Wattie Thompson pictured in a newspaper during his cross-country solo walk.

LAURA WILLIAMSON

Every Sunday in the Wanaka App, we run a profile of an interesting local, and we are always struck that, despite living somewhere with a small population, we never run out of people to write about. Turns out this is not a new thing - the region’s past is full of fascinating characters too, like Wattie Thompson. When we heard his story, we knew we had to share it.

Wattie Thompson spent his last days quietly in Luggate, a much-loved member of the community known for his joviality and skill with a pool cue. After he died, his photo hung on a wall in the Luggate Hotel for years.

Many of the pub patrons who glanced up from their pints to look at it would have had little idea that not only was the man in the photograph the last alluvial gold miner in the region, he played a part in one of New Zealand’s greatest tragedies.

Born in England in 1909, Wattie immigrated to New Zealand as a baby with his parents, who settled at Huntly. He moved as a young man to the Ardgour Valley, near Tarras, and spent time working both there and up the Lindis until, at the age of 30, he volunteered to serve in the New Zealand Army at the start of World War II. He was captured in North Africa spent three years as a POW in Italy - wartime experiences that some say left him a committed pacifist for the rest of his life.

Upon his return to Central Otago, he turned to gold prospecting almost full-time. In the Lindis Valley, he worked a claim at Camp Creek, located in the area off of SH8 now designated as Nine Mile Historic Reserve; his old two-room concrete hut is still there, near the remains of the Lindis Pass Hotel and a huge creekside pile of tailings, testament to the work done by Wattie, and the miners who came before him.

He later prospected at Bendigo Gully, near Tarras, where he worked away sieving gravel and hunting for flecks of gold; he became well-known both for his hermetic lifestyle and for being the the Bendigo Goldfields’ last miner. As interest in Wattie grew, curious visitors started to stop in, and were sometimes handed a pan and a pile of gravel so they could have a go themselves.

Wattie "retired” to Luggate in the late seventies, though he didn’t really stop work, continuing to look for, and find, gold in Luggate Creek.

His first brush with notoriety, though, came not due to his mining endeavours, but to his religious beliefs. At the age of 56, in December 1964, Wattie set off on foot on a journey from Bluff to Cape Reinga wearing a sandwich board calling on New Zealanders to "repent” and to "remember the saboth [sic]”. He said at the time he had had a life-changing vision while alone in his hut, one which left him both deeply religious and sceptical of what he saw as the commercialisation of the mainstream churches.

His trek got a bit of media attention, attracting coverage in the ‘New Zealand Truth’ tabloid newspaper; later, once he’d returned to prospecting, a writer from ‘New Zealand Woman’s Weekly’ even visited him to do a profile. She described "a slight figure with a lined, brown face, bright blue eyes … snowy hair, a white growth on the chin, body tanned through holes in his short, patched trousers, bare feet”, and praised his "simple, contented life”.

His second foray into the public eye was more tragic.

A humble man who needed little, Wattie owned few material possessions. People who met him commented on how he seemed happy with nothing more than his mining kit, his Bible, a radio, a tractor or two (one ended up upside down in Luggate Creek), and a jar filled with gold flakes. The jar has become a bit legendary - local rumour suggests Wattie buried it, but despite extensive searching, it has never been found.

Wattie, however, was fascinated - possibly because he was so interested in geology - by Antarctica, and when he was 70-years-old, he took some of what he had amassed from his veteran’s benefit and the proceeds of gold mining and bought an uncharacteristically extravagant ticket for an 11-hour Antarctic flightseeing trip, scheduled for November 1978.

He went on the flight, but, thanks to low cloud, saw nothing of the frozen continent he had dreamed of viewing; so he decided to go back.

Wattie boarded Air New Zealand flight TE901 for a second time on November 28, 1979. He lost his life, along with the other 256 people on board, when the flight crashed into Mount Erebus.

A memorial service was held in Luggate and Wattie was laid to rest under a quartz rock headstone at the Tarras cemetery, where it remains today, a reminder that extraordinary people are everywhere, even in the smallest of places.The Luggate Community Association is currently undertaking a project to write and publish a comprehensive history of the Luggate township and its community. To help cover costs, the LCA is seeking local businesses to come on board as sponsors. If you’d like to help make this community project happen, contact [email protected].

PHOTOS: Supplied