A day in the life of a prospector

By DB

It’s still dark outside, you still feel a bit weary but you check your watch to see whether it’s worthwhile trying to get back to sleep. It’s 4.30am. If you get up and start wandering around outside it’ll be another hour before you’ll no longer need the torch. You try to go back to sleep but already there’s too much to think about. Will I go back to where I found those few small pieces yesterday, or try that place I worked the day before. Then that area down by the quartz blow looks promising. They’ve all been thrashed by hundreds of others before I arrived but yeah, nobody gets all the gold.

Bloody hell though, I wish I could find a virgin patch; be the first one on new ground. At last it’s 6am! I must have dozed off. Boy it seems to have grown colder in the last hour – perhaps I’ll curl up for a few more minutes. 6.15am. C’mon you lazy bastard, the sun has been up for ages; throw back the rugs, swing your legs over the edge of the bed. Jeez that lino floor is cold. On with the shorts and working shirt; it’s starting to smell a bit – how many days is that? Four? Better change it tomorrow or even the flies won’t want to know me. Then again… Breakfast – the same every day. One Weetbix (crushed), topped up with homemade muesli and enough long-life milk to cover it. Glad it’s winter time – the fridge is working well this time out. Fill the kettle with enough water for 1½ cups. Two slices of bread, under the griller on the two-burner stove, kettle on top. Toast buttered, kettle boiled – hot coffee at last.

Breakfast finished, rinse the dishes using as little water as possible. Clean your teeth, on with your work boots. Socks need a change too. Maybe tomorrow. Mother Nature calls, grab the toilet roll, portable toilet seat and the pick, and it’s a short stroll to your favourite resting place. Crikey that seat is cold, but the sun is up, the birds are singing, there’re a couple of ‘roos in the distance and it’s still too cold for the flies, so nice and peaceful. And not another person within shouting distance. The way we were meant to start the day. Well, that job done, and I’ve decided where I’ll detect today. Grab the freshly filled water bottles, into the car and away. Drive slowly over the broken quartz and ironstone. One day I’ll get a four-wheel drive. The old Ford sedan is great for the highway but it’s not built for this type of work. The two back tyres are bald and I’m sure that’s a new rattle coming from the front end somewhere. Ah well, as long as she keeps going till I get home in a couple of weeks.

There’s the turn off. Onto the highway for a few clicks today, not another vehicle in sight, just cruise along, save fuel! Back on the dirt again, just over this hill, across the creek, quickly remember just how low the car is. No problem. Just down that track a while and there it is, the same as when I left it yesterday. I was feeling good then, five pieces of that yellow stuff in my pocket, about 10 grams I reckon. Another day like that would be nice.

Park in the same spot, for luck. Out of the car at 7.30am and shit it’s cold! And that damned wind has come up. That’ll play hell with hearing through the headphones. Never mind; I’m not gonna get any gold standing here thinking about it.

Gold found by the author around Cue and Nannine

Cap and Headphones

Backpack on, cap on, mosquito net over the cap, headphones over the top of that; army belt with knife and water bottle; bum bag on containing ‘gold’ canisters. Hook up the detector to the backpack battery, plug in the earphones, turn it on, ground balance it. Sounds good, let’s go!

Another lovely day, should be about 28°, fine and sunny – shame about the wind. Bugger! I’ve forgotten the chain. Trudge back to the car, curse the chain for hiding on the back floor where I couldn’t see it, clip it onto the back of the army belt. That feels better; knew there was something missing.

Think I’ll take the pick with me because that pile of dirt I got those two pieces from yesterday might have some more in it. If I flatten it out, I should get a few small pieces.

Walk down the hill to where I finished working yesterday – heaps of dirt mounds, mine shafts, fallen trees and plenty of quartz boulders.

Well, what to do first – detect or hook in with the pick? I think the pick while it’s cool and if I get a couple of pieces from there it will make the rest of the day easy.

