GOLD DIGGINGS IN CREEK AND DESERT
I am in Ballarat, the heart of what was once the chief mining district
of this golden continent. Within a stone’s throw of me was found a
lump of gold as big as a watermelon and from under the hotel where I
stay fortunes in gold have been taken. Every bit of earth in sight has
been run through a sieve again and again to wash out the precious dust
it contained, and for miles about the valley of Yarrowee Creek has
been honeycombed with diggings. It is even said that the water in some
of the deepest mines contains gold. One story is told of how several
barrels of water from here were hermetically sealed and sent off to
Paris. They were kept there for years, and when opened were discovered
to have precipitated several gold nuggets. I doubt the truth of this
story!
Gold was known to exist in Australia long before 1851, when Hargraves,
an Australian who had prospected in California, discovered it in paying
quantities. Hargraves had gone to California in the gold rush of ’48
and had failed, but he was haunted by the idea that the gold country in
California resembled a certain valley in the hills of New South Wales.
This valley was that in which Ballarat lies. He decided to go back home
and prospect. He did so and his discoveries threw all Australia into a
fever. In a short time it was proved that every creek within a radius
of seventy miles from here had gold in its sands, and in the placer
mines opened at Ballarat gold was found in great lumps.
One of the first big nuggets weighed one hundred and one pounds, while
the “Welcome” nugget weighed as much as a good-sized man, tipping the
scales at one hundred and eighty-four pounds and nine ounces. I have
seen models of the nuggets in the mining museums of Queensland, of New
South Wales, and of Victoria, as well as in the different state mining
schools. The “Welcome” nugget, which was the size of a big baby, was
twenty inches long, twelve inches wide, and seven inches thick. It
was sold in Melbourne for fifty thousand dollars. In 1858 a lump of
gold worth twenty thousand dollars was found in New South Wales, and
fourteen years later a mass of gold and quartz weighing six hundred and
thirty-nine pounds was discovered at Hills End in the same state. An
offer of one hundred and sixty-five thousand dollars for it was refused.
Some of the most remarkable mines of Victoria were at Bendigo, about a
hundred miles from Melbourne, where in the height of their production
the goldfields yielded more than a million dollars a year. The mines
at Ballarat are now worked out, but quartz mining is still carried on
at Bendigo Amalgamated, a consolidation of the mines in that region.
The average yield is about one hundred and sixty-five thousand ounces a
year. Since 1851 the mines of Victoria have produced upward of one and
a half billion dollars’ worth of gold.
The Ballarat of to-day is not like the Ballarat of the great gold rush.
Then it was a city of tents, which probably housed more people than the
present population of twenty thousand. Now it is a well-built town,
with many comfortable homes, and streets as wide and as well paved as
those of Washington. The principal thoroughfare is lined with marble
statues, and there are others scattered throughout the long park in the
suburbs.
Ballarat has good stores and banks, and even a stock exchange, but
there is not a mine-shaft house in sight. The people are especially
proud of their theatre seating three thousand, an art gallery
containing some fairly good paintings, and a mechanics’ institute
with a library of twenty-two thousand volumes. It has four other
free libraries, good public schools, and churches of every Christian
denomination under the sun. It has flour mills, woollen mills, and iron
factories. The town has become the commercial centre of a rich pastoral
and agricultural region. It is seventy-five miles from Melbourne by
rail, and on the main road from Melbourne to Adelaide.
The mining school at Ballarat is, I venture, as well equipped as
any similar institution in the United States. I had letters to its
superintendent from the director of the mint at Melbourne, and its
president kindly showed me through. The college is built over a gold
mine which it operates to give practical training to the students. The
boys go down into the shafts and work the mine, thus learning by actual
experience how gold is taken out of the earth. Connected with the
school are all sorts of reduction works run by the students, including
cyanide plants, a chlorination plant, and facilities for all the
various methods of treating ore. There are large chemical laboratories,
assay furnaces, and, in short, everything needed for such a college.
To-day Victoria and Western Australia are the leading gold-producing
states of the Commonwealth. I have talked with miners from Western
Australia, who tell me that much of the vast territory has not been
touched. Said one mining expert:
“The gold we know of extends over an area of more than six hundred
thousand square miles. You can take dirt from the road at any point
along a thousand miles, wash it, and find colour.”
