From the kitchen, a small window gave us a tremendous view up the valley and the house was perfectly sheltered on three sides by high Pine trees. Being in a pretty steep sided valley I realized that we would lose the sun at mid afternoon in the winter and the house would need a couple of workaholics to restore, but Ann and I were captivated by its beautiful and quiet situation. We decided to attend the auction and bid for it, knowing we could easily afford the property if we sold our house.
.
As it happened we had a buyer interested in our house but he was only prepared to pay the same price as we'd paid for it. We weren't too keen, as by now we'd owned the property for almost a year and had upgraded it quite a bit but the pressure was on now if we wanted to buy the Avoca Valley property so we decided to accept his offer.
.
Although we had been to a few auctions and had a good idea of the procedure I had never made a bid to buy a property at an auction. There were only about twenty people at the auction rooms when we arrived and a few more dribbled in as the auctioneer started his rigmarole on the terms and conditions of the sale. I began to feel a bit nervous as the bidding began and was surprised at the low amount of the first bid being only twenty-five thousand dollars. They then rose in one thousand-dollar bids to thirty thousand without me raising a finger. The auctioneer, who was working pretty hard failed to get another thousand-dollar bid so dropped the bidding to five hundred dollars which seemed to spark quite a bit more interest and the price shot up to thirty three thousand five hundred. After a long pause the auctioneer then said, "Going once, Going twice," and was just about to say, "Sold" when I shot my hand up and bid. The auctioneer said, " Fresh blood" but for all his effort he couldn't wring another dollar from the buyers so he knocked the property down to us for thirty four thousand. It was only when I when I went up to pay the ten per cent deposit that I realized I'd forgotten my cheque book which was quite embarrassing but having concluded a sale they were quite happy to wait for us while we shot off home to get it.
.
I'd have to say that Ann and I worked harder on this property than any other property we'd owned. We cleaned, we altered, we painted but I think the best thing we did in the house was to replace the small wooden window in the kitchen with a very large aluminium bay window. Taking up almost the full width of the kitchen it gave us a fantastic million-dollar view way up the valley.
.
The previous owner's brother dropped in one day to inspect our renovations. He lived next door, was about eighty-five and was a bit of a character. He took one surprised look at the new kitchen window and after a minute or two said, " How much did that cost you? When I told him he said, "Bugger me, my brother only paid that much to build the whole bloody house." I had to laugh but then his brother had built the house more than fifty years ago. A week or two later the old bugger who had a couple of large glasshouses on his property had climbed up on top of one of them to replace some broken glass. He suffered badly from arthritis and it must have locked him up while he was up there. The poor bugger couldn't get down by himself so we were called out to help him. He sure was a goer.
.
By now I'd sold all our sections at West Melton except one, which we kept for future access into our neighbour's land on the off chance that we might purchase some more of his property in the future. We also still had almost forty acres left, behind our sub-division which we hoped to sub-divide some time in the future. This was accessed along a small cul-de-sac named Laird place. Wow! We must be coming up in the world, having a street named after us.
.
We had submitted a few street names to the council including Westview Crescent and Laird Place, which were the two they eventually accepted.
Although there was tons of work to keep me busy on our Valley property I felt I needed something more challenging, something more interesting to do. We'd had a go at most things, shopkeeping, motels, horse breeding and I even had a go at the share market for a few years with a portfolio of shares that were going pretty well until the market collapsed in 1987. Luckily for me, I'd sold a large bundle of shares the day before the crash otherwise it would have cost me a packet. As it was, the share market crash had cost me quite a bit and I lost confidence in it completely. I thought, better stick with what I know, buying and selling property. That's the caper.
.
Reading the 'For Sale' columns in the newspaper one day, an advert for a gold dredge for sale caught my eye. Gold prospecting was something I'd dreamed about doing since I met a young adventurous chap on the boat coming out to New Zealand who reckoned he was coming out here to go prospecting on the west coast of the South Island. I went to see the dredge the following day. It was owned by a Dutch guy who gave me the impression that he seemed to know a fair bit about gold mining and was quite happy to impart his knowledge to me. He said his name was Yohan but liked to be called John and he could see I was very keen and interested in buying his gold dredge. It was a relatively simple affair consisting of a steel suction nozzle that connected to a six- inch flexible pipe about two metres long and a metal sluice box was attached to the end of the pipe.
.
