A gold rush or gold fever is a discovery of gold—sometimes accompanied by other precious metals and rare-earth minerals—that brings an onrush of miners seeking their fortune. Major gold rushes took place in the 19th century in Australia, Greece, New Zealand, Brazil, Chile, South Africa, the United States, and Canada while smaller gold rushes took place elsewhere.
Gold digger is a term for a person, typically a woman, who engages in a type of transactional sexual relationship for money rather than love. If it turns into marriage, it is a type of marriage of convenience.
Gabriel's Gully is a locality in Otago, New Zealand, three kilometres from Lawrence township and close to the Tuapeka River. It was the site of New Zealand's first major gold rush.
The Otago gold rush was a gold rush that occurred during the 1860s in Central Otago, New Zealand. 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 number of miners reached its maximum of 18,000 in February 1864.
Stevan Treleaven Eldred-Grigg is a New Zealand author of thirteen novels, eleven history books and various essays and short stories. His works of fiction and non-fiction explore the West Coast, Canterbury, the wider South Island and the whole of New Zealand. He also writes about Samoa, Shanghai, Germany, and Australia.
Te Herenga Waka University Press or THWUP is the book publishing arm of Victoria University of Wellington, located in Wellington, New Zealand. As of 2022, the press had published around 800 books.
William Robert Catton, Jr. was an American sociologist known for his scholarly work in environmental sociology and human ecology. More broadly, Catton is known for his 1980 book, Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, which is credited by younger generations of environmental scholars and activists as foundational for their own works.
Eleanor Catton is a New Zealand novelist and screenwriter. Born in Canada, Catton moved to New Zealand as a child and grew up in Christchurch. She completed a master's degree in creative writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters. Her award-winning debut novel, The Rehearsal, written as her Master's thesis, was published in 2008, and has been adapted into a 2016 film of the same name. Her second novel, The Luminaries, won the 2013 Booker Prize, making Catton the youngest author ever to win the prize and only the second New Zealander. It was subsequently adapted into a television miniseries, with Catton as screenwriter. In 2023, she was named on the Granta Best of Young British Novelists list.
The West Coast gold rush, on the West Coast of New Zealand's South Island, lasted from 1864 to 1867.
William Prudhoe was Mayor of Christchurch, New Zealand, for 1892.
Memphis Eve Sunny Day Iris Hewson is an Irish actress. A daughter of activist Ali Hewson and singer Bono, she began acting in the late 2000s. Her first major role was in the 2011 drama film This Must Be the Place, and she subsequently starred in the 2014 series The Knick. She appeared in films such as Blood Ties (2013), Bridge of Spies (2015), and Robin Hood (2018).
Jane Whiteside was a notable New Zealand tightrope dancer, gymnast and magician. She was born in Tullylish, County Down, Ireland in 1855, to John Whiteside and Jane Whiteside.
New South Wales experienced the first gold rush in Australia, a period generally accepted to lie between 1851 and 1880. This period in the history of New South Wales resulted in a rapid growth in the population and significant boost to the economy of the colony of New South Wales. The California Gold Rush three years prior signaled the impacts on society that gold fever would produce, both positive and negative. The New South Wales colonial government concealed the early discoveries, but various factors changed the policy.
The 2013 Booker Prize for Fiction was awarded on 15 October 2013 to Eleanor Catton for her novel The Luminaries. A longlist of thirteen titles was announced on 23 July, and these were narrowed down to a shortlist of six titles, announced on 10 September. The jury was chaired by Robert Macfarlane, who was joined by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Natalie Haynes, Martha Kearney, and Stuart Kelly. The shortlist contained great geographical and ethnic diversity, with Zimbabwean-born NoViolet Bulawayo, Eleanor Catton of New Zealand, Jim Crace from England, Indian American Jhumpa Lahiri, Canadian-American Ruth Ozeki and Colm Tóibín of Ireland.
The Luminaries is a 2013 novel by Eleanor Catton. Set in New Zealand's South Island in 1866, the novel follows Walter Moody, a prospector who travels to the West Coast settlement of Hokitika to make his fortune on the goldfields. Instead, he stumbles into a tense meeting between twelve local men, and is drawn into a complex mystery involving a series of unsolved crimes. The novel's complex structure is based on the system of Western astrology, with each of the twelve local men representing one of the twelve signs of the zodiac, and with another set of characters representing planets in the solar system.
Unity Books is an independent New Zealand bookseller. It has a flagship store in Wellington, and a location in Auckland with separate adult and children's bookshops.
The West Coast Wilderness Trail has been funded as one of the projects of the New Zealand Cycle Trail. Once complete, the 139 kilometres (86 mi) track will connect Greymouth in the north with Ross in the south.
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; 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 Luminaries is a 2020 drama television miniseries written by Eleanor Catton and directed by Claire McCarthy. The series is centred on a young adventurer named Anna Wetherell, who has travelled from the United Kingdom to start a new life in New Zealand during the 1860s West Coast gold rush.
Birnam Wood is the third novel by New Zealand writer Eleanor Catton. Published in February 2023, the novel follows members of guerilla gardening collective Birnam Wood as, with the help of a charismatic tech billionaire, they undertake a new project on abandoned farmland.