And so much for that idea. Not a speck. Never mind, I did get a piece off that other bigger pile of topsoil on the end so while I’m in the mood I’ll flatten some of that and see what it’s hiding.

Two tonnes of shifted dirt later and not a glint of the yellow stuff. Something tells me it’s not going to be a good day. Well, nothing for it but to start swinging the detector and make up for the two hours lost knocking down sandcastles.

Is it Rubbish or Gold?

It’s 9.30am and it’s warming up. The flies are out and about and as I’m the only person for about 5km around, I wonder what they would do if I wasn’t here? Do they just fly around in circles all day or do they sit in the trees waiting for someone to come along and then descend on them?

10am and I get a faint noise. I check it again, and again, from two other directions to make sure. It’s very faint but it’s there. I very carefully scrape away the stones and top layer of dirt covering ‘it’, and check to make sure the noise is still there. If it’s gone it was only a hot rock or a small piece of rusty tin you couldn’t see on top of the red dirt.

No, ‘it’ is still there. Scrape away the top inch of dirt. If it’s rubbish it should be in that lot. I check to see if I can still hear it. Yes, but it’s louder now – too loud to be anything big. It’s close, which means it’s either rubbish or a small piece of gold. I scrape and dig the next two inches of dirt, drag the dirt out of the hole, and check the hole again and hope the noise is still in there. No luck – check the last lot of dirt. Keep halving the dirt until ‘it’ is located in a small pile. Now the time has come to find out what I’ve found. I take a handful of dirt from the pile and wave it over the detector. ‘It’ is in my hand and I slowly let the dirt trickle out onto the detector.

‘Ping!’ It’s gold – far from a fortune, in fact about the size of a large match head, but my first for the day. Now fill in the hole and let’s get moving. Another is waiting!

Three hours later and with not another piece to be had I decide it’s time for a change of tactics. I’ve been using the 11-inch coil (my favourite) but perhaps the big 18-inch (which is in the boot of the car) might be better on this ground. It penetrates a lot deeper and looking at the mine shafts, there seems to be about a metre of soil until bedrock. I doubt there would be gold in this area heavy enough to sink that deep, but I have to try something.

Take off the backpack, chain and detector, trudge the quarter mile back to the car, and change discs. Boy I hate this big 18-inch thing – it’s so noisy compared with the 11-inch. Ahh, stop bloody whingeing and get working. Two hours later, nothing!

I’ve had enough of the 18-inch and change back to the 11. Two hours later

and that’s enough for the day. It’s 5pm, the sun is low in the western sky, and I promised Allen I would call at his camp to see if he needed a lift into Meekatharra tomorrow for car parts.

The closest watering hole for the author was the historic Royal Mail Hotel in Meekatharra

Sunset and Battery Recharge

As I drive into camp the sun is disappearing fast. There’s just enough time to hook-up the detector battery to recharge overnight; grab the now empty water bottles from the car; get the pick out of the boot (for tomorrow morning); grab the soap and a towel, get out of my dirty clothes and head to my portable Sola shower hanging on a nearby tree. The water’s not real hot but it feels good as the red dirt washes away. It’s getting cold now, 6.15pm and the evening breeze is coming in. Back to the van and into some warm clothes.

Next major decision – what will I have for dinner? I’ve got enough casserole in the freezer for two more meals; baked beans (no, had them last night); canned steak & veg; canned spaghetti & meatballs; or some other canned concoction. No, I think I’ll have chicken chow mein, straight from the packet. While the water is boiling for that, I refill my water bottles, wash the ‘gold’ won today (hardly worth the effort), and decide to put a bit of polish on my work boots.

Dinner is ready – more noodles than chicken. Never mind, my feet are sore, I’m tired and hungry and I like pasta, and tonight is my night to have dessert – fruit cake and custard.

After that little lot it’s time to wash up using as little water as possible because it’s 30km to Meeka for more water.

