Rebecca did well, going on to profitably manage a series of hotels throughout the province, leaving the Cardrona in the hands of a manager. The Bond's hotel, unlike other rush-era hotels throughout Otago, was saved from the wrecking ball, damage from misguided renovators, or improvements decreed by zealous licensing officials, through a mixture of isolation and the dilatory management of several quixotic owners. The Empire, renamed the Cardrona when Mrs Bond sold it in 1884, not only survived but emerged to become uniquely embedded in the New Zealand popular identity as the twenty-first century dawned. I explore the history of the Cardrona Hotel, detailing how - and why - this quintessential example of false-front, 'frontier' architecture, built in a remote goldfields ghost-town, in the middle of an old mining landscape, became an exemplar of the country's colonial heritage and an icon of rush-era architecture.