homeward bounder

A homeward bounder is a local term for a gold fortune large enough to offer its possessor a new life. George Shepard describes its promise as a chance for total reinvention: a nugget can buy a man his own life, an opportunity unavailable in the civil world. In the novel, however, such wealth rarely arrives as a simple reward. Gold changes hands, disguises its origins, and becomes entangled with claims of ownership, legal delay, and colonial dispossession.

Meaning and promise

The phrase turns a discovery into a threshold between one identity and another. A fortunate prospector can use gold to escape the constraints of an earlier life, but the possibility of reinvention also creates uncertainty about who is entitled to the fortune. The homeward bounder is therefore both a material prize and a social promise: wealth may buy independence, yet its value depends on the stories and documents through which it is claimed.

Shepard gives the term particular weight when discussing Crosbie Wells’s estate with Harald Nilssen. He predicts that Wells’s widow may ultimately claim the gold found in the cottage, while noting that Wells had never spoken to him of being married. Nilssen’s commission from clearing and selling Wells’s effects is also in jeopardy while the widow’s appeal proceeds. Shepard proposes that Nilssen invest the commission in a new gaol-house, with the Council sponsoring a loan and repayment expected from public funds. Nilssen would receive the ordinary commission on labour and building materials. The proposed arrangement shows how the promise of a homeward bounder can draw public works, private profit, and a contested estate into the same chain of obligations.

Wells’s fortune and the disputed estate

After Crosbie Wells’s death, his land and mill were sold before the wake was over. The land passed through the bank to Edgar Clinch, who commissioned Nilssen to clear the cottage and dispose of its contents. Nilssen found gold hidden around the single-room dwelling; after the bank purified and valued it, the fortune amounted to a little over four thousand pounds. His ten-percent commission and various expenses reduced the sum, which was then held in escrow while Lydia Wells contested the estate sale. Her arrival came after the funeral, but in time to challenge the transactions arising from the sale.

The gold’s passage through the bank further complicates its identity. The material had already been privately smelted before it was valued; the bank’s Killarney smelted it again and stamped the resulting bars with the Reserve seal. Charlie Frost explains that this second process prevented makeweights from passing through and ensured uniform quality. Once stamped, the gold’s earlier treatment was difficult for outsiders to know. The fortune thus acquired an official appearance without its private history becoming fully visible.

Gold in circulation

Wells’s cottage was not the only place where a fortune was concealed. Around the same period, Quee Long discovered gold sewn into Anna Wetherell’s dresses. Assuming, as Edgar Clinch had, that the gold was connected to Dick Mannering’s fraud, Quee secretly removed it over several months while Anna was heavily affected by opium. He retorted the dust into squares and stamped them with the name of the Aurora mine, intending for the proceeds to be credited to his own claim, which had been purchased by Emery Staines. He stripped four dresses, but Anna’s orange dress remained full because she did not wear it when she visited Quee’s hut in Kaniere Chinatown.

After Anna discovered the gold in that remaining dress, she and Aubert Gascoigne hid it in a flour sack under his bed. The missing gold in her other dresses had already moved through a different route: Quee’s retorted squares were stolen from the camp-station vault, and Staines was considered the likeliest thief. The novel notes that, had Quee’s earnings been banked against the Aurora as required, they would have transformed the apparently unproductive claim into a homeward bounder. In this instance the term marks not merely a discovered fortune, but a change in the perceived value of an entire mining claim.

A separate fortune of roughly four thousand pounds was sewn into five dresses in a trunk belonging to Alistair Lauderback. Francis Carver had used the trunk’s loss as leverage in taking the Godspeed from Lauderback, and later sought the missing shipment in Hokitika under the name Crosbie Francis Wells. The gold’s concealment in clothing, its loss in transit, and the shifting identity used to recover it echo the other fortunes without making them a single hoard. Across these episodes, gold’s apparent solidity contrasts with the instability of its ownership and history.

Land, ownership, and reinvention

The promise of a homeward bounder sits against the novel’s account of land converted into private property and profit. Six years before the events surrounding Wells’s estate, the Crown purchased the extensive western lands of Poutini Ngāi Tahu for three hundred pounds, reserving only the Arahura River, parts of its banks, and a small parcel at Mawhera. The people came to regard the transaction as theft as diggers arrived, paid for prospecting licences, and bought land by the acre, while the value of gold in the rivers and sands remained beyond calculation.

Crosbie Wells later paid fifty pounds to the Crown for a hundred acres at the eastern end of the Arahura Valley, where he built a cottage and began a timber mill. Te Rau Tauwhare regularly travelled the valley to hunt pounamu and came to know Wells through visits to the cottage. After Wells’s death, Tauwhare resented that Clinch acquired the land without appearing to use or care for it, and that the cottage’s contents were cleared for sale. For Tauwhare, land was not simply another currency. The contrast gives the homeward bounder a sharper edge: the goldfield’s promise of self-making is built within a system that has already converted Indigenous land into saleable property. Reinvention may be available to the person who finds a nugget, while the loss that made the land purchasable remains unresolved.