The week a gold mine laid bare a region’s deepest fears and fiercest loyalties
Saturday, 2 May 2026
For three days this week, a panel considered arguments about a controversial gold mine planned for Central Otago. There were high-powered experts and expensive lawyers. But perhaps the greatest truths came from the smallest people. Mike White was there.
Reality came to the vexed issue of whether a gold mine should be built near Cromwell, wearing a herringbone jacket and a warm smile on Wednesday afternoon.
The jacket was built to last, but the smile faded quickly.
Geoff Kearsley, an 83-year-old former university professor, took a seat at a table, arranged his handwritten notes and a crimson glasses case, and glanced up at a panel of seven people waiting for him to speak.
Beside him was his wife, Claire, a slight 78-year-old former psychologist.
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Twelve years ago the couple retired from their university jobs and bought 8ha on a back road near Tarras. They grew olives and raspberries, and opened a bed and breakfast.
They loved it dearly, but, accepting their age, decided to put their property on the market in 2024.
Soon after, however, a letter arrived from Australian mining company Santana Minerals, announcing its intention to build a gold mine further up their road.
It would contain four open pits, a 1km processing plant, a 2km dam for storing chemical waste, and stretch over 600ha.
Trucks and traffic from the mine would run past their house 24 hours a day for at least 14 years.
“This,” remembers Claire, “was shock and awe.”
When Santana representatives visited, they presented the mine as a fait accompli, she says.
And soon the traffic arrived, as Santana began preparatory work, seemingly assured permission was a foregone conclusion.
Contractors ripped out one of their fences and smashed a gate, Claire says. (Santana later replaced them.) Neighbours’ trees were felled.
The rural haven that was Thomson Gorge Rd, was suddenly destroyed.
Shock turned to grief, Claire says. “Grief at our loss.” Sadness followed, kept company by anger, anxiety, and broken sleep.
Of course, news of the proposed mine scared off anyone interested in buying their home. For Sale signs became pointless adornments once people realised mine traffic ran past their front gate, en route to Santana’s operation a few kilometres away.
So here they were, Geoff and Claire Kearsley, him with his white beard and thinning hair, her with a ponytail, in front of the Fast-track expert panel who would decide if the mine went ahead or not.
Until then, submissions had been rarefied, high level, complex, bureaucratic, legal.
But the Kearsleys wanted the decision-makers to see the human face of Santana’s project, and outline the human cost.
“If the mine goes through, we’ll still have to be there,” Claire told the panellists. “No one will buy our properties.”
“We will bear quite considerable costs,” Geoff added. “But we will see no benefits.”
Beyond bureaucracy
The road to the this week’s hearings has been long, despite it being part of the Fast-track process.
This is a government initiative to cut through red tape, and make decisions quickly on development projects.
Buoyed by exuberant support from Resources Minister Shane Jones, Santana lodged its Fast-track application late last year, having spent $8 million and produced 9500 pages of information and technological reports.
The panel of experts appointed to weigh the application, then invited submissions from those with particular interests, or who might be affected.
And for three days, those people were given the chance to speak to the decision-makers in person.
It was a rare opportunity for direct input, and for the public to see the controversial Fast-track process in action, the panellists emerging briefly from weeks of weighty reading and research, providing comforting proof the gigantic task hadn’t been abandoned to AI.
The tables at Cromwell’s Marsden Lake Resort had been readied for them with sleek stainless water jugs, boxes of tissues, and dishes of mints.
A phalanx of Santana lawyers and staff sat behind laptops, and a series of submitters rotated into the seats beside them.
There were spokespeople for local councils, the Department of Conservation, Heritage New Zealand, and an array of environmental groups.
And there were also the little people and locals.
Holger Reinecke was a neighbour of the Kearsleys. He’d arrived in Thomson Gorge Rd well before them, grown grapes, and made wine for 20 years.
Circumstances had now changed and Reinecke and his partner, Chantal Degril, decided in early 2025 they wanted to move back to France where Degril was from. But now they were stuck, unable to sell their property, in limbo on land they once loved.
“I realise I’m only a very small cog in the big decision-making process that’s come upon us,” Reinecke told the panel, his words hinting how his life had been swallowed by Santana’s actions, and his future had slipped out of his hands.
Reinecke joked he was jealous of the 750,000 lizards on the proposed mine site, which had become examples for many of the ecological destruction about to be caused.
“Unfortunately, there’s only two of us, and we’re not rare or protected.”
Reinecke said there had been no engagement from Santana and the company seemed to forget or ignore the impact of their proposal on people’s lives.
“The mining project doesn’t just land on us from outer space, or appear through some Harry Potter-style magic.
“People behind such a project need to understand that they do not operate in some imagined void, or world of alternative facts.”
‘The scone had more substance’
Jonny Trevathan’s daughter, Maggie, started at Tarras School last week. Jonny went there as a kid. So did his father, Beau.
