Ross

This old relic of a mining equipment now sits at the side of a muddy path in Ross is an interesting photo opportunity that led to a walk through a key part of New Zealand's history.

Driving down the highway in our rusty rental car, we saw this wheel and stopped to take a photo as it looked "cool". Little did we know that lying just around the corner were a scattering of small buildings from the gold-mining town of Ross, sitting on the map somewhere between the wider known Greymouth, beaches of Hokitika and Franz Josef Glacier. Having read about the West Coast's mining past in a travel guide before arriving we had been disappointed at having to pay a crazy price to enter Shantytown just up the road to see some possible reconstructions of life in a once thriving mining town, and totally glazed over this town just off the SH6.

Pay a modest $2 for entrance to a real historical goldmine, offering a well-preserved house once belonging to a prosperous gold-mining family whose ancestors had risked everything to travel across the world to try their fortunes at a booming trade they knew little about. Staring through the window of the house out into the town, you are treated to the view across a small town that whose industry is now long gone but a community still thriving down in this part of New Zealand.

Not only is this town a reference to its' mining past, but also a window onto the diverse individuals who first made up this community back in the 1800's. Walk down towards the lake is a small Chinese pagoda, paired by a Chinese teapot in the Ross Museum. This immediately challenges you to abandon your idea of this sleepy little town and realise that this small place was a symbol of new life, prosperity and hope for miners, religious communities and others alike.

Step across the street and find your way through the tiny wooden door inside St. Patrick's Chapel, the last church in the town of Ross. Whatever your religious beliefs or background, take a moment to appreciate the serenity and peace of this small wooden construction and the hope and community it brought for hundreds of people recently arrived in New Zealand all those years ago. Built partly from materials brought across the sea on cargo ships, partly from wood gifted by a local saw mill, this church was literally one of the foundations of this community now lies as a museum documenting photographs of lives now long gone.

Of course, the main tourist attraction in Ross is the chance to try your luck at gold panning in the museum. Pay around $12, grab a gold pan, find a space in the river running nearby and you can spend as long as you want to try and find some gold just like the first dwellers in this town did. If this fails, pop into the museum and take a look at Roddy's Nugget; an impressive 3.1kg golden nugget discovered by some gold miners named Scott and Sharp in 19 something.

For me, though, the main attraction was the locals going about their daily business, undisturbed by tourists pointing a lens at their usual activities: two men playing cards outside the Grand Hotel, teens completing laps of the town on their bikes, young lads tinkering with their cars in overgrown jungles of weeds. All these faces, unknown to me but for a photograph opportunity or two, the living blood and memories of the young lives that once arrived on these shores to begin a new life in a new land and try their luck at gold to carve out a bright future for themselves. The mines may be long gone, but these people hold the same hopes and dreams to make a future in this community.