Gold Rush, Otago 1861-64

In terms of time, place and status, real people of different names, Adam and Rebecca Spencer are both offspring of England’s lower class who are despatched from their homeland as convicts bound for the penal colony of Hobart Tasmania. His father, a Welsh blacksmith, for breaking and entering to remove bed sheets and silver for conversion into cash to feed his family; his mother, for soliciting and stealing in London’s red light district to feed herself. Both serve their ten-year terms before each is granted their ‘Ticket of Leave’.


Rebecca’s father is despatched to the same penal colony prisons by a court judge, crime unknown, but status definitely lower class and poor, thus qualifying for Britain’s policy of ridding itself of ‘riff raff’ unbefitting citizen status in the land of their birth.


In terms of time and place, real people with different names and status, and a decade or so younger than Adam and Rebecca: Edward and Robyn Fraser are from opposite ends of England’s entrenched class system. He is a regimental captain in the English armed services, and son of an English Lord. She is the daughter of a mother-child pair who serve in the household of the English Lord. The son and servant marry over the objections of the regimental officer class and those of respectively the father and the master. They escape these objections by taking ship for the goldfields of Victoria, Australia.


In Melbourne, the three men meet by chance and immediately form a friendship based on their instincts and their common English heritage. By now, Adam and Rebecca are hoteliers; the entirely fictitious Will and Victoria are general store keepers


Edward strikes it rich, but loses all to a fraudster, in consequence of which the three friends form a mutually beneficial ‘partnership of comrades’ with the aim of enriching all three families through the Midas touch of Edward, while at the same time, through goldfield settlement,  find a safe haven they can all call home.


Adam and Rebecca, William and Robyn see the partnership as way of casting off of the invidious ‘convicts’ label which has tormented them from Hobart to the Ballarat Goldfields to the City of Melbourne. Edward simply jumps at the chance to escape his ignominious humiliation by travelling on.


And so Edward again boards ship, this time bound for Dunedin and inland rivers, vowing to again strike it rich so his wife and children, along with his now family protectors, the Spencers and the Binghams,  can join him in this distant land of opportunity.


In the following span of two years, the gold digger and the goldfield tradesmen with their wives and families discover Central Otago’s roadless, treeless, gale-swept and mountainous landscape hundreds of miles from food and shelter is an ever-present daunting obstacle to their dreams of a safe haven in which to work, live and raise their children. 


The three families struggle to survive the mortal dangers offered up by the extreme elements of all-enveloping snow, killer floods and wildly alternating extremes of hot and cold, often in the course of just one day and night. Wise diggers tramp in groups, all too aware of roaming displaced Australian bushrangers with little respect of the law and even less regard for the life and liberty of single travellers on horse or afoot. These challenges of man and nature threaten death or crippling injury for all who venture into the high country wilderness as they follow the lure of Otago’s golden treasure. At one time, in 1862, more than 20,000 join the search.