Kimberley, where gold was discovered in the eighties, was the first
of the Western Australia fields, and it proved a disappointment. The
prospectors there were working along dispiritedly when in 1892 a man
rode into the town of Southern Cross with great news. He brought with
him ten thousand dollars’ worth of nuggets and dust picked up in two
days in a desert region that the aborigines called “Goldarda.” There
are still old-timers to tell of the scenes that followed. In two hours
the price of a horse rose from ten dollars to two hundred and fifty
dollars. Camels could not be had. Dogs, cows, and goats were at a
premium. So was anything on wheels, from buggies to baby carriages.
Some men set off with wheelbarrows. In a day or two Southern Cross was
practically deserted, and its inhabitants were trekking across the
hundred and twenty-five miles of desert that lay between them and the
new strike at Coolgardie. They did not even know the location of the
water holes along the route. Many were two or three weeks on the way
and arrived with tongues swollen and lips cracked and blackened from
thirst.
[Illustration: In parts of Western Australia, where water cannot be
had, gold is dry-blown. The soil is first sifted for nuggets and then
the metal is separated from lighter waste by means of bellows.]
[Illustration: More than ten thousand camels are used in the dry back
blocks, especially in the mining districts of Western Australia.
Sometimes it may cost five dollars or more to give one a real drink.]
In a few weeks the news brought men from all parts of Australia; in
a few months it attracted them from all parts of the world. Capital
became interested. The Wealth of Nations mine at Coolgardie, from which
three great nuggets were taken at once, but which later proved only
a low-grade mine, was discovered by an Indian camel driver who was paid
two dollars and a half for his find. The owners of the camel took out
more than a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of gold and then sold the
mine for seven hundred thousand dollars. The original Coolgardie claim
yielded more than two and a half million dollars in its first ten years.
In 1893, when the Coolgardie claims were giving out, a grocer of
Adelaide formed a syndicate of fifteen people with a capital of less
than a thousand dollars. The prospectors they sent out turned up the
riches of the famous Golden Mile of Kalgoorlie. Five years later, when
the syndicate was disbanded, it voted its original capital as a bonus
to its secretary. The value of the shares, based on its holdings at
the Golden Mile, was then more than thirty-six million dollars. At
that date the syndicate had produced seventeen tons of gold. The money
distributed to the Adelaide shareholders was close to five millions in
cash, besides upward of seventeen millions in stock.
The great handicap in the Kalgoorlie, Coolgardie, and other desert
mines was lack of water, which then cost about as much as gasoline does
now. In the Coolgardie fields water brought as much as twenty-five and
fifty cents a gallon, and there was a regular business of evaporating
and condensing salt water from the lakes and wells to make it fit to
drink.
It was impossible to get enough to wash out the gold, which had to be
dry-blown. That is, the soil spaded from shallow trenches was first
sifted for nuggets, then thrown into the wind and expertly caught in
iron pans. It was tossed up again and again to get rid of the lighter
waste. Later on bellows worked by hand or foot power were used, and
still later fanning mills were introduced. I am told that in those
early “roaring nineties” one could see above the mining camps in the
desert a red cloud of dust. This “hell cloud,” as it was called, hid
the miners from view, and out of it came the sound of laughter and
curses, and the roar of the gravel raining into thousands of iron pans.
Although at that time the whole of Western Australia had only about
as many people to pay its taxes as Des Moines has now, the government
did a great deal to help get water for the miners. In the Coolgardie
district it built a number of tanks, bored artesian wells, and
installed condensers. Kalgoorlie now has a reservoir with a capacity of
five million gallons. It is fed by a stream through a steel pipe as big
around as a barrel and three hundred and fifty miles long. The water
comes from a point near Perth and is lifted by a series of pumps to a
height of about thirteen hundred feet. The Western Australia government
sells it at an average rate of seventy-five cents a thousand gallons;
in the early days water used to cost sixteen times as much. Without
this pipe line Australia’s best gold mines would have to be abandoned,
and the cities of Coolgardie, Kalgoorlie, and Boulder would sink back
into a forlorn desert. Nowadays, as one of the old prospectors put it,
“Water? They _waste_ it! At Kalgoorlie, _they even bathe in it_, at
twenty-five cents a head!”
