Story: Gold and gold mining

Digger and gold plant

Digger and gold plant

Photographed in the upper Shotover River in the 1980s, this huge digger is scooping up alluvial gravels and feeding them into the gold plant that sits on a pontoon floating in a backwater. The piles of tailings downstream indicate the places already worked. Miners targeted areas that had been inaccessible to early dredges or that were worked over a century earlier but by less efficient techniques.

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Photograph by John Walrond

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How to cite this page:

Carl Walrond, 'Gold and gold mining - Recent mining', Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/photograph/8651/digger-and-gold-plant (accessed 20 April 2024)

Story by Carl Walrond, published 12 Jun 2006