Daily Photo – Hirstfield & Garfield

In the year of 1865, on the black sands of a Southland beach, an Australian prospector spotted something among the stones, shells and sand at his feet that seemed oddly out of place. It was ​​soft, dense, and if he had exposed it to heat it wouldn’t have tarnished, rusted, or corroded. In fact, if he had heated it up to 1,064°C (1,947°F), he could have watched it melt and made it into a nice ring or necklace. The man’s name was James Kirkton, and what he’d discovered was gold. While there can be no-doubt that Kirkton would’ve got awfully excited by his discovery, unlike other gold finds around the country, his didn’t lead to an instant influx of lawless yobs who had forgotten all common sense in the search for fame and fortune on the country’s gold fields. Very far from it – Kirkton’s discovery was unique in that the gold was very fine, difficult to extract, and access to the area was extremely limited. 

Needless to say, as tends to happen in these situations, word eventually spread about Kirkton’s find, and prospectors starting flooding the area with tents and other portable makeshift dwellings. Thus a small town they called Hirstfield was born. For the next two decades or so, things went well for the town of Hirstfield, so much so that permanent establishments were added to the landscape and the population steadily grew. While all this was going on, a few kilometers inland, among the surrounding hills and gullies, a pocket of alluvial gold was discovered, and once again the cycle repeated itself. Everyone went absolutely bonkers and scrambled to the new location, desperate to get a piece of the action. This meant, by 1882 a second township not too far away had been created – this time called Garfield. The problem with this hurriedly erected metropolis was that nobody stopped to think where the gold actually was, and the miners soon realized that the valuable vein of gold ran directly underneath the town. Faced with a curly predicament, the residents took a vote and decided upon the only rational course of action, they’d move the town back to Hirstfield. So, in what must have been a logistical nightmare, a grand display of community spirit and a lesson in motivation, by 1885 the entire town had moved – school, community hall, hotel, houses, tables, chairs, pots, pans, Mrs. Higgins’s three prize-winning hydrangeas – everything had been taken back to where they started – Hirstfield. 

The year of 1885 proved to be an important milestone in our story, not only had the residents of Garfield returned to Hirstfield with their tails between their legs, but the arrival of the railway in the area cemented the merged towns as a permanent location. Now, as we all know, a new town needs a new name, and instead of choosing to name it after some British aristocrat who didn’t know where the hell New Zealand was, or have any idea that the lower South Island even existed, they did a remarkably sensible thing – they turned to local Māori for inspiration and called the new town Orepuki.