" When the news of the Scottish find reached Kaniere, forty or fifty miners who had been toiling there for weeks for poor returns decided to cut their losses, buy new licences and make for Kokatahi. In the time that it took them to get to the warden’s office at Hokitika and back, the Scottish strike had been talked up into a ‘homeward bounder’: a discovery so huge that it would change men’s lives at a stroke and enable them to return home as rich men. They came up the river in pairs and groups. They "

― Rose Tremain , The Colour