ARCHAEOLOGY

Earnscleugh Tailings receive heritage recognition

At Earnscleugh, mounds of stones and gravel create a desolate landscape highlighting the massive scale of gold dredging undertaken during the 19th and 20th centuries.

WRITERS: Marion Sutton, Heather Bauchop, Sarah Gallagher, David Watt IMAGE: Kevin Jones

The site on the banks of the Mata-au/ Clutha River has now been added to the New Zealand Heritage List/ Rārangi Kōrero as a Category 1 historic place. Director Southern Region, Sheila Watson, says the Earnscleugh Tailings (List No. 9267)have outstanding historic, technological and archaeological significance, representing the evolution of mining and its associated technologies from the early 1860s through to the 1960s. Contact Energy worked closely with Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga to ensure the listing respected the site’s future and the historical significance. Boyd Brindson, Head of Hydro Generation for Contact, says it was a pleasure working together. “We will continue to work in tandem with Heritage New Zealand Pouere Taonga to ensure the continued preservation of the Earnscleugh Tailings site and do our bit to tell its story.” In 1862, miners, Horatio Hartley and Christopher Reilly, walked away from a beach on the Clutha/Mata-au with their fortunes made – lodging 1000 ounces of gold with an astonished gold receiver. As thousands of miners followed in their wake and goldfields became worked out, miners looked for new ways to extract gold. Dredging was one of these new technologies. While spoon and bucket dredges worked the Clutha/Mata-au in the 1860s, it was not until the 1880s when Charles Sew Hoy developed the steam-powered bucket dredge that dredging boomed. Over 200 dredges mined Otago’s river and old river channels, recovering tens of thousands of ounces of gold and transforming the landscape. Dredges operated on the Earnscleugh Flat from the 1890s through to 1963. The scale was enormous. Huge machines churning through the river gravels transformed the Flat into an eerie landscape of tailings, a huge snail trail of gravels marking the path of the dredges. There was a modest revival in the dredging industry as the price of gold rose during the 1930s. The Clutha Dredging Company’s giant dredge, the Alexandra, worked into the 1960s. It was the last dredge operating in Otago. You can read a copy of the listing report on our website. n

The Earnscleugh flat paddock dredge tailings with the Clutha River/Mata-Au to the right.