The Dunedin goldfields, referred to in the account as the fields at Dunstan, enter the story through Crosbie Wells’s discovery of a fortune there several years before his death. Though the strike made him wealthy, he kept it secret; its later revelation transformed the image of an obscure man living alone in the Arahura Valley and made the goldfields’ riches part of a bitter dispute over land, ownership, and inheritance.

The fields and the wider gold economy

The narrative gives little topographical detail about the Dunedin goldfields themselves. It identifies them as the place where Crosbie Wells made his major strike, rather than describing the workings, routes, or settlement around them. Their importance lies in what could be taken from the ground: gold whose value might remain hidden until it was carried elsewhere, converted into money, or claimed as property.

The account places that wealth against the broader expansion of gold-seeking on the West Coast. Thousands of diggers arrived in pursuit of gold, paying a pound for a prospector’s licence and ten shillings per acre for land. Those revenues accrued to the Crown, while the value of gold in rivers and sands remained too vast to have been given a total. This wider contrast clarifies the stakes of Wells’s fortune without making the Dunedin goldfields themselves the setting of the Crown’s land purchase.

Crosbie Wells’s strike and secrecy

Several years before the main events, Wells made a successful strike at Dunstan and drew in thousands of pounds. He later lived alone in the Arahura Valley, little known in Hokitika and not suspected by his acquaintances of having wealth or consequence. The account offers no explanation for his silence about the strike. His secrecy nevertheless shaped what followed: after his death, those around him had to reconstruct a fortune whose source and scale had been concealed.

The gold discovered among Wells’s belongings was valued at a little over four thousand pounds. The discovery gave retrospective weight to his earlier success at the fields, while also making the boundaries of his estate uncertain. The fortune was not simply an abstract reward for prospecting: once found, it became a material asset subject to expenses, commissions, and rival claims.

From a distant strike to a local dispute

The discovery in Wells’s cottage brought the wealth associated with Dunstan into the legal and financial affairs of Hokitika. After Edgar Clinch purchased Wells’s property, he commissioned Harald Nilssen to clear the cottage. Nilssen found gold concealed in many places in its single room; after purification at the bank and deductions for commission, taxes, fees, and incidentals, the remaining money was held in escrow. Lydia Wells then appealed to revoke Clinch’s purchase, arguing that the property and effects legally belonged to her.

Wells’s fortune was also connected, in the unfolding account, to gold concealed in Anna Wetherell’s dresses. The passage recounting the tangled movements of the gold describes Ah Quee removing dust from four gowns and retorting it into squares stamped with the name of the Aurora mine. These transfers complicate any simple account of where the fortune was located or who could claim it: gold found at a distant field had become concealed wealth, disputed property, and material whose later custody carried legal and personal consequences.

Narrative significance

The Dunedin goldfields remain largely offstage, but the discovery made there governs a chain of events far from the original strike. Wells’s secret separates the wealth he possessed from the modest life others observed; its later appearance makes that contrast a source of uncertainty rather than a straightforward tale of prosperity. The gold’s journey through concealment, recovery, and competing claims also echoes the wider conflict between legal title and older relationships to land. The goldfields are thus significant less as a fully depicted place than as the concealed origin of a fortune whose ownership continues to change with each revelation.