Dr Shaw visits Collingwood during the 1857 Goldrush

                       Collingwood and Pakawau, 1864. Artist: Jane Stowe

 

 "Nothing could possibly exceed the singularity of the scene that presents itself to the                                traveller on entering the town of Collingwood." 

So said Englishman Dr John Shaw of his 1857 visit to the gold boom township in his book "A Gallop to the Antipodes", published in England the following year. An inveterate globe-trotter, Dr John Shaw from Boston in Lincolnshire, Englan was a wealthy eccentric, a shrewd, scholarly bachelor who visited Australia and New Zealand twice and published two books about his travels there.

 Despite the pedantic Victorian wordiness, Shaw's keen eye for detail and tart, gossipy style  make his books a delight to read, if in small doses. Below is an account of his stay at Edward Everett's "hotel" in Collingwood, at the time full of cheek-to-jowl shanties offering a bed, food and liquor, their proprietors all willing and eager to relieve would-be diggers of their hard-won gold. Being granted a "bush licence" by the Nelson Provincial Council to sell liquor at a goldfield was pretty much a licence to print money! 

"There were several houses of accommodation both for diggers and visitors, all possessing peculiarities which would have startled some and amused others of the old world unacquainted with life as it is carried on at the diggings. I was strongly recommended to one of them as possessing many advantages over the rest. I repaired to Mr. Everett's establishment for that accommodation which I believed to be the best at the diggings. After dinner, which consisted of a huge cut of mutton, as clumsily carved as if some of the miners had been chopping it with their tools, I had an opportunity, after appeasing my appetite, to look around me and take a sketch, only in words, of this very extraordinary house of accommodation.

Seated in the dining-room, I looked in vain for carpets, sofas, pictures, paper, mirrors, and other things useful as well as ornamental. I beheld, however, everything that was useful, entirely bereft of the ornamental. To the right hand of the table where I had dined were suspended from the wall two Macintoshes, and a towel, and a weighing-machine; half a sheep, with a stone bottle dangling from the same nail; three saws oscillating in the wind, which came down from the roof, being close to the head of a dead fish, with its eye sufficiently lifelike to be expressive, as it were, of both surprise and horror at the operation of being sawed, of which it seemed singularly conscious by a peculiar development of the eye. In the centre stood a table, on which was placed an orange box in conjunction with a huge tin dish, destined for the reception of a quarter of mutton, tilted upon one side like a vessel on its beam end, several bottles of pickles, with a dozen or two of plates for the foreground, bounded on the right by a couple of bottles of raspberry vinegar, or something similar, and to the left by a huge teapot. Underneath the table were a lot of sacks, a riddle or sieve, with no end of bags, and a lot of carrots heaped up in a corner.

Above the table was a shelf containing half-a-dozen bread-loaves, two or three pounds of candles spread out with great accuracy, with the vinegar cruet gracefully suspended. Beneath this was a sheet or veil, which reached only to half the height of the wall, for the express purpose of shutting out the vulgar eye from gazing on the various eatables which were enshrined in this sanctum sanctorum. Beneath, in one comer of the room, was a big bucket, wrong end upward, as if it had suddenly suffered from the shock of an earthquake, placed near to a sack of potatoes, with a plentiful supply of pickaxes and shovels for associates, and several old boxes to boot, one piled on the top of the other, and surmounted with a mattress rolled up, forming a kind of apex, the whole not dissimilar in appearance to a rough sketch of a pyramid. On the wall to the left was seen, most legibly written, "All meals to be paid for before leaving the table," which beautiful specimen of penmanship was intercepted, or rather cut in two, by a shirt fresh from the wash-tub, there placed to be bleached.

In short, the floor was such as might be seen in every well-cultivated garden, when all the weeds are hoed and well kept down. A bit of canvas separated the sleeping apartment from the kitchen by being suspended in the doorway; this was substituted for the wooden division, the door as yet being in embryo, very probably at some carpenter's shop in the vicinity, or more probably in the wild, wild woods, too far away to bear the expense of felling, hewing, planing, and joinery. One might have supposed that in such an establishment an ad libitum kind of life might have been adopted. This, however, was far from being the case, as certain restrictions were laid upon the inmates in the following terms-- "No smoking allowed in the bedrooms." The bedrooms consisted of two tiers of bunks, wherein perhaps a dozen diggers might repose. I tumbled in with the rest, being attired as a digger, in a heavy pair of medium lace-boots, with a sailor's flannel-shirt for an envelope. I had with me eighty sovereigns, which I placed by my side in a stocking for a purse, during two nights' repose, without fear of molestation or of robbery, among rough diggers, many of whom, I have no doubt, were as honest as their superiors".

           References

           Shaw, John (Doctor of Divinity), "A Gallop to the Antipodes" (NZ sections only)

          Digitised online version

Painting  "Collingwood and Pakawau, 1864".

          Original held by the Aorere Heritage Centre, Collingwood. 

Artist: Jane Stowe nee Greenwood (1838-1931), 6th daughter of Motueka pioneers Dr Danforth and Sarah Greenwood.