Colonial facts and fictions: Humorous sketches

by John Milne

While I was in New Zealand a Maori army was being organized. In Canterbury I saw an Army store. Here, works by General and Mrs. Booth can be purchased. One, by Major Corbridge, is entitled ‘Up-Line to Heaven, Down-Line to Hell.’ Soldiers’ cards, pray-cards, roll-books, and cartridges are also sold. I suppose the latter, which cost ten shillings a thousand, are tracts.

At the outfit department you can buy regulation shields, uniforms, army pocket-knives containing photos of General and Mrs. Booth, sisters’ jerseys, badges, sergeants’ bannerettes. The Salvation Army are certainly a powerful body amongst the lower classes in the colonies. One officer describes his colleagues as ‘Hallelujah gutter-snipes, and ragpickers on the muck-heap of sin.’ They work amongst those who find ordinary churches too genteel. It is to be hoped that they are doing good.

Dodd and I had several good walks and drives about Sandhurst. One was to Eaglehawk, which is a large mining district. In fact, the whole district from Sandhurst to Eaglehawk, and, for that matter, for miles beyond, is covered with poppet-heads. These poppet-heads, which indicate shafts, extend in lines over an undulating country. From the length of any of these lines, you can roughly estimate the length of the lodes or reefs which are being worked. Like Charters Towers, the reefs are of quartz; but, instead of being in a granitic rock, they intersect or run through the traditional slate. The distance to Eaglehawk was four miles, and on the road we counted sixty-four public-houses, and ten places of worship: that is to say, the reconverters were to the converters in the ratio of six to one. This reminds one of the way in which whisky and water is sometimes mixed.

During the evening Dodd and I made several attempts to gain an entrance to the Salvationist barracks. It was always too crowded. We heard that the Salvationists had become so popular, that other sects, in order to draw an audience, had been compelled to adopt similar tactics, and brass bands had been started at several chapels.

Next day we spent our time in visiting mines and stamping mills. One mine we visited was lighted by electricity. It was a very nice dry mine for a visitor, but as it only yielded four or five pennyweights of gold to the ton of quartz, it paid but small dividends to its shareholders. Some of the mills we visited were very swagger. They had tree-ferns growing in the engine-rooms, and everything was clean and neat. Those who managed the mills and mines were exceedingly courteous, and told us all that we wished to know.

During the afternoon we saw a crowd in the middle of Pall Mall, and thinking it was a row going on, we walked towards it. It proved to be the brokers of the mining exchange doing their business in the street. This is common at other towns in Victoria.

The next town was Ballarat. The country about was hilly. In the distance several prominent hills were, I was told, old volcanoes. Originally this was the great centre for washing gold out of the alluvium. The deposits of alluvium consist of pebbles and sand, which at one time formed the bed of a river. These deposits are called leads. At first it was thought that the leads were only on the surface of the ground, just as modern river-beds are on the surface. Exploration, however, proved that there were ancient river-beds which had been buried by flows of lava, forming what is called bluestone. This led to deep alluvium mining. In sinking downwards, the miner would pass through successive layers of gravels, clays, and bluestone, until he reached the upturned ends of the slate. The slate is the oldest rock, and over the surface of this rivers ran, depositing their gravels in the hollows. Then during periods of volcanic activity, the gravel was buried by bluestone. During a period of repose, rivers flowed over the bluestone, and there deposited fresh gravels; and so the processes of nature continued, sometimes laying down a layer of gravel, and sometimes one of bluestone. The whole arrangement is like a plate of sandwiches. The plate being the slates, the bread the gravels, and the ham the bluestone. The gold is in the gravels, and it probably came there by the wearing away of the upper part of quartz lodes, cropping out on the surface of the country over which the rivers ran. It is probable that by the action of solvents percolating through these gravels, the original character of the gold has been altered. It may have been made purer, and it may, during processes of preparation, have been collected together to form large nuggets.

At all events the gold from alluvial washings is usually purer than the gold from quartz reefs; and further, it is only in the alluvial deposits that large nuggets have been discovered.

At Ballarat the alluvial deposits have been exhausted, and only reef mining is to be seen. To see workings in deep leads, we had to take train to Creswick, and from there a buggy out into the country. On account of the softness and the water contained in the deep gravels, peculiar systems have to be adopted for their extraction. The shaft is sunk through the deposit to be worked down to a hard bed, and a tunnel is driven in the hard bed beneath the soft deposit as far as the limit of the property. From this tunnel vertical holes, or ‘jump-ups,’ are made upwards into the soft gravels, which are then taken out in blocks. As these are removed the roof is allowed to fall in. On the surface the gravel is put into a circular iron tank or buddle in which there are revolving forks. Here it is washed with water, and the big stones thrown away. The clear gravel is then drawn off into long troughs or sluices, down which water is flowing. On the bottom of the trough there are small ledges of wood or iron, behind which the gold collects, while the lighter gravel is washed away. The country round Creswick is gently undulating, with here and there a few conical hills—probably old volcanoes.

On our return to Ballarat we had a good look at the town. The streets are remarkable for their width. On a windy day you might hesitate before you crossed them. At the School of Mines we visited a museum. The school itself was in an old court-house. The condemned cell had been converted into a room for a professor. The museum was next door, in a church which has been bought. It is not an uncommon thing to put churches up for auction in the colonies.