OH WRONG ARE YOU, OH WRONG AM I

The extensive mining ruins at Waiorongomai Valley (sounds like "why-o-wrong-o-my") tell the story of the struggle for gold. The extensive network of trackways, tunnels and vertigo inducing inclines have been cleared to produce a maze of walks across the hillside.

Trackway

The site is just south of Te Aroha and, from research, looked interesting enough to justify a stop-off on our way from Coromandel to Tauranga in the Bay of Plenty.

With only 2hours available we had to opt for one of the shorter loops taking us across the side of the valley and up to the base of the Butler Incline; a steep trackway rising up the hillside where ore was brought down in trucks which dragged the empties back up the incline.  You can walk up the incline right to the top some 400m up but it is much steeper than the pictures suggest!  The remaining tracks are all original and the oldest in New Zealand.  it is remarkable how well they have survived.

Butler Incline

More Old Relics

According to the information boards around the site, the gold proved to be especially difficult to extract from the ore.  It proved to be resistant to the standard techniques of pulverising the rock and dissolving it in noxious solutions such as cyanides and Mercury.  As a result, despite the scale of the workings and the human endeavour needed to construct them in the valley, apparently most of the gold remains.  This must have led to the lament written in around 1892:

Oh wrong are you, oh wrong am I

Oh wrong all of us,

We're all sold, there is no gold,

The claim's not worth a cuss,

We came oh why?  It's all my eye,

So sing O-wai-o-rong-o-mai

Here comes the blooming bus,

So let's all get in, it's a sin,

The claim's not worth a cuss,

So sing O-wai-o-rong-o-mai,

Oh wrong all of us.