FAREWELL TO THE GOLD
(Paul Metsers)

Shotover River, your gold it is waning
It's weeks since the colour I've seen.
But it's no use just sitting and Lady Luck blaming
I'll pack up and make the break clean

(Chorus)
Farewell to the gold that never I found
Goodbye to the nuggets that somewhere abound
For it's only when dreaming that I see the gleaming
Down in the dark deep underground

It's nearly two years since I left my old mother
For adventure and gold by the pound
With Jimmy the prospector, he was another
For the hills of Otago we were bound

Chorus

Well we worked the Cardrona's dry valleys all over
Old Jimmy Williams and me.
They were panning good dirt on the winding Shotover
So we headed down there just to see

Chorus

We sluiced and we cradled for day after day
Barely making enough to get by
'Til a terrible flood swept poor Jimmy away
During six stormy days in July

Chorus

One of the best-loved New Zealand folk idiom songs. It was written by Paul Metsers, but popularised by Phil Garland, Nic Jones, Gordon Bok and others. Metsers wrote about its composition:

I'm afraid there is no mystery source for the song, no distant broadside or doggerel from which it gained its inspiration. It's all out of my head as it happens. I got hold of a pictorial history of gold mining, a small but fascinating book called ‘The Goldfields of Central Otago’. When I read of the tragic flash flood of July 1863, I knew I had the basis of a story.

Youtube clip

--Stewie.