Sheer Scale of Tunnelling Awes Children
New Zealand Herald Thursday 30 December 1999

Miners' shoes and intricate models of gold stamping batteries are all very well, but it's the pickled thumbs that everyone remembers.

Two ghostly white thumbs are preserved in little bottles on a shelf at the Waihi Gold Mining Museum and Art Gallery, like some kind of 1920s ACC rip-off.

There were plenty of genuine accident cases, but cutting off a digit was also a nice little earner during tough times, and a severed thumb would fetch £400 in compensation. But the museum's patron, Ted Grant, would rather not dwell on the grisly display.

'You're not supposed to display human body parts, but we've got away with it so far,' he says.

Mr Grant prefers to point out Norm Kirk's signature on a miners' payroll before he became Prime Minister, or the model of the old underground workings twisting over 14 layers of glass, and representing 175km of tunnels that went 600m deep.

The little museum is dedicated to the gold mining operations that have kept the Hauraki District town thriving since 1882.

A miniature train speeds around a scale model of old mining operations in the Karangahake Gorge, and stepping on a mat lights up the model of the old Cornish Pumphouse that pumped water out of the tunnels.

It was after the tunnel workings closed in 1952 that a group of residents decided to set up an arts and museum centre.

In 1962, they persuaded the Department of Education to gift the town's old technical school building to the Waihi Borough Council, to be used as a museum and gallery.

The museum's committee brought together mining relics, including 500kg rock stampers and power pylons that brought electricity to the Martha Mine in 1913.

The hordes of school children who troop through the museum are always intrigued by the huge amount of manpower that was required to move so much rock.

Centre office manager Gale Lockwood says the youngsters have no concept of 60 years of digging, and imagined thousands of miners must have been going flat out for weeks in order to go 600m below ground.

'The kids are fascinated. The town was built around a hill, which is now a big hole in the ground since opencast mining started in 1987,' she says.

Up to 12,000 visitors pass through the doors every year, many of them using the visitor's book to express their horror and appreciation of those pickled thumbs.