In fact Maggie was the fifth generation of Trevathans on their farm near Tarras since their forbears bought the land in 1914.
The Trevathans’ land is adjacent to the mine, but they didn’t recoil when Santana announced its plans.
Beau and Jonny had both been positive about the area’s other major proposed development - an international airport at Tarras. So they initially thought the mine would provide good opportunities for the district.
They went along to Santana’s community drop-in sessions at the Tarras Hall, and asked the company if they could have a face-to-face chat - in the same way the airport company had done.
“That unfortunately fell on deaf ears,” remembers Jonny.
But eventually Santana CEO Damian Spring and general manager Paul Miles visited the Trevathans to talk about the mine’s potential impacts.
“When we finally got them to sit at the table with us and have a cup of coffee and a discussion, there was more substance in the scone than there was in the conversation,” Beau remembers.
“But they’d ticked the box to say they’d consulted.”
The Trevathans’ main concern is what will happen if the mine’s tailings dam, which will contain 18 million cubic metres of chemical waste, fails.
Beau says Santana never informed them of their modelling about this.
Only after the family had researched the issue themselves did they discover a document showing their homes would be inundated under 3m of toxic rubble within 45 minutes of the dam breaching.
“They had this information, and they never brought it to our attention,” Beau says.
“We were kept in the dark. When it comes to consultation, they’ve been very poor.”
On Thursday, the Trevathans’ lawyer, Bridget Irving, said the family didn’t want the risks of a catastrophe from the mine hanging over them for generations to come.
“Loss of life is foreseeable if the worst was to happen,” Irving said, pointing to a 2019 mining tailings dam collapse in Brazil that killed 270 people.
Irving said Santana’s proposal contained many assumptions, with a refrain there was no risk. But she warned that “assumption is the mother of all stuff ups,” and Santana’s attitude appeared to be “yeah, but she’ll be right”.
“This application is, unfortunately, not decision-ready,” Irving concluded.
The deep divide
But it wasn’t all concern and criticism.
When Bill Sanders got up to speak to the panel, there was standing room only in the public gallery.
The Cromwell businessman created the Santana Mine Supporters Facebook page in January, which now has more than 10,000 members.
The call had gone out on the page for members to support Sanders, hence why the room had reached capacity.
Sanders told the panel he’d never done anything like this before, but the group gave people wanting local jobs, higher wages, and the chance to stay in the region, somewhere to stand together.
Sanders pointed to one member who flew to Australia to work in the mines, leaving his family behind, because that’s where the well-paid jobs were.
“If this mine doesn’t go ahead,” Sanders warned, “he’s not coming back here. He’ll move his whole family to Australia - and he’s not the only one.”
When Sanders finished, there was loud applause, and when he walked outside into the autumn sun, the handshakes and backslaps and congratulations showed he’d tapped a vein within the local community.
But Sanders wasn’t the only one talking about people leaving the district over the mine.
Hayden Johnston, who owns winery and event centre The Canyon at Tarras Vineyards, said if the mine went ahead, he would have to abandon the businesses he’d spent nearly 25 years building.
“The incompatibility of this project means I can’t be there - I’ve got to get out. It will completely blow the wind out of my sails.”
Johnston (Ngāi Tahu) was 5km from the mine site, and spoke of what was at stake.
He talked about the incredible swarms of native bees, the peace of the place, the comfort of conservation land adjoining his property.
He said visitors from around the world were “won over and silenced by that landscape”.
And he warned what was special about the area was already being affected by Santana’s activities, with Central Otago’s famous wines at risk of being tainted beyond rescue if the mine was approved.
“A ‘yes’ decision here will light the pathway for the many, many other [mining] applicants to follow. I just think it’s the beginning of the end of the current economy of this region.
“And I don’t know, frankly, whether we have the mandate, all of us in this room, to make that call.”
Feeling the heat
On the final afternoon of hearings, panel chairperson Matthew Muir, KC, began to wilt.
Central Otago’s sun had been beaming through the venue’s windows all day, searing the former High Court judge’s back. Removing his jacket wasn’t enough, so he called for a brief break.
When everyone returned, Muir asked Santana lawyer Joshua Leckie if the company regarded those neighbouring the proposed mine - the Kearsleys, the Trevathans, Holger Reinecke, Hayden Johnston and others - as “collateral damage”.
No, no, Leckie replied, not at all.
“The perception of those neighbours is,” Leckie began, before catching himself and apologising for characterising it that way. “Their views are very relevant to your consideration.”
And then Muir brought the hearings to a close.
There were goodbyes to be said. There were flights to catch. There was a mountain of paperwork to sift.
There was one of the most difficult decisions for the future of those not just on Thomson Gorge Rd, but across Central Otago and New Zealand, to be made.
And as the panel filed out, they could still hear the echo of several submitters: You have one chance to get this right.