A Queer Gold Story.

Opunake Times, Volume II, Issue 65, 15 February 1895, Page 2

A Queer Gold Story.

Peeth, February 12. An astonishing story, combining all the elements of a first-class romance, including the discovery of a mountain of gold and great slaughter of natives, has been published. The scene is laid somewhere beyond the Ninety-Mile. Two prospectors, Michael Fitzgerald and William Parry, have been arrested in Sydney since the story came out.

The story told by their mates is that a syndicate of eight was formed for the purpose of prospecting, six of whom went out in December last and camped at Freshwater Hotel, on the road to Mount Margaret. Fitzgerald, while engaged in tracking camels which had wandered away, entered a patch of dense forest, in which he caught sight of an immense outcrop of gold. Every boulder showed gold, The hill, which is fifteen feet wide at the summit, is 250 feet long and 70 in height, and is described as full of gold. In another outcrop the casing also contained rich gold.

Later information, however, tones down these glowing accounts, and says the quartz is nice battery stone, but not sensationally rich. During the absence of the prospectors at the find, the blacks raided the camps, A man named Robinson, who joined them in the pursuit of the natives, stages that the latter were slaughtered wholesale, without regard to age or sex; infants were-taken from their mothers and their brains dashed out on the rocks ; and unnameable outrages were perpetrated oipwomen.