![]() ![]() He formed the Shotover Big Beach Gold Mining Company the following year with the intention to dredge the waterlogged deeper layers of his new claim. In 1887 he acquired rights to a sizeable block at Big Beach, a gold-bearing flat on the Shotover River. ![]() The entrepreneur Choie (Charles) Sew Hoy was not a fossicker: he was a key figure in the development of colonial Otago, an influential merchant and money-man, and a gold-dredging pioneer. In popular memory, Chinese gold-seekers are largely remembered as fossickers and small-scale prospectors, reworking the fields that European diggers had worked through quickly. The man who would revolutionise this fledgling industry arrived in Dunedin, via the Victorian and Californian goldfields, from the upper Panyu district of Guandong, in southern China. Attempts at building pneumatic dredges, diving bells and submarines then followed, all with little success. As early as 1863, during the alluvial gold boom, miner Charles Nicholson had invented a spoon dredge to lift gold-bearing gravel from the Molyneux (now Clutha) River, and later formed the first dredging company to try, albeit unsuccessfully, to exploit the resource. Gold-dredging was a New Zealand phenomenon. Toitū’s hefty dredge bucket, built by Dunedin firm A & T Burt Ltd. ![]()
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