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Mining in New Zealand

Follow the history of gold coal and ironsand mining, and finding pounamu, Examine the conservation and environmental issues around mining. Also covered are types of mining, technology, mining dangers wealth, benefits, and disasters. SCIS no. 1865227

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Otago gold fields

Otago gold fields

Map of the Otago goldfields in 1865.

Opposing mining

Opposing mining

Kirstie Knowles of Forest and Bird posts her submission against a government proposal to mine national parks.

Copper

Copper mining on Kawau Island.

Mining in Northland

Mining in Northland

Dean Baigent Mercer talks about some of the mining exploration projects that are underway in the Far North.

Hydraulic mining

Hydraulic mining

This diagram shows the use of water in hydraulic mining.

Quarries

Auckland’s largest quarry is on Mt Wellington.

Gold nuggets and flakes

Gold nuggets and flakes

New Zealand has been a significant source of gold since the 1860s.

Mining trucks

Each capable of carrying 200 tonnes of ore-bearing rock, these massive trucks are lined up at Mcrae’s goldmine in Otago. Primary sector industries such as mining often have very high costs for phys...

Coal mining

Coal mining near Huntly in the 1950s.

Pike's mining operation criticised

Pike's mining operation criticised

A group that looked at Pike River's mine two weeks before the mine exploded says there were major shortcomings in its operation.

Save the Coromandel

Save the Coromandel

An anti-mining save the Coromandel poster.

Rogers coal mine

Rogers coal mine

The entrance to the Rogers coal mine.

Huntly remembers mine disaster victims

Huntly remembers mine disaster victims

One-hundred years ago, 43 men died in the Huntly mining disaster.

Otago miner's song

An Otago miner's song from the 1860s.

Coal valley

This short 1979 National Film Unit documentary visits Rūnanga, to profile the men at work at five private coal mines.

Hunter’s gold

Hunter’s gold

This classic kids’ adventure series follows a boy trying to find his missing father, amidst the 1860s Otago gold rush.

Community protest

Community protest

Community members are protesting renewed mining efforts in the Karangahake Gorge.

Locals upset at seabed mining proposal

Locals upset at seabed mining proposal

South Taranaki locals are upset consent has been granted to mine ironsands off the coast.

Mining ironsands at Taharoa

Mining ironsands at Taharoa

South of Kāwhia Harbour at Taharoa, in the Waikato, ironsands occur as dunes and beach sands.

Denniston incline

Denniston incline

The bleak Denniston plateau on the West Coast was the country's most productive coalfield.

Newspaper report from 1909 on a gold and ironsand mining venture at Okarito.

Unauthorised greenstone mining

Unauthorised greenstone mining

Detective Senior Sergeant Steve Wood rests his hand on pounamu seized by Wanaka police during an investigation. Three truckloads of illegally mined stone were confiscated. It was believed to have a...

The gold mines of Wellington

Gold field at Gabriel’s Gully

Gold field at Gabriel’s Gully

Gold field at Gabriel's Gully, Clutha district at the height of the gold rush in 1862.

Chinese gold miners

Chinese gold miners

Chinese gold miners at Orepuki

Waihi gold mine

Waihi gold mine

Blackwater Gold Mine

Blackwater Gold Mine

Showing an elevated view of buildings at the Blackwater Mine, with the premises of the Waiuta Trading Co (right, foreground) Westland Region (N.Z.)

Sluicing for gold at Kumara

Sluicing for gold at Kumara

Quantity: 1 b&w copy negative(s). Physical Description: Film negative

Off to the goldfields

Off to the goldfields

A gold miner with his pack, pick, shovel and his billy.

Grahamstown goldfield

Grahamstown goldfield

A circular view of the gold field with factories with smoking chimneys, derricks, mining equipment and houses, looking out to sea from the hills behind the township Quantity: 1 colour art print(s)...

Five years

A cartoon about the Pike River disaster.

Mining company strikes gold near Paeroa

A mining company has found outstanding quality gold near Paeroa.

Mining e-waste for gold

Mining e-waste for gold

An Auckland company is using bacteria to mine precious metal.

Gold mining

Gold Mining NZ

Coal mining in New Zealand

Coal mining in New Zealand

Aspects of coal mining.

- Pike River mine disaster

On the afternoon of 19 November 2010, an explosion ripped through the remote Pike River mine on the West Coast of the South Island, killing 29 men.

Digging and drilling in New Zealand

Do drilling and digging have a future, or are NZ’s mining days over?

Trans-Tasman iron ore animation

Mokau coal field revived

The coastal town of Mokau may see a resurgence in coal mining.

Quarry explosion

A quarry explosion in New Zealand.

Mining events in New Zealand history.

Gold in them hills

A history of gold mining in Wellington.

Our extraction industry

Our petroleum and minerals industry.

New Zealand 's industrial minerals

New Zealand produces a diverse range of industrial minerals.

Northland mining

Mining in Northland, New Zealand.

Mineral resources

Mineral resources cover a wide range of economically useful materials.

