Something that grabbed our eye while staying in Greymouth, the town we stopped in after our night in Nelson, was "Shantytown" a few kilometres out in the middle of nowhere. We had a bit of time on our side so we headed out and ended up spending four hours wandering around this excellent theme town.
Shantytown is basically a history lesson in the goldrush on the west coast in the mid-nineteenth century. The main street features the various shops,foundries, banks and jails of the day.
We took a steam train into the forest where the family fortune grew considerably with a session of goldpanning. It wasn't so much the gimmicks that made the place so interesting as the stories of life out there. Towns of ten thousand people leapt from the mud one year and were gone the next. Local diggers became Prime Ministers of all of New Zealand and even the massive Irish contingent made their mark, rioting for home rule and being a bit pissed as usual. And it carries on today. Modern techniques mean that gold prospectors go into old mines, get what was missed the first time around and then, as part of their permission from local government, restore the landscape to it's preninteenth century condition, as many of these mines and surrounding areas were left as filthy open gashes on the local land. The nearby town of Ross is the site of a large industrial goldmining operation today. The guy behind the operation has tried to buy the whole town from the residents so he can strip it for gold. They're not moving.
we want gold
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