Ross was born in the rush of 1865.

In the week that gold was discovered the area’s population was 250 people. Within three weeks it had swollen to 2000 and, writes Philip Ross May in his book Goldtown, a month after that it was 4000. 

In those early, fevered days, the West Coast was home to just 12 per cent of New Zealand’s European population, but a full quarter of all the men aged between 21 and 40. Reverend James Buller (who made 26 river crossings to bring godliness from Canterbury to Hokitika and had to sleep under a shop counter when no spare beds could be found) remarked upon arrival: “Nothing populates a waste howling wilderness like gold.”

Certain civilisations have spent millenia mythologising this precious metal. Love is declared with gold rings, triumphs rewarded with gold medals - and wealth stored in gold bars. In 18th century Westland, where the bush was thick and the rain fell hard, where farming and agricultural success was not as easy as it was “over the hill” on the Canterbury plains, gold was the mineral that brought new in their droves. According to one historic estimate, between 1865 and the turn of the century, the Ross Flat produced more than 10 tonnes of gold. 
 

There’s still gold in the town’s alluvial gravels. Birchfields Ross Mining runs an open cast operation here. One huge pit, just behind the tiny settlement, is now a lake. Speaking to the Greymouth Star in 2009, owner Evan Birchfield said, “Rogernomics forced us to go gold mining and I’ve never regretted it”.
 

According to Birchfield, there was “no doubt” nuggets as big (or even bigger) than the 1909 find had gone over his screens and not been caught. The modern-day mine was mostly about collecting fine gold, but, he said, there were constant encounters with the past. 
 

“Some of my trucks have toppled over when the ground has given way to shafts,” Birchfield reported. “We have been down 45 metres below sea level and still come across shafts where the old timers have been - amazing.” 

Philip May Ross (the author and historian whose father was a former mayor of this historic town) writes comprehensively and evocatively of the years that followed the initial Ross rush. By the first decade of the new century, he says, the brash young digger of the 1860s who made the Ross district his home would have experienced almost the entire gold mining world in miniature:

“The deep ground at Ross was a piece of Victoria, the high gravels of the Mont d’Or a little California, the dredging claims were Otago and the bush and the rain - those ubiquitous elements which governed local mining - were peculiarly Westland.”

That small rectangle of land, measuring roughly five by 10 kilometres and bound on one side by the Tasman Sea represented “virtually the full suite of gold deposits and the full range of mining methods to work them”. 

In the late 1800s, gold mining technology changed drastically and quickly (from pans and shovels to steam-engine driven pumps), but in the new century, a very grand scheme was afoot. Government had a plan to “unwater” the deep levels of the Ross Flat. The plan would allow for the extraction of gold - and the water would be used to produce electricity. It took several years and cost tens of thousands of pounds but, on September 8, 1909, they pressed the buttons and the pumps started up. Ross Goldfields Ltd was in operation. And then, two days later, quite close to the edges of the new company’s claim, that record-breaking nugget was found.

Philip May Ross: “Big nuggets had been as rare as pukekos’ teeth on the Ross Flat but now, at the propitious moment and in ground worked for half a century, a fist sized nugget sprang forth to gladden the hearts of the Company directors and encourage the shareholders, to provide Rossites with a cause for a champagne christening and their chronicler with a subject for idle speculation.”

They dubbed it the “Hon Roddy Nugget”. The golden fortune was named for the then Minister of Mines, Roderick Mackenzie, baptised with champagne and feted from pub to pub. 

But was it a plant? An interloper designed to bolster faith in that expensive and extensive new gold mining and electricity scheme?

“Sir - There are not a few persons who now firmly believe that the ‘Hon Roddy’ nugget was brought over from Victoria to be so coincidentally found only a foot or two from the boundary of the Ross Goldfields area. I am, etc, WATCHFUL.”

- Letter to the Editor, Grey River Argus, February 26, 1910.

Cue outrage from R. Pedrazzi Snr who wrote back to the newspaper “emphatically” vouching for Ross nugget: “If ‘Watchful' (behind the fence of anonymity) or any other person can prove my statement incorrect, I will forward a cheque of £100 to the Greymouth Hospital.”

Did Mr Pedrazzi have skin in this gold game? Sir James McNeish wrote about the Roddy Nugget in his book Tavern in the Town (“still the last word on New Zealand’s most colourful pubs” according to the jacket blurb of the 1966 reprint). He introduces the pivotal Ross characters in the “what happened next” tale of the Hon Roddy - namely Louis Pedrazzi, who made a celebrated, garlicky salami and owned a tiny wooden pub called the City and Cantabrian James Free. The two men (and possibly a third called “Ross” according to some newspaper reports) pooled their resources and bought the nugget for four hundred pounds.

McNeish: “For four days, he sat on the bar top counter uninsured, as a holder of matchsticks. For variation, Louis used him as a doorstop. Visitors flocked in. The sleepy township of Ross awoke with a bang.”

There had, wrote McNeish, been nothing like it since the inspecting engineer of mines returned from Melbourne with a new engine and a boatload of dancing girls.

“Roddy led a wonderful life. He was photographed, handled, kissed and toasted in every brand of spirits the bar could supply. Then he left to ‘further his education’.”

Pedrazzi and Free had turned down several purchase offers (including one from the Christchurch Cycling and Motor Company), but they would eventually sell The Roddy for good. 

