Captured in time

LOCATION

Waiuta is located on the West Coast of the South Island, 38km southeast of Reefton.

The photograph of Waiuta on the front cover of the New Zealand Heritage List/Rārangi Kōrero report is a knockout.

It was taken on a cellphone by Robyn Burgess, Senior Heritage Advisor for Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga, while visiting the site of the former goldmining town in the Upper Grey Valley, which was built around one of New Zealand’s most successful quartz mines.

The photograph, below, shows the chimney and foundations of a bowling green pavilion that was constructed on top of a flattened mullock heap around 1931.

Framed by a vast sky and a layered hinterland, the image references both the isolation and the social infrastructure of Waiuta, a recently listed Category 1 historic place and once a tight-knit community of 600 people, which is now touted as the West Coast’s best ghost town.

Thanks to an early miner and his camera, the power of photography to speak of places and people is highly pertinent in recounting the Waiuta story. Czech immigrant Joseph (Jos) Divis came to New Zealand in 1909 following a period of mining in Germany, and over time made Waiuta his home. In his unofficial role as resident photographerminer, he recorded a visual legacy of daily life in Waiuta from 1910 to the mid-1930s, when the town was bustling with activity.

Sam Symonds, Greymouthbased DOC Senior Ranger, says the Divis photographic record is invaluable.

“The huge collection of photos is a real blessing, and those taken underground are amazing gems. Men in tough conditions, shirts off, smiling at the camera. They would have been blinded by the flash for a few seconds and then gone straight back to work.”

That those gritty scenes below ground ended so abruptly in the winter of 1951 sets Waiuta apart from other old goldmining towns.

It was an unlikely scenario, given the buoyant backdrop of what became the West Coast’s largest-producing goldmine owned by heavyweight player, London-based Consolidated Goldfields, which made a substantial investment in the

WORDS: ANN WARNOCK

The fortunes of West Coast goldmining town Waiuta changed in an instant, but tantalising clues to its once-thriving past remain

local mining operations and the development of the town.

And initially the good times rolled. Blackwater Mine, the first mineshaft at Waiuta, was fully operational by 1908, with gold being processed at the nearby gravity-fed and water-powered Snowy River Battery.

In the 1930s an adjacent shaft, Prohibition Mine – New Zealand’s deepest at nearly 900 metres (including 264 metres below sea level) – came into play.

The highly productive Prohibition Mine spurred advances in processing, and a modern ball mill (a type of grinder that was used to grind and blend ore), built close by, superseded the Snowy River Battery plant down the valley.

The leaps and bounds of Waiuta’s mining operation were mirrored in the life of the town.

Rudimentary housing became a permanent built environment with staff dwellings at so-called ‘Nob Hill’ and a large cluster of houses for miners and their families – one local road was even known as ‘Incubator Alley’.

Interestingly, Jos Divis’s photographs reveal that despite the strata of management and miners, the inhabitants of Waiuta mixed without social divide.

The township’s workforce came from the international mining community – including Australians, British, Italians, Dalmatians and Danes – which meant the population was far from ordinary. So too were its abundant facilities – a swimming pool, bowling green, rugby field, whippet-racing track and tennis courts, plus sporting clubs, an enviable calendar of balls and picnics, and an ardent community atmosphere.

When Waiuta staged its jubilee in 1931, said to be the greatest event in its history, gold prices were rising and a sense of opportunity pervaded the town.

Ironically, however, the story of Waiuta was already more than half over.

World War II recruitment triggered a decline in miner numbers, and the gold output from Waiuta plummeted to less than a third of its pre-war volume.

But despite the diminishing forces of war and yield, the end was still a shock.

In July 1951, when the original Blackwater Mine providing essential ventilation to underground workings suddenly collapsed, Consolidated Goldfields made a snap decision to close the mine.

One week it was a township, then three weeks later – with houses dismantled for timber or carted away and machinery sold, scrapped or abandoned – Waiuta had all but vanished.

By 1953 the town’s population stood at 14.

But Robyn says the place was not forgotten, and in the 1980s it became “an early draw for heritage tourism”.

The highly motivated group Friends of Waiuta, formed in 1985, now works in partnership with DOC to protect and promote the Waiuta site.

The ongoing restoration of several remaining cottages, historic-site clearance and ecology enhancement are on its trajectory.

A major decontamination programme in 2016 removed material containing arsenic – the result of gold extraction methods used at the Prohibition Mine site – from the area.

President of Friends of Waiuta Margaret Sadler, who lived in Waiuta until the age of four, says many of its members – some based overseas – are descendants of Waiuta miners. She says the group is propelled by “wanting to give others a window into this world”.

The recent commemorations marking the 70th year since the closure of the Blackwater Mine were, she says, “an emotional reunion”.

While only tantalising traces of the Waiuta way of life remain today, the town site continues to resonate.

“Waiuta has outstanding significance and value,” says Robyn. “Its historic mining and domestic features dotted around the valley might seem like a far cry from a bustling town within a noisy mine operation, but remarkably the former mine and town are still so readable, despite the loss of so many of the standing buildings.”

Beyond its physical presence in the isolated West Coast landscape, the poignancy of Waiuta endures.

Queensland-based Andrew Saunders, whose late father Alf started out in the Snowy River Battery in 1929 and moved to Australia when the mine closed, says, “Every time my father went back to New Zealand later in life, he visited Waiuta.

“I think it was the sudden way nearly everyone had to leave without any preparation for doing so – it left them with some longing for the place.”

In 2020 Waiuta became part of Tohu Whenua, a nationwide visitor programme that connects New Zealanders with their heritage and enhances a sense of national identity by promoting significant historical and cultural sites. To learn more about visiting Waiuta, read our domestic travel piece on page 44.