John spent a fair bit of time explaining all the ins and outs of gold prospecting and said he was off down south at the weekend to explore some of the old gold towns around Cromwell and asked if I would like to go with him. I jumped at the opportunity and we set off a couple of days later. John picked me up and once out on the main road he shot off like a bat out of hell, never stopping till we arrived in Cromwell which is about four hundred and fifty kilometres from Christchurch. He was one of those chaps who once he set off anywhere, just didn't want to stop for anything until he arrived at his destination. He later told me of one time he took one of his aunts on a long trip and she just about burst her bladder not wanting to ask him for a toilet stop. After riding with him a few times I knew just exactly how she felt.
.
We arrived there safely and booked a cabin in the camping ground at little place called Bannockburn. It was getting on by the time we arrived there but once we'd had a good look around and got settled in John pulled out a pile of maps so we sat down and studied the area for a while. The maps showed dozens of creeks and old gold workings in the surrounding area and one of the creeks ran right through the camping ground. This camping ground had originally been located adjacent to the Bannockburn Creek but when the government decided to build a huge electric hydro dam on the largest river in New Zealand, the mighty Clutha River at Clyde the beautiful camping ground had to be re-located on to much higher ground as this whole area was to be flooded and years later came to be known as Lake Dunstan.
.
The cabins were relatively new and were beds were extremely comfortable but that didn't stop me from waking up early as I was extra keen to get cracking. Making a breakfast of bacon and eggs I roused John who said he was gasping for a cup of tea and a smoke. After breakfast we got all our gear ready and drove down to the Creek at the original lower camping ground. We were surprised to see that we weren't the first ones down there. Already there were about half a dozen families along about half a kilometre of the Creek. They were working away with all sorts of equipment, gold pans, wood and metal sluice boxes and the greatest assortment of home made apparatus I'd ever clapped my eyes on.
.
I stopped to watch a group of four women sitting at an old log table slowly panning the washdirt their men had put through the sluice boxes. I was just thinking, they're working so slow I would never have the patience to do that job when John hurried me along to find a good possie to start working. Finding a likely spot further along where the creek was about fifteen feet wide and two or three foot deep we assembled the dredge on the shingle bank and then slipped it into water. John told me to hold the nozzle of the dredge under the water and to be ready when he started the motor. He had already explained the principle of how a gold suction dredge worked and it seemed relatively simple. He sat a five-horse petrol motor on the bank. This was directly coupled to a two-inch water pump which this in turn pumped the water through a one an a half inch fire hose to the three quarter inch venturi inside the suction nozzle of the dredge. The Venturi increases the pressure of the water dramatically and creates a vacuum at the nozzle. Resting the steel nozzle on the bed of the creek I could feel the powerful suction tearing away the gravel from the bottom and shooting it through the six inch two metre long flexible pipe connected to the dredge that was floating a few metres behind me on a couple of blown up truck tyres.
.
Compared with the motley lot of simple equipment all the other prospectors were using, John's dredge looked pretty sophisticated and before long a group of them had congregated on the bank showing a lot of interest in our dredge and how it worked. John explained to them the principle of how his suction dredge would recover gold. He said that as the gravel flowed through the dredge, the gold, being seven times heavier than the gravel would settle between the riffle bars that were set on a length of coconut matting on the bottom of the sluice box. Some of the onlookers seemed very doubtful, saying the material was going through the dredge too fast and the gold, being very fine in this area would just go straight through and back into the creek. By now the tailings were piling up at the back of the dredge so John started clearing them away with his long handled shovel.
.
After we'd worked pretty hard for over an hour I was very keen to have a look in the sluice box so I asked John and he stopped the motor. We emptied the contents of the box into a couple of gold pans, called dishes by some of the old timers and John showed me how to pan the washdirt on the edge of the creek. Although gold panning is a skilled and tedious job, it can also be quite exciting. I watched John as he submerged his pan at the edge of the creek. Crouching down he swirled the pan in a circular motion just keeping enough water in the pan which was slightly tipped forward to take the lighter sand and shingle over the front edge leaving the heavier minerals, and if you're lucky some 'gold' to sink to the bottom. The back and forward swirling movement must be very gentle and even though John seemed to be a quite experienced at panning, it still took him over fifteen minutes before I could see what was left in the bottom of the pan.
.
John kept running his fingers through what was left of the wash on the bottom. All I could see was a handful of black sand and not a spec of gold. There were also about a dozen tiny reddish coloured stones that he said were semi-precious stones called garnets but these were of little value being only suitable for industrial use so he turfed them back into the creek. He then suggested that I have a go at the other panful and told me to pan it into his empty pan just in case I missed any gold. This was a good idea as it meant I could work faster without the fear of losing what we were prospecting for. I actually panned the wash from pan to pan three or four times for practice but still not a skerick of gold, just one reasonable sized garnet that I kept. Maybe some of the old timers were right when they said that we could be sucking the gravel through the dredge too fast and any fine gold was just going back into the creek. One of them suggested we could be better to prospect over on the West Coast where the gold was more nuggety.