The nugget was bought for  £450 as a fundraiser for the Ross Hospital and Messrs Archie Peebles, Bob Ford and Archie Gardiner took it on tour, selling raffle tickets around the country. Newspapers of the day proclaimed its arrival, from Christchurch to Wellington to Wanganui to Auckland. The Hon Roddy! The largest nugget yet discovered in the Dominion! One week only!

It was a splendid sample of gold, its lumps and bumps said to contain “the distinct shape of a man’s face” or, viewed from another angle, “it has the impression of a lady’s shoe”. And all that gold could be yours for just five shillings.

Some commentators later described the raffle of the Roddy as the original “Golden Kiwi” - the national lottery that grew out of the Art Union raffles and operated from 1961 until 1989, when New Zealanders began to favour the newer, shinier (and televised) Lotto. In 1910, only print journalists were there to record a very complicated prize draw, overseen by two West Coast mayors and three local dignitaries. 

First, two cylinders were prepared. In one, the officials placed a blank pellet for every ticket sold. Then they repeated that process with a second cylinder, marking just one pellet with the magic word. For more than an hour, the men drew blanks. And then, on draw number 3131, the coveted word - “nugget” - was plucked from the second cylinder. 

Reefton’s Percy Cohen claimed the gold. And, in the final paragraph of the Greymouth Evening Star’s report of the draw, there was an intriguing footnote: “The Roddy nugget has been purchased by Mr J. Murdoch (Mayor of Kūmara) for  £400, on behalf of some residents of Christchurch.” 

We now know the New Zealand Government bought the nugget to give to the king. 

What would King George V do with our gold nugget? "He can't wear it on his watch chain with comfort, and there is hardly room for it on his crown," noted the Greymouth Evening Star (April 4, 1911). "It might make a good paper weight, but then the Palace minions might sneak it, and sell it for beer, or something else equally as pleasing and deleterious. We suppose its final resting place will be in the Tower, along with the Crown jewels, and Queen Mary's hat pins."

There is no question the West Coast gold made it to London. The New Zealand Times reports the Roddy travelled from Wellington to Melbourne by the SS Warrimoo, before being transferred to the Orient liner Osterley and sailed to Naples, whereupon it was carried “overland” (with, presumably, at least one more sea journey) to London. 

Archives New Zealand still holds much of the paperwork associated with this journey, including insurance documents and a request for the approval for £800  from the Unauthorised Expenditure Account to pay for the gift, its mounting and travel. 

There is a letter too from Downing Street, London, to the then Governor of New Zealand thanking the country for both the nugget and the accompanying addresses of loyalty - one from women of New Zealand to Queen Mary and one “on behalf of the Māori  Race to their Majesties”. 

King George V’s coronation was, at the time, the most expensive ever. It cost £2.5m and, according to cabled reports from the day, “no language can exaggerate the splendour and effect of the great spectacle which London witnessed”. There was pomp and there was ceremony. There were 24 carriages, traversing a lavishly decorated five-mile route, overseen by 25,000 police officers. Somewhere, in the middle of all this splendour, was a gold nugget retrieved from the blue puggy ground of Westland. 

Modern day Ross is a blink-and-you’ll-miss it town, prettily heralded by an avenue of flowering cherries and most recently famous as an overnight stop on the West Coast Wilderness cycle trail. The Historic Empire Hotel does an outrageously good burger, $5 will get you the key to the covered town swimming pool - and $10-$20 will pay for the hire of a gold pan and expert tips from the Ross Goldfields Information & Heritage Centre. 

“The thing is, you can still go up Jones’ Creek and if you’re lucky - or if you know what you’re doing, probably more like it - you still come away with half a dozen flakes,” says Rick Fennell, centre manager.  

“Probably not even enough to buy you a jug, but it’s still there. You can still find it with just a pan and a shovel.” 

Fennell has had an interest in Ross since the 1980s when he worked with the teams that developed the historic goldfields walks behind the Heritage Centre. It’s been a tough few pandemic years keeping it all afloat, he says. Tour bus traffic dried up for a long time and independent travellers aren’t so inclined to splash their cash. 

“They rock up in their $300,000 motor caravans looking for freedom parking and they’ll put 50 cents in the donation box and say ‘there’s my bit to help the community’.” 

The Heritage Centre, in the old Bank of New South Wales building, is classic small-town museum stuff. Photocopied newspaper articles, hand painted dioramas, lots of photographs and a video on loop. In a cabinet in the centre of the room, on a fold of red velvet brocade, a replica of The Hon Roddy Nugget.

“Quite a few people know about it,” says Fennell. “Quite a few people come in looking for it. There’s so many stories. That it wasn’t from here, that it was planted, but one of the locals on the committee, he reckoned his great grandfather vouched that it was found here.” 

Every so often, says Fennell, a geologist will stop by and they’ll get talking. Could another Roddy be lurking in the Ross dirt? 

“They reckon it could be possible. There could be a slip come down from up the hill and bring a lump with it. The mountain, Mount Greenland, its French name is Mont d’or - mountain of gold. 

“There’s got to be gold still up there. One geologist from California, back in ‘93, he said Mount Greenland was like a pimple of gold. He said if you could squeeze it, it’d be bloody good.”