THE JUBILEE OF OTAGO GOLD MINING.

Otago Witness, Issue 2934, 8 June 1910, Page 81

THE JUBILEE OF OTAGO GOLD MINING.

(Daily Times, June 3,) It is satisfactory to know that in the Tuapeka district, alive to the importance of its past in connection with the history of the development of this province, timely consideration is being given to proposals for the fitting celebration of the jubilee of the discovery at Gabriel's Gully of the first remunerative goldfield in Otago. There is no chapter in the history of gold discovery in New. Zealand so stirring as that which deals with the finding of the rich auriferous deposits of this province in the early sixties. The story is circumstantially told in the late Mr Vincent Pyke's valuable "History of the Early Gold Discoveries in Otago," and will be always worthy of the attention and respect of the rising generation. Formerly a digger on the Victorian goldfields, Gabriel Read -made known, early in June, 1861. hie discovery of payable gold at the spot which now perpetuates his name. The news that the deposits were so rich and easily worked reached in due time the whole of ifce Australian goldfields, then just beginning to be on the wane, with the result that thousands of miners came down to New Zealand to try ta better their fortunes. By the end of that year gold to the value of nearly three-quarters of a million sterling had been produced from the locality, and the population of Otago had increased in six months from 12,000 to 30,000. In the end this pioneer of the Otago goldfields, whose name is imperishably associated -with the historic spot where Nature has these many years been obliterating the scars left by an army of miners, received £IOOO from the Provincial Government in recognition pf his services and as bonus for a discovery which he placed unreservedly in the hands of the Government. The record of the discovery of gold in Otago figures the more prominently in the record of the rise and progress of an industry which has contributed over seventy-five million pounds sterling to the capital wealth of New Zealand, since amongst the Victorian miners drawn to these shores by the reports from Gabriel's Gully were not a few who later on figured prominently in pioneer work on the West Coast and Thames goldfields. There is abundant reason why public sentiment in Otago should be stirred to a keen realisation of the propriety of celebrating fittingly next June the fiftieth anniversary of the date of the discovery of the hidden wealth of Gabriel's Gully. The question of the form such a celebration should take will be one for careful consideration, for which there is fortunately ample time. The idea of making the past glories of Gabriel's Gully live again by the establishment, as suggested, of a mining camp in full swing on the identical scene of past mining activity will probably commend itself to the local mind. A more comprehensive form of-celebration -would be a mining exhibition in which the development of the industry from the days of the employment of the most primitive devices to those of the most modern methods and appliances could be traced through the agency of a typical display. But the point we would emphasise here is the desirability that the celebration, whatever its precise form, should be national in character, and that the liberal co-operation of the Government should Jt>e cheerfully lent for the furtherance of the project in order that the result may fittingly commemorate an event which in its results influenced the future of the Dominion and laid the foundation of the prosperity of Dunedin and Otago.