In 1882 Charles Lawson, a Norwegian sailor-turned-miner sat down in his tiny cottage in Bendigo, Otago, to write to his 11 year-old daughter in Liverpool. The lonely widower, born Karl Larsen in a tiny hamlet in northern Norway, wrote the kind of letter that a parent writes to a child, and in doing so, revealed aspects of his new home and the nature of his work as a quartz miner in Otago that no history, journal or contemporary letter has offered previously. It details the unique lifestyle and the landscape and society in which it was lived, to re-populate the mining town from its present iteration as mere stone ruins in an historic reserve.

Lawson’s letter, the last anyone received from him before his accidental death in 1883, allows a unique look at the uncelebrated, unglamorous and poorly remembered world of the Otago miners who chased golden dreams underground, whose experience of the rush for gold was limited to the end of a dark adit in an under-capitalised, marginally-profitable mine lit by sputtering tallow candles. I investigate and discuss this hard, forgotten story, particularly as it contrasts with the romantic depictions and commemorations of the alluvial miners of that era.