Livingstone Diggings, Otago Region, New Zealandi

Regional Level Types
Livingstone Diggings	Diggings
Otago Region	Region
New Zealand	Country

Alluvial gold in gravels. Abandoned.

Livingstone is 10 kilometres south of Duntroon, once a thriving gold mining community, but now a couple of old wooden buildings, and half a dozen houses are all that remains.

The alluvial gold diggings are 1.5 kilometres south of the town, and a couple of hundred metres west of McKenzie Road. There appears no easy access, and may need to be walked into from the road. The sluicings are fairly extensive, overgrown, but sluice faces may still be visible. Further down the road, the small quarry is for gravel only. This area however shows evidence of several water races, as they proceed on a torturous route to the gold diggings. These are on private property, the road ending at a farm.

The gravels reach a depth of 80 feet at the location, with old timers stating only the basal 18 inches was payable in gold, then being patchy. It was heavy ground requiring much hard labour, and blasting. The ground was worked over several times, including a party of eight Chinese miners who re-worked the tailings for two years.

The Taratu Formation quartzose terrestrial gravels, up to 2 metres thick, consists of poorly sorted quartz gravels. Some areas are underlain with the Papakaio Coal Measures, containing marine fossils. The Taratu Formation is overlain by early to middle Eocene Tapui Glauconitic Sandstone gravels, with minor to up to 50% glauconite.

Heavy mineral concentrates (grain size) in the basal 10 metre section of the Tapui gravels include abundant zircon and magnetite, with minor epidote, tourmaline and gold. The gold is extremely fine grained (less than 0.5 mms), which led to miners in the past having difficulties extracting it during sluicing. The Taratu Formation gravels also include these minerals, but lesser concentrations. The heavy mineral concentrates accumulated in swales on the sea floor during storms, when the area was part of the ocean.

Gold was mined at the location starting from June 1869. This started as ground sluicing by small parties of miners. The location was considered a poor man's field, with some making wages, and others barely scraping by. Several water races fed the goldfield from the south including Mountain Hut, and Mosquito.

At least four attempts were made in the 1890's to hydro sluice with elevators needed due to the amount of tailings blocking the gullies. Only one turned out to be payable.

Small scale mining continued into the early 1930's when a company was formed to large scale hydro sluice the area. Richard Clark Cook wrote into the papers stating some of the claims by the new company in its efforts to raise 30 000 pounds capital were outlandish, with no supporting evidence provided, and the field was poor in gold. This was supported by several former miners who once worked at the location. The company hit back stating Cook was the local farmer who was unhappy his land was being used for mining purposes, and the old miners did not know what they were doing, and lost much of the gold in the tailings. Talk about the company was between 1932 to 1935, but no information was found it was successful.

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