Daily Photo – Hindon & The Silverpeaks

I spent a good few hours of the afternoon in Hindon for two reasons. Firstly, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d visited the place, and a strenuous adventure along unpaved, steep, narrow, and winding roads that featured a shared road-and-rail bridge with sharp bends and steep drop-offs  seemed just the thing.

My second, and more compelling, reason for going was that I wanted to see the settlement where nearly 1,200 miners once swarmed the gullies and terraces in the hope of striking it rich. After 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 discovery spread and hopeful prospectors poured into the newly found goldfields. One of the settlements that sprang up almost overnight was a small township in the Silverpeaks range near Dunedin, called Hindon. However, as with most gold rushes, once the gold ran out, the miners quickly moved on to new fields, while the real fortunes were made by the merchants selling shovels, the innkeepers charging exorbitant fees for a night’s rest, and those who realised that gold is often easier to extract from the desperate than from the earth itself.