Finding the pakeha's yellow stuff: Māori gold miners of the 19th Century

Abstract

In the goldfields of Victoria in the mid-1850s, the Melbourne Age commented that Māori ‘have worked at our diggings with a uniform repute among the European mates for steady industry and good conduct.’ At the later Aorere field, Māori miners were in the majority in some valleys, acquiring riches at a level that caused their colonial neighbours to be both impressed and jealous. In Otago, Māori found spectacular riches, while on the West Coast, Māori were in the vanguard of the first discovers there. My research has revealed that Māori were mining at goldfields as far away as California in 1849 and would later feature in the stories from the Yukon in the 1890s. I will discuss this little-known history of Māori gold miners, focusing on the goldfields of Otago as my major area of study.