The Hawthorn Hotel, on George Street in Dunedin, brings together fortune-telling, lodging, and business at the opening of Emery Staines’s goldfields career. Its dining room and bar are not merely places to pass through: Lydia Wells uses the hotel to read the futures of newcomers, while Staines’s debt there gives Francis Carver an opening to secure a share of his future mining returns.

Setting and Uses

The hotel serves different purposes across the episodes set there. Lydia Wells regularly takes her almanacs and star charts to a corner of its dining room in the afternoons, where she offers readings to newly arrived diggers and travellers. The hotel is also a place to lodge and eat: both Staines and Carver stay there during Carver’s shore leave, and they often breakfast together. These overlapping routines make the establishment a point of contact between the city’s newcomers and its established operators.

Lydia Wells’s Fortune-Telling

On one afternoon, Lydia’s only customer is a golden-haired boy in a felt cap named Edward, who has arrived aboard the steamer Fortunate Wind. He is fascinated by her apparent affinity for the arcane, and his enthusiasm inclines her to give a generous reading. By the time she has drawn his natal chart and discussed his past, present, and future, it is approaching four o’clock. When Francis Carver strides across the dining room towards her, Lydia sends Edward to ask the waiter to wrap a hot-water-crust pie for her dinner. The moment places her fortune-telling within an ordinary public routine of meals, customers, and passing encounters.

Staines’s Debt and Carver’s Offer

Staines arrives in Dunedin in high spirits after commissioning a natal chart from Lydia, whose uniformly providential forecast has encouraged him to celebrate. The next morning, with a severe headache, he discovers that he owes the Hawthorn Hotel eight pounds: he has lost his fortnight’s stipend at brag and another five pounds besides. His memory of the gambling is hazy, and he asks the hotelier for coffee on credit while he considers what to do. About three-quarters of an hour later, Carver appears at the hotel with sponsorship papers.

Carver offers to pay for Staines’s miner’s right, swag, and passage to a payable goldfield, as well as any debts he has incurred in Dunedin. In exchange, Staines must sign over half-shares in his first claim, with dividends in perpetuity routed to Carver’s Dunedin account by private mail. Staines suspects that Carver engineered the gambling loss by encouraging him to bet and keeping his glass filled. Though he recognizes that he has been played, he accepts the terms with good humour, treating the swindle as experience.

A Shared Lodging and Point of Departure

Carver advises Staines that Otago is past its prime and directs him towards Hokitika, where rumours promise quick riches. Because the landing there is dangerous and steamers have already been wrecked on the bar, Carver insists that Staines travel under sail. After they visit the customhouse, an outfitter on Princes Street, and the Reserve Bank, Staines has a miner’s right, a swag, and a ticket to Hokitika aboard the schooner Blanche, scheduled to leave Port Chalmers on the morning of 13 May.

During the two weeks before their separate journeys, Staines and Carver see a great deal of each other while lodging at the Hawthorn Hotel. They often breakfast together, and Staines sometimes accompanies Carver on errands and appointments around the city. Carver speaks little beyond a persistent, contained anxiety; Staines, by contrast, takes their companionship as a welcome diversion. The hotel’s role in this episode is therefore both practical and consequential: it provides the setting for Staines’s lodging and social routine, and the circumstances of his stay enable Carver to turn a gambling debt into a lasting claim on his first mining venture.