Five Years Under the Southern Cross: Experiences and Impressions

by Frederic C. Spurr

Governments are wiser to-day than formerly. They do not throw away their gold or their land to adventurers. The law of honest work is beginning to apply. Our youth can no longer wander into the world and pick up nuggets of gold at will. Some of them try and do this in a modern way by prospecting at gambling. That folly must also pass. The world will only be happy and fraternal when its gold fever has passed, and when honest work of brain or hand shall have taken its place.

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It was at Bendigo that I had the new experience of descending a gold mine. In almost any part of the world one may descend a coal mine, but a gold mine is much rarer, and when the opportunity was offered of seeing the conditions under which the most precious of all metals is extracted from the earth, I naturally embraced it immediately.

Once upon a time, within living memory, fifty years ago, there was no need to penetrate deeply into the bowels of the earth to discover gold. It lay upon the surface and just beneath it.

Rarely are surface nuggets found to-day; the country has been so thoroughly scoured. But exceptions occur, and as I write there is a note in the daily papers to the effect that a man picked up a nugget of gold last week worth £500. There may be yet another rush to that neighbourhood.

Deeper and deeper the mines have been sunk. When the surface and the sub-surface had yielded all their precious secrets, men went ever farther down in search of the yellow metal. Sometimes the mines were a failure and the owners of shares were glad enough to give away their shares, or to sell them at ridiculous prices, rather than pay the continual “calls” made upon them. One man, whose name to-day is intimately associated with Bendigo, found a fortune in this way. He was entreated by a disappointed shareholder to buy shares at sixpence each. It seemed like throwing money away to buy even at that price, for the mine was exhausted. Yet he bought them, and then, in a moment, the tide turned and gold was discovered in the exhausted mine, and the almost penniless man who had bought shares for which he could scarcely pay, became a semi-millionaire. Such are the fortunes of the gold-field. The mine we descended was 2,100 feet deep. The shaft, top gear and cage resembled those of a coal mine, save that the wheels over the shaft were less than half the size of those of an English coal-pit. And, of course, there was an absence of the grime associated with a coal mine. We had to divest ourselves of all our ordinary garments and to don a costume which for the time gave us rank amongst tramps. Armed with a candle, we entered the cage, and descended. The journey seemed interminable. For more than two minutes we were slowly dropping through the shaft, enveloped in a profound darkness, and subjected to a perpetual baptism of water which rained upon us. There are times when seconds seem like minutes, and minutes like hours. And the two minutes and a half we were in that cage, suspended by a slender steel rope, seemed a small eternity.

The temperature at the bottom was nearly 80 deg. Fahrenheit, and we were compelled to remove all clothing, save our trousers. In a few minutes we had entered upon the experience of a Turkish bath; streams of perspiration ran down our bodies. Whenever we lighted upon a group of miners we saw that they also were living in a perpetual bath. Nearly stripped, great beads of perspiration stood out on their flesh. “We are used to it, sir,” said one of them cheerfully, but I learned that for some of them this “use” meant disease and death—largely through want of care when they brought their overheated bodies to the surface. Along well-built corridors we tramped, holding our lighted candles ahead of us. No danger in the gold mine of that terrible fire-damp which is so fatal to coal miners. But in the gold mine there is another danger like that which threatens colliers; that of falling masses of mineral. We came to one place where on the previous day, without warning, a hundred tons of rock and quartz had fallen. Happily, no man was injured; but it is not always so. When our turn came to crawl along on hands and knees, surrounded by angry-looking rock possessing sinister-looking gaps, the perspiration did not decrease in volume. It seemed as if a single touch would suffice to bring down a hundred tons weight upon our fragile backs. The danger is always present despite every precaution taken to ensure safety. Blasting continually goes on, and then the danger is at its height.

Let me confess to a feeling of disappointment. In a coal mine the black diamonds glisten under one’s eyes. There is no faith required to believe in the presence of coal. The seams are there, and all that is necessary is to dislodge the coal, load it in trucks and convey it to the surface. It is otherwise in the gold mine. In my simplicity I was looking out for nuggets, as men used to do on the surface. Alas! we saw not so much as the ghost of a nugget. To our untrained eyes there was not the suspicion of gold anywhere. Everywhere we caught the glitter of a yellow substance, which at first we mistook for gold, but which is in reality worthless. The gold is hidden in these vast seams of quartz, which have to be dislodged, brought to the surface, sent to the battery, crushed and washed. And then at last, when the water has ceased flowing over the pulverised mass of sand, the gold is discovered. It is all faith at first. These men justify their business by faith, and then, in the final analysis, justify it by verification. The layman would pass by all this quartz as so much rock or stone. The expert knows that hidden within it is the most desired of all metals. Yet they never know what may be found below. Hence, every man is searched when he reaches the surface. A year or two ago there was a scandal at Bendigo over gold-stealing, and there were found many defenders of the men. Formerly the most ingenious devices were employed by the miners to conceal any gold they had abstracted in the mine. One of the favourite methods was to swallow the metal and to take means later to disgorge it.

It is easy to moralise in a gold mine. Perspiration, discomfort, danger, deprivation of the light of day, an invitation held out to pneumonia, and all for a bit of yellow metal which men have accepted as the basis of exchange! And to-morrow, if a fresh Bendigo were discovered, there would be the same rush and the same risks taken. It is civilisation. And is the world very much happier than when men exchanged one useful article for another and when gold was unknown?

After science, Nature once more. Those desolate surfaces at White Hills, plundered of their golden treasure and bequeathed as an eyesore, have been converted. For years they lay despised of all men. The soil was said to be unfruitful. Men resigned themselves to the spectacle of a wilderness. And then came one or two Spaniards who saw visions of gardens in that belated spot. They planted tomatoes, and, lo! the love apple flourished where the desert had reigned. And more, led by the foreigner, whose intrusion was at first resented, the inhabitants of the district are cultivating tomatoes, which grow beautifully on the alluvial soil. Thus the gash made upon the face of Nature by man’s spade and pick is slowly healing, and a red growth is obliterating the ugly work of fifty years ago. And so it is ever: the artificial thing goes ever deeper into the darkness, while the beauty of Nature remains a perpetual enchantment. The gashes disappear under our mother’s healing touch.