.
We enjoyed a couple of days prospecting up and down this creek without any luck but on the third day we found the creek bed completely dry. It was a lovely hot day and one of the annoyed prospectors told us a couple of farmers were irrigating upstream so we stowed the dredge into John's station wagon and drove down into Cromwell. This was an area of pretty dangerous rivers where many gold miner's lost their lives in the early days when gold was just about everywhere to be found. John soon found an easy accessible spot where a small creek ran into the Kawarau River. Ideal, I thought as we carted the dredge down and coupled it up by the edge of the water.
.
Two hours later I was peering into the dish John had just about finished panning and sure enough, there mixed with the black sand were a couple of dozen tiny specs of gold. He pulled out a small glass pill bottle, filled it to the brim with water, licked his dry finger and transferred the flecks of gold to the rim of the bottle where they sank faster than the eye could see to the bottom. We spent another couple of days in this area prospecting a few more creeks but what little gold we recovered was extremely fine, so fine in fact, some of it would almost float on water. John said it was called flour gold and his dredge may have been a bit too powerful to recover it all. We set off home the next day as John had to start work having an eight to five job. I'd made up my mind to buy his dredge as I had ideas of modifying it and the price he was asking was very reasonable. I'd always thought that I had a bit of an inventive mind and knew there was good money being made by inventors. It also follows that money could be made from improving any thing that had already been invented. These were some of the thoughts that ran that ran through my active mind as I dozed off heading back to Christchurch.
.
After a few months Ann and I soon had our Avoca valley home renovated to our liking except for the garage which was under the house and only had a dirt floor so we set about concreting it. That done, at last we now had time to explore and enjoy the fantastic setting the house was situated in. About half an acre of the two-acre property was taken up by a lovely orchard with every type of fruit imaginable, apples, pears, plums, apricots, you name them, we had them, or did we. I think the birds ate more of them than we did.
.
Climbing up the hillside of the property to explore the boundary we soon realized the shelter-belt trees were about ninety feet high and sadly in need of topping. We were still haunted a bit by the experience we had at Rolleston during the huge Northwest storm in seventy-four, when many of our high shelter belt trees came crashing down almost destroying the garage and workshop. The last thing we wanted was a repeat of that. The trees here protected us from the strong south-west winds that occasionally swept down the picturesque valley where the verdant slopes rise to steeper rocky outcrops like so many valleys on the Peninsula.
.
We decided to have them topped and employed a company aptly named Beaver Tree Services Ltd. They did an excellent job. I used to watch in awe as the guy would clamber nearly a hundred feet to the top of a tree with a chain-saw dangling from his belt. Starting his chainsaw he would then lob off six foot lengths which would come crashing down noisily to the ground. They must have topped about seventy trees and when they'd finished I could see about six months work ahead of us to clean up the mess. Luckily I had a couple of mates who wanted firewood for the winter so they came up every weekend for two or three months working their hearts out helping me to cut up the heavy logs and then cart them away home on a large overloaded trailer. I don't know what I would have done without them and we finished up with about three year's firewood supply.
.
At every opportunity, I'd stow the gold dredge in the back of the car and be off to the West Coast to prospect the many dozens of rivers and creeks between Greymouth and Westport. I used to base myself in the camping ground at the small town of Reefton. In those days it was pretty rough and ready but a good place to meet the odd interesting old prospector from whom I could glean a bit of local knowledge. The camping ground consisted of a dozen tiny two-man army huts, an ablution block and a large cookhouse. Getting up early I'd be one of the first in the cook-house frying up some bacon and eggs, the smell of which would soon entice others in. After a hearty breakfast, which would have to last me till I got back in the evening I would head off south toward Greymouth, prospecting a different river each day.
.
The first one I tried was Slab Hut Creek only a few miles out of Reefton and it was pretty easy going once I got the motor started. Fortunately the creek bed didn't have too many large stones that could block the suction nozzle. Sometimes an odd elongated stone would shoot up the nozzle and jam and not wan0ting to stop the motor I'd slip my hand up the nozzle to dislodge it. The first time I tried it the suction was so great it tore my protective rubber glove clean off.
Thank you for visiting my page at Angelfire.
Please come back and visit again!
http://sites.netscape.net/douglaslaird/lsd
My Favorite Web sites
My Favorite Things About Angelfire