Our website is currently under construction — thank you for your patience.

This Week’s Issue

Historical Society’s big day at Waihi Gold Discovery Centre

Want to promote your business or idea?

We Support Local

Written by

Published on

August 5, 2025

Members of the Mercury Bay Historical Society had a very big day out last Saturday.

Mine group at the Gold Discovery Centre.

Members of the Mercury Bay Historical Society had a very big day out last Saturday, when they visited Waihi to learn about the town’s gold mining history. It was an early start at the Gold Discovery Centre to meet tour guide Eddie Morrow. Eddie is a ‘mine’ of knowledge about the history of gold mining in Waihi, and how the town has grown up around the industry. The first ‘gold fact’ Eddie told them was that all that glitters is not gold – at least 75 percent of what comes out of the Martha mine is silver!

It began in 1878 when two gold prospectors, McCombie and Lee, discovered “a promising outcrop of rock” on a hill in the area then called Waihihi. There was no town called Waihi. This was 26 years after Charles Ring discovered gold in Coromandel, precipitating the Coromandel gold rush.

The Waihi Gold Discovery Centre is a treasure-trove of working models, dioramas and information depicting the progress of the gold industry and of the town. Society members thoroughly enjoyed manipulating the interactive activities and state-of-the- art models.

From there the group moved on to the Waihi Museum to a welcome from historian and archivist Doreen McLeod. The Museum houses many fascinating historic artefacts and precious early videos, archives and records of the nascent gold industry.

Saturday afternoon saw the group on board Eddie’s Gold Mine Tours bus, to visit sites in and around Waihi, beginning with the dizzying 260-metre depth of the original Martha Mine open pit, and through the many processes necessary to extract miniscule amounts of gold and silver from many tons of rock. The ore-bearing quartz is found anywhere from 200 to 600 metres underground, and the mine owners, OceanaGold, are still finding original hand-dug tunnels at a depth of almost 600 metres.

At the end of the day, Society members had a new-found respect for those old pioneers who risked everything to get at the shiny stuff.

Penwardens find special treasure in Waihi

Daphne and Erwin Penwarden were among the Historical Society Tour Group to Waihi last Saturday.

The visit meant a lot to them. As they gathered outside the Gold Discovery Centre, they looked at the church building next door – St John’s Anglican Church – and remembered the day, “fifty-seven years and ten days ago” when they were married in that church.

Eddie and Daphne met in 1965 when they were both working in Waihi at the Akrad Radio Corporation factory, close to the church. Erwin was an apprentice radio technician and Daphne was assembling radio-telephones. The company was later bought out by Pye Radio which for many years was a significant employer in Waihi. The Penwardens moved to Whitianga in 2004, to become well-known in Lions and the Menz Shed.