In developing Western Australia’s mineral wealth, camels have proved
almost as invaluable as water. They had been introduced into the
country in the early days and multiplied faster than in their native
Arabia. Along with them came their nomadic or Bedouin drivers, who
found Australian wages to their liking and stayed on, although in many
cases their jobs have now been taken by white men. It is estimated
that more than twelve thousand camels are worked in the dry back blocks
of the continent. The ungainly beasts stalk back and forth between the
railway terminals of the east and the dry lands of the west. From the
silver-mining centre at Broken Hill in western New South Wales they
start out for the northwestern part of the state and for interior South
Australia, Queensland, and the Northern Territory. From “The Hill” they
take supplies to the remote sheep stations, returning with wool. Three
hundred and fifty camels are worked by the water-supply branch of the
Western Australian government. They serve the gold prospectors and the
settlers of the “Never-Never Land,” and they are the police and mail
carriers of the desert blocks.
In the desert gold-mining camps a considerable expense of doing
business is watering the camels. A camel ordinarily drinks seven or
eight gallons, when thirsty he will take in twenty gallons, and after
several days without water forty gallons are hardly enough to fill him
up. Where water is scarce it may cost his owner two or three dollars to
treat his mount to a drink; one camel just in from a long trip drank
fourteen dollars’ worth before he was satisfied.
But before I leave the subject of gold mining in Australia let me tell
you of the visit I made to the mint at Melbourne where for many years
gold dust and bullion have been turned into sovereigns. The gold comes
from different sections of Australia and after being coined is shipped
off to London. The greater part of the metal goes into sovereigns and
half sovereigns.
I went through this money mill with its director. We first watched
the gold as it came in. Some of it was dust, but much was in the
form of bullion bricks from the smelters. As it was handed over the
counter the clerks weighed it, using scales so fine that they can
weigh accurately a golden grain as small as the point of a pin or a
great nugget the size of my head. After the gold has been weighed a
memorandum of the amount is made for the depositor, which he presents
at the cashier’s office to get his money.
Leaving this room we went on to see how the smelting was done. The gold
is melted in crucibles or pots of fine clay and plumbago. Each pot has
a capacity of perhaps half a gallon of liquid gold. It is fitted into
a little furnace not unlike the forge of a country blacksmith, set in
a long, narrow ledge on one side of the melting room. In the room we
entered there were twenty of such furnaces, nearly all of them filled
with gold. The fuel used is coke, and a strong draught makes such a
heat that the metal bubbles like boiling water. I was dazzled when I
looked into the pots. The liquid was emerald rather than gold. I saw it
poured out into moulds and the stream was a current of beautiful molten
green on a background of light yellow. Later, when the moulds were
opened, the green had disappeared and the metal had become a bright
golden yellow.
I next watched the bars of bullion being rolled into the strips from
which the gold coins are cut. Each was a ruler of gold twenty-five
inches long, two inches wide, and not quite half an inch thick. I
followed a truck load of these bars as they were wheeled into the
rolling room. Here they were pressed between great steel rollers,
which made them longer and thinner. At the finish each bar had become
fourteen feet long and was just the thickness of a sovereign. Moreover,
the pressing had polished it so that it shone like a new wedding ring.
I noticed that the workmen wore thick gloves, and was told that this
was because the strips of metal get hot as they are rolled.
[Illustration: Once treated with scant consideration, the shearers
who now have one of the strongest unions in the country are veritable
autocrats about their hours, wages, and quarters. Every afternoon they
knock off for tea and a smoke.]
[Illustration: Like 600,000 other Australians, these leather workers
are union men with good wages, fair hours, and a weekly half holiday.
Forty-eight hours is the weekly maximum, though in some trades as
little as thirty-six hours count as full time.]
[Illustration: The agriculturist feels keenly the need for more people
on the land, but he stands with the trade unions in opposition to
letting in swarms of coloured labour from the over-populated Orient.]
The next process is making the blanks. This is done by steel punches
which cut the metal into disks much as a cook cuts the dough in making
biscuits. I stood beside this machine and heard it chop, chop, chop,
as it punched out sovereigns at the rate of ninety to the minute,
twenty-seven thousand dollars per hour.
Each blank is weighed to see that it has exactly the right weight of
gold for a sovereign, and is then run through a coining press which
stamps the image of the king upon it and at the same time mills the
edges. All of this work is done with cold steel pressing upon the cold
gold. The only heat after the melting is that which comes from the
pressure caused by the enormous weight on the metal.
I have no doubt that Australia will be turning virgin gold into
sovereigns for years and years to come, but its production of the
precious metal is on the wane. The mines of Kalgoorlie are still
paying, but those of Coolgardie are worked out. The annual production
for the whole country is now only half that of Victoria in its best
days, and is considerably below the best year’s output in Queensland
and Western Australia. It may be, though, that more Golden Miles lie
hidden under the vast unprospected areas of the continent.