A gold-mining childhood is protracted

Press, 26 December 1987, Page 17

A gold-mining childhood is protracted

By

GARRY ARTHUR

lan McEwin has what some might call an obsession. He grew up in the West Coast gold-mining community of Waiuta (now a popular ghost town), where his father managed a battery for crushing gold-bearing quartz from the rich reef that gave nearby Reefton its name. Although he left there when he was 15, he has never got Waiuta out of his blood. Today he lives in retirement in Avonside surrounded by memorabilia of the old mines, and admits to being preoccupied with his nostalgia for the goldmining days of his childhood.

Over his bed hangs a mobile made of metal cut-outs showing machinery from the Blackwater mine — the poppet head, the battery, a tube mill, the pelton wheel. All swing overhead as

silent reminders of the place he loved.

“I loved the roar of the stampers that crushed the quartz,” says Mr McEwin. “You couldn’t hear yourself speak. In fact, I like the sound so much that I wrote to the goldmines in South Africa asking them to send me a tape-recording of a big stamp battery, but they said they could not help. I’d written to the wrong place.” In his book-lined den are the gold-miner’s short-handled shovel and pick-axe that he had specially brass-plated in memory of Waiuta, and in his workshop is the gold drill that was used for taking a tiny conical sample from bullion bars for assay. It was made by a blacksmith, and Mr McEwin prefers it to his electric Black and Decker.

The window of his workshop is a cellophane version of a stained-glass picture, showing in brilliant colours aspects of the old Waiuta goldmines. A versatile hobbyist, he drew it and constructed it himself.

But best of all, perhaps, are the old glass photographic plates used by a Silesian German, Jos Divis, to make the marvellous photographs which are the principal historical record of Waiuta. Divis was a gold-miner whom lan McEwin remembers as always smiling and having a very effusive manner. "We thought him a bit unusual,” he says. “He always wore the same clothes. He wore puttees wound around his legs, and a bush hat with a wide band. His jacket had many pockets. He looked very military.”

lan McEwin’s father was a keen photographer, too, so the pair became close friends. Jos Divis had some beautiful platecameras and the glass plates that he produced have such sharp images that a Christchurch

photographer told Mr McEwin they could be enlarged to wall size without losing anything. Some of the German’s pictures have been used to illustrate the four books that have been written about Waiuta. He also had a large wooden stereoscope for viewing pictures in three dimensions, but none of his 3-D pictures were of Waiuta. They were of China, Japan and other countries.

As a German national, Jos Divis was interned during World War 11, on Quail Island in Lyttelton harbour, Mr McEwin believes.

“Why he became a miner, is beyond my comprehension,” he says. “He had been at Waihi before Waiuta. He had the only real record of Waiuta, and I don’t know why people don’t acknowledge that a bit more. It would make a good book.”

lan McEwin’s father was an experienced quartz gold man. He had worked at the Wealth of Nations and the Progress mines at Reefton before starting as battery manager at Waiuta in 1906. But he had started at the bottom, doing the lowliest job of all — washing down the "slime tables,” the sloping tables covered with canvas that collected the very fine gold particles which in earlier times would have been washed down the creek.

“He gradually worked up to battery superintendent at the Blackwater mine on the Snowy River at Waiuta, run by Consolidated Goldfields of the U.K. He got £5OO a year.” Later, a new flotation process was introduced at the Prohibition mine, and everyone moved up there.

Although he is so keen on Waiuta, lan McEwin would never have made a miner. He gets claustrophobia. “I only went

down the mine once,” he says, “and I was quite frightened. My cousin, Alf Saunders, worked as a miner, and we went down in the cage with the miners once. It was 2500 ft deep and there were 14 levels. When we got down to the chamber it was wet and greasy, and the air was foul. The side legs were all crooked with the pressure of the stone.” His cousin’s working place was up a ladder into a black hole that went a long way into a narrow spot where the reef ran through, only about six inches wide.

The miners set their own charges of gelignite to blast out the quartz, and fired them, too. lan McEwin was surprised to learn that in spite of all he had read about the oppression of South African blacks, they never had to do that. Before the charges were fired in South African mines, all miners were cleared out and the connected charges were exploded from one plunger. One visit to the Prohibition mine was enough for him. “I couldn’t get out fast enough,” he recalls. Thanks to his father’s caution, he always had a healthy respect for gelignite — well, fairly healthy. His father had told them never to touch gelignite if they came across any unexploded sticks. “We never touched it,” he says, “but we’d get our shanghais and try to set it off. We never succeeded.”

He remembers the story of a mine worker, George White, who was set to work preparing a bit of ground for a staff bowling green. His pick struck a bit of “frozen” gelignite in the mine waste, or mullock, and it ex-

ploded, doing him severe injury. “He got a little compensation, and the mine manager, Ernie Spencer, brought it in to him. ‘Here you are White,’ he said. ‘Here’s your compo. We’d have had a good year but for you.’ ”

Mr McEwin left Waiuta in 1934. After studying at Christchurch Teachers’ College, his first posting for his probationary year was at Reefton, and his first appointment as a teacher was at Lyell, another rich quartz mining centre, between Inangahua Junction and Murchison. Gold has been in his blood all his life, but he has never found much of it himself. The little he did win as a child, with a sluice-

box above the girls’ swimming pool on Waiuta’s Snowy River, he had made into a wedding ring for his wife by a Nelson jeweller.

In 1951 the Prohibition shaft fell in, the mine gear was flooded, and the mine was closed. Gold was then fetching a comparatively low price. Attempts have been made in recent times to put a drive down to meet the reef below the flooding, but without success.

Now old Waiuta lives on only in the recollections of old-timers who worked there and of a handful of people like lan McEwin, whose childhood memories are as rich as the reef that drew their families there.