Written records of a different time - Puhipuhi in 1889.
Written records of a different time - Puhipuhi in 1889.
OPINION
To strike gold is to find, do or produce something that brings you a lot of money or success.
This week the “gold” was in fact a bottle of mercury… an essential piece of a story just waiting to be told.
When working within a museum collection, the artefacts, archives and files lie in wait for their feature, the treasures too precious to be in the harsh limelight long-term - but when they do come out, they represent the time, people and places from our past.
Our current mining mission here in 2023 doesn’t require lamps, picks and the associated sweat, blood or tears, but it’s vital to our story that we also strike cinnabar, a bright scarlet to brick-red mineral.
Cinnabar is the primary ore of mercury, once used as a pigment until the dangers of mercury were realised.
The mineral cinnabar.
Mercury is toxic, but as long as the cinnabar isn’t heated, the mercury is locked by the sulfur, making cinnabar low in toxicity.
A now-pink-hued chunk of cinnabar is extracted from within a dark, cool room from a waxy archival-grade box on a numbered shelf in a numbered room. Cinnabar is sensitive to light, so the rich original colour has faded to salmon pink, with pale white translucent strata running horizontally. It would have once been pulled from the earth of Puhipuhi, Northland, but this time it is handled with white cotton gloves.
The mine at Puhipuhi was active from 1907 until 1947, extracting mercury. To produce liquid mercury, crushed cinnabar ore is roasted in rotary furnaces.
Pure mercury separates from sulfur in this process and easily evaporates, but the liquid condenses and is collected - usually in iron flasks.
White gloves at the ready, we search for objects related to the silver liquid. In the cool, dark collection store, we locate two cylindrical metal bottles with screw-stoppers used to transport refined mercury from the Puhipuhi mines. They are the texture of corroded iron and heavier than the cinnabar.
The entrance to a low-level mine before a tramway was constructed at Puhipuhi.
They feel like if they were dropped, the concrete floor would probably fracture as opposed to the bottles. A fired-clay mercury crucible is our next discovery. The coffee cup-sized vessel is tapered at one end with burn marks around the top edge, hinting at its tough working life at the mine as an essential part of collecting liquid mercury.
The final element for our mining story isn’t mineral or industrial but paper - a handwritten record of the quest for what was known as a ‘gold reef’.
This document within the Whangārei Museum archives is hand-written in the most beautiful cursive handwriting and the yellowing paper is thin.
Seven pages by an unnamed author detailing the key players involved with Puhipuhi as they negotiate for mineral information and land - there’s a fire, gold samples visible to the naked eye, and a central figure drowns at the town wharf. The transcript of this document will be released when this story comes together this summer to explore our geological and mining history, with a fresh exhibition launching soon.
Alyce Charlesworth is a curator at Whangārei Museum.