Seabed mining could earn billions of dollars

The Cook Islands hopes to transform itself into one of the world's richest countries.

How government agencies manage offshore seabed mining activities in New Zealand.

Huge anti-mining protest

An estimated 50,000 marchers gave the Government a firm message to stay away from mining on conservation land.

Maori and mining

Māori engagement in New Zealand’s extractive industry.

The key resources and key jobs in New Zealand mining.

Chatham Rise phosphate

Why we desperately need Chatham Rise phosphate.

Our kiwi submarine

Mining gold in New Zealand with a submarine.

Mining jobs available in New Zealand

Mining salt at Lake Grassmere.

Mining statistics

Mining statistics for New Zealand.

How to mine gold

For many modern day gold prospectors little has changed.

The revival of the coal industry has spurred fresh debate.

Mining Pounamu/greenstone.

Waihi gold mining

Gold mining in Waihi.

Fast facts about swamp kauri.

Down in the Brunner mine

Brunner was the site of New Zealand's worst mining disaster.

A history of ironsands

The well-known West coast black sand beaches are New Zealand's greatest known reserves of ironsand.

This classic kids’ adventure series follows a boy trying to find his missing father amidst the 1860s Otago gold rush.

Central Otago Gold-mining village

Central Otago Gold-mining village

In their quest for gold, miners often lived in remote, inhospitable places. Many worked hard for little return and only a few struck pay dirt. One success story involved two central Otago Māori min...

Gold miners in a mine

Gold miners in a mine

There are two distinctive forms of gold mining in New Zealand: extracting gold from alluvial gravels using pans, dredges, and sluice boxes or mining gold-bearing quartz bedrock through open-cast or...

Dillman town

This view, looking at the gold mining settlement of Dillman town on the West Coast (South Island) reveals houses, shops and flumes. The West Coast experienced a dramatic gold rush with towns like D...

Caledonian gold mine

Caledonian gold mine

This mine extracted gold from a quartz reef first discovered by William Hunt in 1867 in a Kuranui Stream waterfall. This mine and others in the area (combined with local Kauri logging) were so prod...

Mining at Ross

In this photograph of gold mining at Ross, you can see an example of fluming – wooden boxing designed to carry water to assist recovering gold from gravel deposits. It was in Ross that New Zealand’...

Martha mine, Waihi

Martha mine, Waihi

The Martha mine almost didn’t go ahead. At the time Māori protested against the mine as it was on sacred (wahi tapu) ground where ancestors were buried. They even sealed two miners John McCombie an...

Panning for gold

Panning for gold

Alluvial gold mining was hard, physical outdoor work and miners clothing and appearance reflected this. Thick moleskin trousers or breeches were worn for warmth and protection, while broad-brimmed ...

A cool idea

Between 1861 and 1863, thousands of fortune-seekers from Australia poured through South Island ports, (especially Dunedin’s Port Chalmers) on their way to the Otago goldfields. It was a particularl...

Gold dredge

Part boat, part excavator, New Zealand was the first place in the world where gold dredges were developed and used like this example here, the Golden Bay Dredge. The first steam-powered dredges wor...

Certificate of miner's right to mine Tuapeka goldfield

Certificate of miner's right to mine Tuapeka goldfield

The Australian Gabriel Read first discovered gold in the Tuapeka area in 1861. He described the gold he found as being, “like the stars in Orion on a dark frosty night". Read also wrote in a letter...

Sluicing for gold

Sluicing for gold

Sluicing for gold was a later development on the New Zealand goldfields as the more accessible alluvial gold became scarcer. Sluicing involved washing away terraces or hillsides of gravel to obtain...

Gold mining near Kopu

Gold mining near Kopu

Charles Ring first discovered gold in the Coromandel in 1851. This painting shows a tunnel entrance to a gold mine with three miners outside, one carrying a shovel. Coromandel gold came not from ri...

George Fairweather Moonlight

George Fairweather Moonlight

Tall and exceptionally strong, the Scottish born Moonlight was a famous Otago and West Coast gold prospector who discovered a number of important goldfields. Two of them were Moke Creek (1861) and ...

Two men panning for gold

Two men panning for gold

One of the easiest and cheapest ways to discover gold is to pan for it, as this staged picture of two gold miners shows. Gold panning involves scooping gravel or sand into a pan, then swirling and ...

Gold escort

This is the last Central Otago gold escort, changing horses at Roxburgh. Escorts carried gold (via a stagecoach) from goldfields to (in this case) Dunedin where the gold was subsequently weighed, r...

Gold tailings at Kaniere

Gold tailings at Kaniere

Stacked like Pringles chips this curious landform is the result of a gold dredge. These are tailings – mounds of gravel that have had gold extracted from them by the Kaniere Gold dredge (built in 1...

Mining news

Gold dredge production figures from 1911.

Gold rush (New Zealand)

Gold rush (New Zealand)

The New Zealand gold rush began with a discovery of gold in the Coromandel area in 1852. As more gold was discovered, people came to New Zealand from all over the world looking to strike it rich. T...