GREENSTONE MINING

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 1, Issue 44, 2 August 1939, Page 3

GREENSTONE MINING

AN INDUSTRY THAT FAILED Dr Edward Sliortland's intensely interesting account of his journey round the South Island of New Zealand in 1843-,4 in the course of his duties as Protector of Aborigines taehti'ons an attempt by the oldtime scalers to develop a greenstone export trade about 1840 or a little earlier. They had seen a huge block of greenstone in the middle of tho "Piopiotahi tor Pent," and interested a Manila, merchant in the export of the £tone to China. Piopiotahi is the Maori name for the Cleddau River flowing into Milford Sound, but it was usually applied to the Sound as a whole. The trial shipment sent to China proved unsaleable, as the Chinese dis liked the black specks in the stone. The stone found at Anita Milfond Sound, is the tan,giwai variety, pale and nearly translucent, and scientifically quite different from the darker green nephrite which is the* real greenstone worked and prized by the Maoris. Some of the stone was, however, sold off to natives in the Wellington district at Is a lb. The men who had worked the stone to send to China got disgusted waiting for their arrears of pay and scattered round the Foveaux Strait whaling settlements. Captain Anglem, living in retirement on Stewart Island, told Rev. J. F. H. Wohlers, the missionary ->t Ruapuke Island, that he had worked greenstone on the West Coast, blasting it with gunpowder. This was very likely the same enterprise thaL Shortland chronicled. Certainly the men at Piopiotahi had had a difficult 'task, diverting the stream in which they found their block before they began working it-