This was the country's biggest gold strike, and led to a rapid influx of foreign miners to the area – many of them veterans of other hunts for the precious metal in California and Victoria, Australia.

The rush started at Gabriel's Gully but spread throughout much of Central Otago, leading to the rapid expansion and commercialisation of the new colonial settlement of Dunedin, which quickly grew to be New Zealand's largest city.

A find near the Lindis Pass in early 1861 started producing flickers of interest from around the South Island, with reports of large numbers of miners travelling inland from Oamaru to stake their claims.

"At a place where a kind of road crossed on a shallow bar I shovelled away about two and a half feet of gravel, arrived at a beautiful soft slate and saw the gold shining like the stars in Orion on a dark frosty night".

[2] The public heard about Read's find via a letter published in the Otago Witness on 8 June 1861, documenting a ten-day-long prospecting tour he had made.

[3] There was little reaction at first until John Hardy of the Otago Provincial Council stated that he and Read had prospected country "about 31 miles long by five broad, and in every hole they had sunk they had found the precious metal.

[5] Within a year, the region's population swelled greatly, growing by 400 per cent between 1861 and 1864,[5] with prospectors swarming from the dwindling Australian goldfields.

A second gold strike in 1862, close to the modern town of Cromwell, did nothing to dissuade new hopefuls, and prospectors and miners staked claims from the Shotover River in the west through to Naseby in the north.

In November 1862 Thomas Arthur and Harry Redfern sneaked off from shearing for William Rees at Queenstown and looked for gold on the banks of the Shotover River armed with a butcher's knife and pannikin.

These goldfields all gave rise to mining towns and communities of temporary shops, hotels and miners' huts made from canvas or calico fabric-covered timber frames.

Evidence such as material artefacts, foundations of huts and buildings, and photographs from the Central Otago goldfields provide us with information about the labour and social roles of men and women in the 19th century.

[9][page needed] The incoming population included entrepreneurial, skilled and technical people that established services for the miners, such as shops, post offices, banks, pubs, hotels and hardware stores.

[citation needed] Historical evidence of male miners or businessmen in the 19th-century Central Otago goldfields is readily available in literature by and about the experiences of inhabitants at the various gold strikes.

Tailings (the materials left over after the removal of the uneconomic fraction (gangue) of the ore) also provide some of the archaeological evidence from Otago gold mine sites.

Although diaries and memoirs about the lives of males in the mining communities exist, little mention or information is known about the significance of female labour and social roles.

As the news of this goldfield in Gabriel's Gully spread, prospectors engaged in the area, and Janet opened up her home, cooked meals and tended to the miners, as they passed through.

[12] She wrote stories based on her life and roles on the Central Otago goldfields, which provide accounts of labour and social aspects of mining and gender in the 19th century.

This archaeological evidence provides information which suggests that women played significant labour and social roles within mining communities.

Another excavation report by Petchey from the Macraes Flat mining area, presents items of children's toys such as marbles, and a china doll's leg amongst ruins of a house site.

However, the rapid decline in gold production from the mid-1860s led to a sharp drop in the province's population, and while not unprosperous, the deep south of New Zealand never rose to such relative prominence again.

The West Coast of the South Island was the second-richest gold-bearing area of New Zealand after Otago, and gold was discovered in 1865–6 at Okarito, Bruce Bay, around Charleston and along the Grey River.

The first goldmining in Southland took place in 1860 on the banks of the Mataura River and its tributaries (and later would help settlements such as Waikaia and Nokomai flourish).

This activity led to the founding of mining settlements such as Orepuki and Round Hill (the Chinese miners and shop owners essentially ran their own town known colloquially to Europeans as "Canton").

Attention turned to the gravel beds of the Clutha River, with a number of attempts to develop a steam-powered mechanical gold dredge.

[23][24] Paul Metsers' song "Farewell to the Gold" is based loosely on a flood in July 1863, which killed 13 miners on the Shotover River.

[27] In 2008 plans were made for a heritage trail including Arrowtown, Kawarau Gorge, Lawrence and the Dunedin Chinese Garden.

[29] Much of the archive is sourced from records made by reverend Alexander Don, in his mostly unsuccessful attempts to convert Chinese goldmining communities to Christianity.