Mt Stoker Antimony Mine, Hindon, Dunedin City, Otago Region, New Zealandi

Regional Level Types
Mt Stoker Antimony Mine	Mine
Hindon	- not defined -
Dunedin City	City
Otago Region	Region
New Zealand	Country

Mt Stoker deposit, also known as the Mt Stoker Antimony Mine, near Hindon (Rowe, 1881a) consists of an auriferous quartz lode with pyrite and some stibnite. The lode is 5.5 m wide and dips 45o to the northeast. The deposit was worked intermittently up to 1948, when 9 t of ore were produced.

XRD of specimens confirms either lewisite or romeite; however, XRD alone is not conclusive. Brugger et al. (1997) notes lewisite as a questionable species.

The first note found about the mine was 1871, stating it was a new discovery by Lyder and Brown (surnames), with a third share sold to a Dunedin merchant. Later Seidlin (surname) is noted as the mining partner to Lyder. A company had been formed with 1800 pounds capital, however most of the shares remained in control of the three mentioned above.

Lewis Harris visited the mine is 1892, and Lyder is still there. A train was caught from Dunedin, and stopped to let the visiting party off in the Taieri Gorge. They had to clamber down the hillside to the Taieri River, then get pulled across the river by the mine workers on a chair strung on a rope. It was then a steep climb up the other side to the mine. He notes bags of first class ore, and a pile of second grade ore by the tunnel mouth. Ore had to be sledged down the slope, carted across by the chair, then sledged up the other hillside to the railway line. Clearly regardless of the price for antimony such an arrangement could not last. Ore had been assayed in London at 60% antimony. Silver was noted in the ore, but no lead.

The lode is hosted in quartzofeldspathic schist, and some interbedded greenschist in a north-east trending fault zone, dipping moderately south-east. The fault system is up to 35 metres wide, as sub-parallel zones of silicified and brecciated schist, breccia, and cataclasites, as a series of sub-parallel reverse faults.

There are three generations of quartz veins in the fault zone. The earliest is concordant massive veins of barren milky white quartz, cross-cut by veinlets of darker fine grained translucent quartz. The second stage is intershear quartz veins and breccia, containing quartz and schist fragments in a dark coloured translucent quartz matrix. On the vein margins are centimetre scale stibnite aggregates, with disseminated pyrite less common. The final stage is high angle barren quartz veins cutting schist, and earlier veins.

It should be noted that there are two antimony mines in the area: Mt Stoker antimony mine (on the east side of the Taieri River and the Hindon Antimony Mine (aka Douglas' Reef) near Hindon Crossing on the western side of the Taieri River.

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References