Pos S  45° 1.535'
    E 170° 8.265'

It has been a centre for sluice mining since the early 1860s when the resident population was quite high. A great number of the miners either came from or via the Victorian goldfields and stayed in Otago afterwards.

Sluice mining involves taking a massive high-pressure pump and playing is against the earthern sides of a watercourse and catching the run-off to be channelled through special boxes with washboard bottoms. The gold would settle in the grooves of the washboard panels and could be recovered. The rest of the water and mud was left to flow downstream, an ecological disaster completely ignored at the time, as was the moonscape of the diggings area itself.

Originally the area was treeless, gaspingly hot in summer and achingly cold in winter. There was scrub but not much else.With great ingenuity they devised ways to make the mining work and lived in houses that needed every plank to be brought in from the coast.

We have now gone to a live on-line database called MOP ('Myra's Other Place') and therefore you see no entries below because the records are being directly entered there was no point entering data twice. You will have to log in to access them. The MOP database has a lot more than just cemetery records and is worth checking out here where you can log in as Guest password guest.

Once arrived in the system you can select HEADSTONES and enter in the search box name you seek and that will give you a list of all the cemeteries that have that name.

If you wish to look at one specific cemetery enter the cemetery name and then change the pull-down option just left of the entry box and select Cemetery before clicking on the arrow selector....