Legal
Bringing Waiuta’s mining focus back to life
Waiuta, the town at the top of the West Coast’s richest gold mine, has a new lease of life after growing from the region’s last great gold discovery, back in 1905. A new book, called Hard Won Gold – Stories from Waiuta and the Reefton Goldfield, has been published with a focus on how the very tricky deposits of the goldfield yielded up huge...
New West Coast mine milestone
New Zealand Petroleum & Minerals granted Tasman Mining a Mining Permit for the high-grade Blackwater gold deposit near Reefton on the West Coast. This approval grants the right to mine gold and silver from the site for a 20 year period. Six decades after gold mining ceased, Tasman Mining aims to set up an underground mine at the site of the...
A mineral export once more valuable than treasure
Peter Owens reviews a mineral we once exported to the UK that had unprecedented value to the allied victory in WW1. From the ‘forgotten history’ archives, our country played a key role in the manufacture of top quality artillery shells for the British Army on the Western Front during WW1, and in the building of ships for the Royal Navy. This...
The stone mason and the tree
They cut the old totara tree down in 1949, but the quarry named after it continued to live on in a raft of glorious white buildings here and overseas. Hugh de Lacy tells the story. It was probably not the biggest or most handsome totara tree in North Otago, but it had a defining role in the development of not only a signature local industry but...
Coal overrides garnet
Peter Owens looks at a scheme to woo West Coasters from coal with precious metals. The Coalition Government’s decision to lend what is a foreign company, $10 million to mine garnet on the West Coast (a loan from the Provincial Growth Fund) has been widely interpreted as another ploy to woo the West Coasters away from the mining of fossil fuels....
Converting a quarry to electric
Volvo Construction Equipment and its customer Skanska have recorded ground-breaking results from their Electric Site research project – including a 40 percent reduction in operator cost. VOLVO AND SKANSKA tested the viability of the Electric Site research project over 10 weeks at Skanska’s Vikan Kross quarry, near Gothenburg, Sweden. The...
