Gold mining townships don’t come any more ghostly than Matakanui, a fairly easy, mostly tarsealed 10km from Omakau. At the foot of the Dunstan Mountains and surrounded by hectare upon hectare of gold workings, Matakanui, originally known as Tinkers, is well worth the time and effort to visit.

If the light’s right, peaking through the windows of Teddy Duggan’s long-closed general store may give you a glimpse of merchandise, unsold and dust-layered on dusty wooden shelves. Looking at the very original Newtown Tavern it doesn’t take much to see ghostly miners spilling drunkenly out onto the road as more refined townsfolk look on with ill concealed disgust.

Matakanui’s ghosts share the township with several living residents, so please respect their privacy and be aware that all buildings are privately owned. And loved.

The road to Matakanui is also the road to Thomsons Gorge cutting through the Dunstan Mountains to Bendigo in the Cromwell Basin. For Rail Trailers accompanied by road transport a day spent exploring this gorge is richly rewarding. The climb up to the pass has been described as much like traveling the Skippers Road near Queenstown. Steep one side, towering cliffs on the other. It does pay to have a head for heights.

The gravel road then passes through a landscape scattered with remnants of the gorge’s gold mining past. A highlight of exploring Thomsons Gorge is the Come-In-Time Reef. Here there’s a tunnel hewn 60m into the hillside and a stamper battery superbly restored through fund raising efforts by the Otago Goldfields Heritage Trust.

Well into his 80’s, Teddy Duggan shut the door to the sun-dried mud brick Matakanui store in 1980 and retired to his house to the left of the photograph.	A Central Otago township wouldn’t be a township without at least one surviving pub, even as in the case of Matakanui’s Newtown Hotel it stopped serving beer in the late 1960s. Today Newtown Hotel is a private holiday residence.

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