Hindon car and railway bridge

When Gabriel Reid discovered gold in a small gully near the Otago town of Lawrence in 1861, everyone went absolutely bonkers! Within weeks, the population of Dunedin skyrocketed as news of his announcement spread and everyone headed for the newly discovered gold fields in the hopes of getting rich. Following Gabriel’s initial find, small towns sprang up all over Otago as people with very little knowledge or experience in how to mine for gold arrived, and everyone went crazy with gold fever. One of those places was a small settlement in the Silverpeaks Mountain range near Dunedin, called Hindon.

At the time of the gold rush, nearly 1200 miners swarmed the gullies and terraces of Hindon hoping to strike it rich with an easy find. However, given the nature of gold rushes, once the gold ran out, miners quickly moved on to new goldfields while the real fortunes were made by the merchants selling shovels, the innkeepers charging exorbitant fees for a night’s rest, and the people who figured out that gold is easier to extract from the desperate than from the earth itself.