About Us and Our Jewellery

Established in 1985, The Gold Room brings Westland’s rich gold mining story to life as beautiful jewellery crafted from the locally found natural gold nuggets and flakes.

Our philosophy, when creating jewellery with natural gold, is to leave the nuggets in their original state, preserving the unique raw forms, from the ground.

When working with the natural gold nuggets and flakes, to make beautiful jewellery that is not only different but very wearable, many of the innovative designs incorporate prized gemstones, elegant gold work and of course imagination. Each piece of beautiful jewellery is designed to express the nuggets own individual character.

Watch the Jeweller Working

Watch our in house jeweller working with the natural gold, creating that exclusive piece of unique nugget jewellery.

You are welcome to view our jeweller as he works at his bench.  Watch him as he uses his torch to careful heat a natural nugget, then attached a ring to the top with gold solder.  This is the first stage in making a nugget into a pendant that you can wear.  He may also be rolling out a rod of metal, or drawing wire through a plate to make the necessary size piece of metal he requires. If you catch him on the right day, watch him melting gold to make a wedding band.  Gold melts at 1064 degrees Celsius.

The polishing room is where all the finishing takes place.  There are large rotating buffs, tumbling machine and sonic cleaner to make your special piece come to life.

Guarantee of Genuine Natural Gold Nuggets

The Gold Room is delighted to be able to offer its unique jewellery to you, and guarantees that all the gold nuggets and flakes used in our jewellery are natural as found out of the ground.  They are not man-made, melted, molded or other type of imitation.

We source the natural gold nuggets and flakes from local commercial mining operations, and individual gold fossickers.

During the jewellery making process, we often polished the natural gold to bring out it’s rich yellow colour and attach the natural gold to, or on to, other jewellery parts, but we never alter the nugget from it’s original form.

Uniqueness and Rarity of Gold Nuggets

Mining Techniques

A Personal Connection to the Discovery of Gold in Westland

Barry along with his wife Teresa are the owners of The Gold Room. Theresa shares her families history and connection to the first gold discovery in Westland.

Teresa’s family history is woven into the Maori and European story of the West Coast, like a golden thread. Both sides of Teresa’s whakapapa – her family tree and connections with the land – are firmly rooted in the West Coast for centuries. Her father’s family were goldminers, while her mother, Mary Hinetewai Tainui was born at the nearby Maori Pa at Arahura, which has a human history as old as any in New Zealand, the Arahura River being the source of the legendary greenstone or pounamu.

The Tainui name is not only steeped in the ancient Maori history and traditions of the South Island as one of the leading families of the Ngai Tahu tribe, but is also linked to the very first gold discoveries on the West Coast in the early 1860s.

In fact, it was Teresa’s great-great-grandfather Ihaia Tainui who first brought gold prospecting skills to the Coast from observing the men at work on New Zealand’s first goldfield at Collingwood, near Nelson. Within a few weeks Maori were discovering even better gold prospects in the wilds of the northern West Coast, at Waimangaroa, Buller Gorge and Lyell – and Ihaia was always at the forefront.

Ever restless for new gold discoveries, Ihaia was among the first Maori to be bitten with ‘gold fever’. He knew how to win gold and he knew where to look, and so 1863 found him prospecting in Hohonu Creek, not far from Arahura, with a sluice box and gold pan. His people knew Hohonu intimately, not for gold but for the treasured pounamu found within its waters.

By now the provincial government in Christchurch had offered a substantial reward for the first person to discover a ‘payable’ goldfield in Canterbury (the West Coast was then known as West Canterbury). With this in mind, Ihaia soon had stored up a nice little pile of gold flakes from his lonely claim at Hohonu. At the same time, a Christchurch businessman chartered a boat to sail to the Mawhera (Grey River) to join the search for gold. Instead, the captain made a wrong turn and ended up crossing the bar at the next river, the Taramakau. Realising his mistake, this Captain Dixon panned some gravels on the south bank of the Taramakau River, and came up with a glittering prize, a small parcel of fine gold.

Captain Dixon’s sailing ship was stuck inside the river mouth until the next spring tide, so he paid two local Maori who had been helping try to free his ship, to walk over the mountains with an urgent courier to deliver to his brother-in-law. One of these men was Ihaia Tainui. Sealing up the parcel and without telling them what was inside it, Dixon sent them on their way to deliver what he thought was his claim on the £200 bonus.

However, he was not the only wily one at Taramakau that day. Ihaia took the opportunity of the long trek to Christchurch to take his parcel of scaly, nuggety gold to claim the bonus – without telling anyone else. Five days later Ihaia faithfully delivered the courier to Captain Dixon’s brother-in-law, who celebrated all night long at his pub, the appropriately named Golden Fleece Hotel, and the next morning presented himself at the government offices to claim the bonus. But he was 10 minutes too late – his Maori courier had beaten him to it and had tabled his own pouch of gold. He protested and blustered, and even accused Tainui of stealing his gold, but the officials noted that Dixon’s gold was very fine and of very small quantity, whereas Tainui’s was flaky – and plenty of it.

Ihaia Tainui was undoubtedly the first, but in the end the provincial government found an excuse not to pay him the bonus – Hohonu was too difficult to access from Christchurch! Regardless, Ihaia returned home and resumed digging for gold, joined by his Maori relatives. In between gold digging, the Maori prospectors were always on the lookout for pounamu, and when they found a large boulder in the Hohonu creek bed they levered it up and found a sprinkling of nuggety gold underneath. Subsequently it was renamed Greenstone Creek.

A handful of European diggers who had followed Ihaia’s lead to Hohonu excitedly pegged out the creek – including a slippery character named Albert Hunt, who was cared for by Maori when he arrived on the West Coast destitute, and then ‘jumped’ their gold claim and falsely claimed the title as the discoverer of the West Coast goldfield.

Although unrewarded and unrecognised as the true discoverer of the goldfield, Ihaia Tainui and his fellow Maori prospectors continued to find new goldfields and were therefore the first to open up some of the richest diggings on the West Coast — Kaniere, Totara (Ross), Waimea, Okarito and Notown to name a few.

When his prospecting days were over Ihaia Tainui settled down with his family at Arahura Pa, and in 1879 he was elected by South Island Maori as their representative in Parliament.

Tainui’s grandfather was the great fighting chief Tuhuru, who led a conquering war party across the Southern Alps, overwhelming the previous West Coast tribe and establishing authority for the Ngati Waewae tribe. Tuhuru’s eldest son Tarapuhi was famous in the earliest days of the West Coast for his hospitality in welcoming and feeding every European who ventured into what then was an unexplored wilderness, and helping save those who got into trouble.

Tarapuhi was another of Teresa’s direct ancestors. He died in 1864 and was laid to rest in the ancestral burial cave at Mawhera (Greymouth).

Fineness and Purity of Gold Karats

Karat can also be spelt as carat and abbreviated to: kt / k/ ct

Karat in gold is a measure of purity, not to be confused with diamond carat which is the weight of the stone.

Natural gold does not come out of the ground at an exact karat, as it is formed by nature, this is why it is quoted as a percentage pure.

To make karated gold jewellery, the gold is refined and then the alloys are added in the right quantities to make the required karat. For example, an item in 18kt gold has 75% pure gold content and 25% of alloys.

You can have any karat of gold between 1kt and 24kt as it is just a matter of ratio of pure gold content to alloy.