Gold mining company Hawkeswood Ltd is expanding operations across Otago, as they adjust to modern-day mining and working under the glare of the public.
“Finding the gold and mining the gold used to be the hard job, these days getting a resource consent is the hard job. Working on some of the bigger high country stations out in the middle of nowhere is like a dream now, a lot of those jobs are gone,” sole director and ultimate shareholder, Andrew Hawkeswood, says.
His family-owned company is expanding across Otago, including starting a project near Roxburgh that he says will likely involve State Highway 8 being “shifted over” to get to the gold – permission to do so is granted.
The company has always known about the Coal Creek deposit but, until now, moving infrastructure above and below ground has made it unfeasible. With the gold price now steady at around $7000 per ounce, shifting buried water pipes, commercial tree blocks, fences and asphalt was more doable.
“The price of gold changes everything. If you’re only getting $1500 an ounce you need a lot of ounces to be able to shift a state highway.”
The attraction of the Coal Creek site, despite it being occupied by rural businesses, was its status as fully consented. Adding to that appeal for Hawkeswood is its history of being pioneered by some well-known mining men.
“That was consented in 2016 by Kokiri Lime. We bought the assets of Kokiri Lime which included the resource consent and the mining permit for the Coal Creek project,” Hawkeswood tells Newsroom.
Kokiri Lime, owned by Mackley Ferguson, purchased the project from a group of keen gold hunters who identified the deposit over 20 years ago.
“That was Central Goldfields – Bob Kilgour, Ken Harliwich, Mark McLaren and Owen Shearer, they were reasonably prominent Central Otago mining figures back in the day.”
Hawkeswood, whose son Jack is the fourth generation of miners in the family, has been involved in gold mining in the area for 21 years. The company has been operating at Millers Flat for the past two, along the banks of the Clutha/Mata Au River.
“We’ve always been way out in the middle of nowhere and nobody knew us until we turned up at Millers Flat.”
Yields have been good and while the last thing a gold miner will tell you is how much gold they are getting, Hawkeswood hints at a healthy turnover in the tens of millions.
Newsroom earlier reported Hawkeswood’s estimate of a boost of up to $70 million to the local economy in the first few years of operation at Millers Flat.
“It’s really good but I’ve still got no money; we just put it back in. It all goes in tax and royalties and buying more land and equipment.”
The purple patch is spurring expansion and Hawkeswood has four other Otago sites in the pipeline. Permit applications are underway on blocks of land directly across the Clutha/Mata Au River from Coal Creek, at Adams Flat near Milton, at St Bathans and a chunk on the left side of the Manuherekia River about 5km north of Alexandra.
The company’s two drill rigs, used for testing ground, have two or three years’ work ahead of them at present, Hawkeswood says.
He says interest is high and a lot of ground is being “pegged”.
“Everybody wants to be a gold miner, there’s a lot of people out there pegging ground, they’ve been watching too many gold rush programmes.”
Heavy industry vs rural ambience
Alluvial mining using a floating plant can be noisy and dusty for neighbours but remediation work is done immediately and the site slowly moves through the landscape. Hawkeswood says a few years on there’s “absolutely nothing” to show they’d been there.
This will be the mining style for Coal Creek but with slower progression than at Millers Flat due to the technical mining required and the tenure of the land.
“At Coal Creek it’s less spread out than Millers Flat, it’s quite rich but it’s very narrow. It will be very technical, my brain actually starts hurting when I think about that one. We’ve been drilling it for the last few months to get a better idea of how we are going to tackle it.”
Moving what is in front of the operation before breaking new ground, as well as putting it back afterwards, would see the job stretch to around five years of operation.
At Millers Flat the company reduced working hours and truck movements following complaints by residents last year. They have worked to appease some with financial assistance and minimising impact wherever possible from the constantly rumbling diggers.
In 2024 Newsroom’s David Williams reported on resident’s concerns that initial mining at the site had quickly changed the nature of the Teviot Valley.
Thirty-six people work at the site including high school graduates from Blue Mountain College and Dunstan High School. About half of the employees were local people, Hawkeswood says, and the number will grow over time with 10 to 15 new staff required for the Coal Creek project.
The company is building a permanent workshop at Millers Flat and plan to offer mechanical and engineering apprenticeships once that’s set up.
In two weeks’ time, machinery will arrive to undertake sampling on a property the company has purchased at Coal Creek. This was principally to reactivate the resource consent, Hawkeswood says.
Planning work would then be refined with full-scale mining set to begin in about two years.
Teviot Valley Community Board chair Mark Jessop says the response of the public at a packed-out information evening on the Coal Creek project in early July was “generally positive”.
“I was quite surprised; there was hardly any negative response. People seemed to be resigned to the fact that this is going to happen.”
He believes the company has abided by all its consent conditions at Millers Flat since the mining permit was issued, as well as voluntarily donating “six figures” in funds through various community sponsorships and endeavours.
The community board was looking to nominate one or two representatives onto a Coal Creek group that would liaise between the community and the mining company.
