Website makes history a shared journey
The Prow website <www.theprow.org.nz> has been launched. This is a project that offers an opportunity to make this region’s heritage more accessible to the public.
The website features fully researched stories from the Top of the South, including Golden Bay, with photographs or images and lists of resources for further reading and research.
Cliff Riordan, project manager of photographic collections at the Nelson Provincial Museum, said, “By combining digital content from the museum’s collections with that of other cultural organisations, the richness of the region’s stories is enhanced and the stories add value and understanding to the digital content.”
The museum’s staff has assisted The Prow researchers to find images from the museum’s vast collection of photographs dating from the 1860s to the present day. The website aims to provide students and researchers with the opportunity to dig more deeply into each story, with lists and links to a wide range of relevant sources and resources, including material held at the museum’s Isel Park research facility. .
Golden Bay stories on the website:
Aorere Gold. “A few specks of gold, found by a musterer in the Aorere Valley in October 1856, led more than 2000 men to Massacre Bay over the following three years. The gold rush was short-lived, but the region’s new name of “Golden Bay” remained.”
Onekaka Ore. “It took nearly 50 years of exploration, analysis and debate before Onekaka’s rich iron ore resource began to be commercially processed in 1922. While the Onekaka Iron and Steel Company had plenty of potential, a combination of low demand, foreign competitors and the economic Depression saw the works closed by 1935, although it was kept on standby during World War II.”
The Golden Waikoropupu. “Legends of taniwha protecting the healing waters of the Southern Hemisphere’s largest coldwater springs, tales of hardship in the backbreaking search for gold, and the story of how the prospectors’ leftovers are used to generate power can all be found in the Waikoropupu Valley in Golden Bay.”
The first meeting - Abel Tasman and Māori in Golden Bay. “When the Dutch explorer Abel Janszoon Tasman sailed into Golden Bay in 1642, a brief violent encounter with local Maori appears to have resulted from mutual cultural misunderstanding.”
Charles Heaphy 1820-1881. “Heaphy was an acute observer: energetic, persistent and versatile. He arrived in Wellington in 1839 and was soon convinced there was flat, farmable land in the centre of the South Island. The New Zealand Company employed him as an explorer.”
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