gold, page-509

...Hi OP... Slighly different & personal slant on '87 than that of another poster... & it's a lazy Sunday so you may take time to read... Cheers...

...Early 80's I was a commercial fisherman, our natural climate & river bar bound access to the Tasman meant that we could av. approx. only 130 days p/year... to fill the other 230 odd days we set up a small alluvial gold enterprise, very basic 20 & 40 ton Hitachi's, D8 & assoc. pumps, ancillary equip. etc., not a big deal but it paid it's (& our) way as well as augmenting the fishing... '84 NZ election & floating of NZD, boy!!!, hindsight & how naive were we country bumpkins, albeit NZ was about 20 years behind the US et al...

... Along came a couple of Aussie boys, messrs Hunt & Harris with their Sovereign Gold Mines float, bought up virtually everything going including us, simply because their offer was outragiously over the top & therefore way 'too good to refuse' as the saying goes. We were paid in script, cash (later on, in Gold) as well as being employed to continue our operation just as. Sovereign xcesses were incredible, local bankers & their big city bosses put on their gumboots & physically visited sites, nearly begging for business... Hunt & Harris (& some smarter than I, locals) ensured they did not leave empty handed. They also bought up Hotels & Motels around NZ, incl our local landmark 6 story Kings Hotel for 3+ M.

Summer time helicopter bbq's on the Hokitika beach occurred regularly as did (mostly at theflick of a switch) un-necessary money (& mind) blowing trips to CH CH, Queenstown, Brisbane, once to Canada & the US. What a euphoric episode, paticularly as one was only in his 30's, I'd would not swap this period for anything. Of course it couldn't last, but try telling that to a 30 year old living 'the dream'...

...By '86 Hunt & Harris were more prominent during the wash ups, scalping gold & now selling direct to Asians who they'd arrange to meet in mainly Queenstown or Wanaka. We were also now being paid in production gold, a local scalliwag melted it for them into (slightly less than matchbox size) approx. 13 oz, impurities incl. (our gold ran roughly 82-86% unrefined). Come early '87 there were less frequent visits, by EOF (March in NZ), I'm afraid, we were down to scalping our own wash-ups to keep ourselves running & splitting the rest with the crew, as were the other operations under the Sovereign umbrella. This also signalled that one might be wise to dump our shares, luckily way before Oct '87.

I'm afraid, by the time the Receivers got their asses on site, most of the useful major equipment had also vanished... Hey man, this is a wilderness area, Receivers from Auckland (another country &skol's baliwack) wearing business shoes & never seen mud??? What does one expect, orderly & shipshape?

...No doubt Hunt & Harris were scammers & fraudsters, but I liken them to the Character portrayed by Paul Newman in "The Sting", & they certainly shared their ill gotten loot... What they got away with only they know, but an older & wiser me now knows it's merely a fraction of a fraction of loot Merchant Bankers (as Fay Richwhite, Renouf) & Mercantile Forex traders stole from NZers in the same (& beyond) period...

...Maybe tarred with the same brush??... with many years to reflect, I'm afraid I couldn't care less... it was way too much fun & one really needs to be thankful that one made it his 40's & then some...

Otherwise, apart from the family home (c'76), I managed to secure another house & a 100 acres, a shooting/holiday bach in Haast West Coast, 2 CH CH rentals, 2 Invercargill house rentals for my Mum to augment her retirement, now part of her Trust for G & GG kids. Also very early shares in Holiday homes at Wanaka & Queenstown, these were sold some years ago, as one found to have less & less in common with the newbies... Mainly thanks to somewhat 'inadvertantly' being drawn into the Hunt & Harris 'adventures' during their '83 - '87. Mostly cash & kind transactions saw us debt free by '90...

Hmmmmm, internet banking et al.... note to oneself... be very very wary...

...Had I known then as I know now, I'd probaly be living next to Richwhite in Switzerland with heaps of fiat Zimbabwe zero's taking up room beyond the prime number... na, too bloody cold & ...foreign...

...By far the best momentos are extravagnt memories & the few golden matchbox nuggets...