Tailings 2003 - 2006

Tailings - Black and white photographs by Alan Knowles As a wee blond kid with stick-thin legs protruding from my stubbie shorts I stood in plastic sandals at the bottom of a huge gravel pit being deafened by water jets sluicing the Knowles gold claim in the Kyeburn Diggings. My dad's uncle and cousins had worked the claim since the Depression; and an ounce of their nuggets magnified by water in a glass pill bottle tantalised me from the mantelpiece of our Queenstown home. Over the hills from Kyeburn at Naseby was where my mother's grandfather, Harry Wergeman Robinson, was based as Warden of the Goldfields in the 1860s and 70s. Thus my childhood was crammed with stories of gold rushes, fabulous finds, bushrangers, drunkenness, drownings and disasters. On family outings I could be found panning with a picnic plate. Only once did I experience gold fever when a few specks appeared while panning up the Skippers by the Shotover River. A kindly George Thompson showed me jam jars of bran and small nuggets and warned me about claim jumping as every creek was under claim! I knew well the fate awaiting claim jumpers, for across the gully from our home lived an old gambler and boatman from the mining days called Jock Edgar who didn't mind his little neighbour turning up before breakfast to hear his stories. He would stir his porridge from his bed and I'd stare at the gold ring on his finger with its little nugget going round and round as he thrilled me with stories of claim fights and adventure in early Queenstown. When he lost that ring he offered me a fabulous £1 reward to find it. I searched and searched … gold, huh! Another old miner, Johnny Seffer, lived with his goats and chooks near our school in Queenstown, and was the object of childhood fascination as he was rumoured to have shot a man for jumping his claim in the Moke. Perhaps a truer story was that he kept preserving jars of gold under his floorboards. Later the thought of being shot didn't seem to deter my mates and me from reassembling the monitor at the mine on top of Queenstown Hill and blasting the dirt and rocks in search of the mother lode. We also powered up the unattended State Battery that serviced the scheelite mines on Mt Juda behind Glenorchy, and dropped rocks into the jaw crusher’s maw to watch them crack and turn to dust. Mining and its products were everywhere. As a schoolboy working for pocket money in the coal-smoke-belching TSS Earnslaw’s saloon. I had the stokers guffawing at my puny attempts to shovel coal into the furnaces. Then I would trip over 1cwt bags of scheelite as I scuttled back to make tea and serve scones. At my mate John Anderson's home there was copper ore piled in the drive where his family were bagging the glittery green rock and sending it off for assay. But our visits to the copper mine in Moke Creek had nothing to do with digging the stuff out of the ground. We had discovered where his gunsmith father had hidden his Luger pistols, and so armed with one each and a box of Sten gun ammo we would head to the copper mine for a shoot up …. but that's another story. This suite of photographs is about revisiting with my camera the sites of my early exploits. I have following in the footsteps my photographer father, J.D.Knowles, and his uncle and cousins, and great grandfather Harry Robinson. I trod the now silent tailings and visited the sites of famous and infamous events, to exhume Otago's past in this suite of photographs. Exhibited at Idiom Studio, Level 2, 147 Cuba St, Wellington, August 29 - October 7, 2006.