Historian and geologist Mike Johnston completes the account of the region's goldmining history that he began in Volume One with the Wakamarina. He describes the tantalising nature of eastern Marlborough gold and the dogged attempts to extract it, despite the area's rugged landscape, dense forests, frequent floods and muddy tracks - and often poor returns. The opening chapters detail the varied methods of goldmining in the Northbank valleys of the Wairau, from the alluvial and reef mining of the 1860s and 1870s, to the dredging around 1900, and the Depression diggings of the 1930s. There are stories of tragedy and pathos, fortunes spent, fraud and povery - and a few good-sized nuggets. Further chapters cover the substantial mines last century at Golden Point (near Picton) and on the wind-swept flanks of Cape Jackson. The core of the book then deals with New Zealand's last big goldrush - the 1888 rush to Cullen Creek at Mahakipawa, and to the Waikakaho, over the range. At both places prodigious efforts were made to find the gold deep underground (attempts finally abandoned only in the 1960s) and to mine the reefs high in the hills. The author gives a full picture of the life and times of boom town Cullensville, of its rapid decline and later revival in the 1920s and 1930s. Dr. Johnston concludes with the history of other mining ventures in Marlborough; the extensive antimony mines at Endeavour inlet and the ever-hopeful coal mining at Picton. From official records and old newspaper files the author has gathered in one authoritative volume information available previously only in widely scattered sources.