Determination and true grit defined the early days of Golden Bay’s golden days – Stuff.co.nz

Supplied

Parapara Dam near Richmond Flat, was built by the Parapara Hydraulic Sluicing company at the end of the 19th century.

COLUMN: Hikers through the Aorere Goldfields this summer will no doubt be impressed by Druggans Dam, by far the biggest relic of the Collingwood goldfields.

Lesser known, and harder to access, are two other contemporary dams one up the Parapara River and the highest at Boulder Lake.

For sheer perseverance, the Parapara Hydraulic Sluicing Company holds the record with its 25-year stint in the field.

Some 80 tons of cement went into their 20m-wide Parapara Gorge dam near Richmond Flat, built around 1895. Sluicing achievements of this company include washing a whole mountain away and irrevocably diverting the Glen Gyle catchment into the Parapara Valley. Well done boys!

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In terms of determination though, few sagas beat the building of the dam across the outlet to Boulder Lake, high in the barren Quartz Range, 24km inland from Collingwood.

Floated in London in December, 1896, with an astronomical capital of 150,000, the Collingwood Goldfields Company had good reason to feel optimistic. The conglomerate drifts of the mountainside claim were known to contain rich gold.

Supplied/Nelson Mail

Thanks to the dam, Boulder Lake once occupied much of the glacial valley

One party of early prospectors picked up seven ounces of gold just by turning over large blocks of quartz. Imagine what full scale sluicing could uncover, so went the rationale.

Impossible country meant that the 50-pound bags of cement had to be carried in on workmans backs for the last part of the climb to the 1000 metre-high dam site. Although just three metres high, the dam nearly doubled the size of the glacial lake.

A sawmill was established to mill the matai and rimu needed for the eight kilometres of fluming needed to carry the water down from the intake below the dam. The timber had to be punted across the Aorere River and taken three kilometres by wagon before being trucked on a horse tramline up to the flume construction site.

Over 100 tons of pipes and equipment were transported up from Dunedin and slung across the Aorere River by aerial ropeway. The enormous flurry of activity even prompted Collingwood storekeepers to open temporary branches in the Quartz Ranges.

Sluicing began in August 1899. Despite a more than adequate water supply, returns at the claim were much less than was hoped for,

By November of the following year, the company was in liquidation. The operation carried on under a tribute arrangement with former employees.

Prospects for the new owners were looking bright until 1905, when a big flood carried away part of the fluming. Neither workers or owners were prepared to pay for the costly repairs and all the installed equipment was sold off.

Supplied

Algie Soper mustering the Haupiri Range

Amongst it all operated the graziers who leased Haupiri Station, the two runholders being John (Jack) Flowers who started it, and son Sidney (Sid) Flowers who took it over around 1920.

This 90 square kilometre run - bordered by the Haupiri Range, Slate River, Mt Hardy, Boulder Lake and Snow River up to the Lead Hills would surely rate as one of the most ambitious grazing leases in the country.

From Puramahoi, the sheep had to be driven for three days up over Pararara Peak and along Big Hill Face (Walker Ridge) and down to the flats at the top of Boulder Lake.

To make the sheep think others had come before them, one boys job was to go ahead with a small sack of sheep-dung and use his hand to smear it into the trunks of trees along the route.

It would prove not the blizzards or the steep rocky faces that defeated the graziers up here, but the errant goldminers who came during the depression and shot sheep for both meat and sport.

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In its heyday, Boulder Lake Dam and Control Gate

Sid Flowers recalled how one day he came across 13 shot sheep piled into a heap, only their fillets and back legs knifed off.

He wanted the police to go look for the miner-poachers, but they were not keen on long bush walks where they might be mistaken for an animal and shot.

Sid put in 850 sheep in his final year, 1933, but could only find 350 to muster out. While his father had some admiration for the dam builders of Boulder Lake, his son did not share his sentiment and one day packed in a load of dynamite to blast open the dam and thereby reclaim the extensive flats at the head of the lake.

Little remains today to tell the tale of the dambuilders up here. What flumings did survive have all rotted away. Even the devastating tailings down below have largely merged into the landscape.

But three dams Druggans, Parapara and Boulder - remain as solid tribute to the enormous human effort and endurance.

Supplied/Melanie Walker

The view from Druggans Dam today. Photo by Melanie Walker.

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Determination and true grit defined the early days of Golden Bay's golden days - Stuff.co.nz