The mountain belongs to a low range of hills not far from the coast. It was part of a farm owned by a man named Gordon, who had fenced it in and was using it for pasturage. One night Gordon was visited by two brothers named Morgan, who were prospecting. The Morgans stayed overnight, and Gordon told them he thought there was copper on his farm as he had noticed green and blue stains in the rocks. The next day he took the prospectors to the mountain, and when they left they carried away samples. A few days later they came back and offered him five dollars an acre for the property. He was glad to sell, and for this price the Morgans bought one of the richest mining properties ever known. To get money to work the mine they sold a half interest to three men in Rockhampton for ten thousand dollars. With this they experimented, and finally discovered that the ore could be worked by the chlorination process. The result was that they and their associates soon became millionaires.
Since then the works have expanded until a town has grown up at the foot of the mountain. There are great mills, in which more than two thousand men are employed. The mine has continued to pay big dividends, but these now come from copper rather than from gold. For, when the gold began to grow scarce, apparently inexhaustible supplies of copper were found underneath the deposits of the more precious metal.
Some people think that there may be other gold deposits in the neighbourhood equally as rich as those of Mount Morgan. However that may be, it is a fact that twenty miles from the city a little boy one day found a nugget worth ten thousand dollars.
Rockhampton is a city of twenty thousand founded on the gold and copper mines. It is now growing as a centre of the dairying and mixed farming interests fast developing in the surrounding country. The town, which has the Tropic of Capricorn running through one of its streets, is built some thirty miles inland on a steamy valley of the Fitzroy River. It is cut off by a high range of hills from the ocean breezes. Even in June, the coolest month of the year, the thermometer goes above eighty degrees Fahrenheit, and in February the mercury often rises to one hundred and sixteen. In the early gold-mining days the Britishers who came out to get rich and toiled in the heat nicknamed the place the “City of the Three S’s”—Sin, Sweat, and Sorrow. Nevertheless, it is a growing town full of business.
Three hundred miles northwest of Rockhampton is the town of Charters Towers, the centre of another big gold field a few miles back of the seaport of Townsville. The gold at the “Towers” was discovered in 1872 by three prospectors, who took out millions of dollars’ worth in a short time. The principal mining is quartz, some of the workings being very deep. As at Mount Morgan, copper mining is carried on profitably along with the gold mining. Another field is that of Gympie, where, it is said, the boys used to pick up grains of gold in the streets after a rain, sometimes getting as much as half an ounce a day. In that town one man found a nugget worth eleven hundred dollars.
So far, Queensland has produced nearly half a billion dollars’ worth of gold, and mines are still being worked throughout a large area, although the cream of the known deposits has been skimmed off.
There are also deposits of lead, as well as of iron, bismuth, and silver. Iron is found in all sections, and in one district there are little mountains of iron ore. Mt. Leviathan, a hill two hundred feet high, is said to be composed of pure magnetic iron. In the long tongue of York Peninsula, which Queensland thrusts up toward Torres Strait, there are tin deposits over a wide area. Tin is found also in the southern part of the state.
Some of the finest Australian opals come from western Queensland. That region has a long belt of opal-bearing country, extending from a point near the Gulf of Carpentaria across the southern border of the state and into New South Wales. The opals are brought into Brisbane by the handful and sold at low prices. Many of the opal miners are sheep-shearers, who hunt for the stones in the off season. The gems are found in quartz and in sandstone, from six inches to thirty feet below the surface. The Queensland black opal brings big prices in Paris, London, and New York. It is not really black but a mixture of rich colours, with iridescent green and violet prevailing. Deep down in its heart is a living spark of flame, which has given it also the name of the “fire opal.”
About two hundred miles west of Rockhampton are the Anakie gem fields which are studded with sapphires. Stones to the value of nearly one hundred thousand dollars are produced there every year. The best of them are of the clear lemon and orange tints which have become especially popular with the jewellers of Paris.
So much for Queensland’s crown of gold studded with gems. Her cross is the greenish-gray cactus, which has ruined vast areas of rich agricultural lands. I have heard different stories about how prickly pear came to Australia. Some say John Macarthur, who was such a benefactor to the country through his introduction of the Merino sheep from Spain, is responsible for it. Perhaps he had seen the cactus hedges used in the thickly settled Mediterranean countries to separate small holdings and thought they would be a good thing for the gardens and paddocks of the Australian settlers. It is even said that the first prickly-pear plant was sent to the Downs carefully wrapped in cotton wool and packed in a sealed box. Now, for mile upon mile the traveller sees only an impenetrable thicket of this spiny, gray-green vegetation, growing right up to the settlers’ front doors. It is stated that the plant covers more than fifteen million acres of Queensland, or an area nearly twice that of Rhode Island.