CHAPTER XV
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.