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On a late
autumn evening in 1861, a lone Australian prospector by the name of Gabriel Read
dug a hole in the gravel banks of Gabriels Gully Creek
and found "gold shining like the stars of Orion
on a dark, frosty night".
On returning to Dunedin, Read
duly reported his discovery to the provincial authorities, igniting the first of
the great Otago gold rushes. By July 1861, the population of the goldfield was
11,472 – more than twice that of contemporary Dunedin. Later the diggers shifted
camp to the head of the valley and eventually moved on to the ridge where the
township of Blue Spur was established.
At the place where the Gabriels
Gully and Weatherstons streams meet before flowing onto the Tuapeka River, a
third and more permanent settlement sprang up. Known initially as The Junction,
the fledgling town was a renamed Lawrence in honour of one of the British heroes
of the Indian "War of Independence."
At this time hard-working Chinese
immigrants came to the Goldfields. Shunned by the European miners, forced to
live on the edge of town and burdened with huge discriminatory taxes, they
nevertheless arrived in large numbers. They reworked the areas previously mined,
plus the more remote and less accessible sites.
The Lawrence
Chinese Camp, the earliest and most important Chinese heritage site in New
Zealand, is undergoing a detailed archaeological survey in order to commence the
planned authentic re-creation of the village.
Please visit
www.lawrence.co.nz for a more
comprehensive history of the Lawrence-Tuapeka area.
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