The Coromandel Gold Rushes on the Coromandel Peninsula and around the nearby towns of Thames and Waihi in New Zealand in the nineteenth century were moderately successful. Traces of gold were found about 1842. A small find was made near Coromandel in 1852;[1] and a larger find in August 1867 when there was a modest rush. But Thames acquired a reputation for speculative holding of unworked ground despite regulations designed to check it, and some miners left for Queensland. Most of the gold was in quartz reefs rather than in more accessible alluvial deposits and had to be recovered from underground mines and extracted using stamping batteries.
The decline in New Zealand gold production was halted in the 1890s. The Waihi Mine had been discovered in 1878, but was not seriously worked until 1887, when English capital set up a cyanide process plant. Hence, with these mines and gold dredges extracting gold from the Molyneaux River in Otago, the gold production of New Zealand again exceeded half a million ounces in 1902.[2] The Golden Cross Mine closed in 1920 but reopened from 1991 to 1998. The Martha Mine closed in 1952 but reopened in 1987 and is still operating.