At last, up on the bed to put my feet up. It feels so good to put them up and not have to walk around again until tomorrow! Time to write a short note about my day. It’s is now 9.35pm, Tuesday May 14 and I am going to make a cup of coffee and after downing that, turn off the radio and gas light and go to sleep to dream of where the next ‘nugget’ is coming from. I’ll probably go back to the same place as today. I’m sure there is gold there. Well, I hope there is.

NOTE: The author’s experience this day was while he was working the Mindoolah Goldfield which is located 70 kilometres north-west of Cue along the Beringarra- Cue Road. Access is a few kilometres north of where the road passes through the gap in the Weld Range, the gravel track heading west to the area. The Mindoolah gold area is a compact location of workings approximately 500 metres east-west and the same north-south. Small time modern gold mining has seen a small shallow pit, a couple of large trenches, and much mullock and disturbance. The field was active from 1906 to 1909 as a prospectors’ field, before interest waned. A very small amount of activity was also reported in the late 1930s. A prospector, J. Bertram, was the first to find gold here, and his Bertram’s Reward lease was the first on the field. In 1907, an option was taken over the lease by Mr Hartrick for £6,000, and the name of the mine changed to Mindoolah Deeps. One report in 1907 lists about a dozen leases with 85 people on the field. Most of the leases contained several shafts ranging down to the water level at 70 feet. Regular small tonnages from these leases were crushed over the three years, 1906-09, probably for not much more than tucker money. A. A. Spencer constructed a 10-head battery on the field to crush from his own lease, and for other prospectors. Often referred to as Spencer’s Battery, its official name was Main Reef Battery. A lack of water held the development of the field back. Little happened after 1909, and the field was abandoned. Mindoolah Mines Limited had a small crushing reported in 1941, and the year before, T. Della Bosca, also put through a small crushing while the mine was under exemption.

Frank Gardiner – horse thief, butcher, bushranger, innkeeper, and possibly card cheat

Around 1862, shanties began to appear along the road between Rockhampton, Clermont and Peak Downs. Part of this route was opened up by Oscar de Satge, a Frenchman instru­ mental in the establishment of Queensland in the early days.

De Satge was riding to Rockhampton one day when he spotted a new tent on the banks of Apis Creek. Timber was stacked beside what looked like the beginnings of a new shanty. A big friendly man appeared who greeted de Satge. His name, he said, was James Christie and he offered de Satge a cup of tea. This was accepted and de Satge met Christie’s wife. As he was leaving, his eye rested on the most wonderful brown stallion, which he immediately offered to buy. “I wouldn’t sell him for all the gold in Australia,” was Christie’s reply.

The Christies worked hard with their shanty. They sold liquor and later on added some accommodation as many travellers came and went along the road. In time everyone came to like the genial James Christie, who proved an obliging businessman. Often diggers would leave their gold with him for safe keeping on their way in to Rockhampton. Even the corrupt John Thomas Griffin, the Gold Commissioner who was later hung for murdering two troopers and stealing the money they were escorting, left a total of 470oz of gold with him for several days. Christie was also known to give rations to hard­up diggers and swaggies who called, knowing they were not likely to be able to repay him.

In March 1864 a party of three diggers made camp near the Christie’s hotel and got into conversation with Christie and his wife. Shortly afterwards, Lieutentant Brown with a party of native mounted police arrived from the Yaamba Barracks on what appeared to be a routine patrol, just as they often did along what was the gold trail to Peak Downs. However, the three diggers turned out to be detectives and one of them had recognised Christie’s fine brown stallion. He knew immediately that the genial host of the Apis Creek Shanty was none other than Frank Gardiner (born Francis Christie in Scotland in 1830) and that his “wife” was actually his mistress, Kate Brown. There was a reward of £1,000 on Frank Gardiner’s head and after a struggle, an arrest was made and he was taken away in irons on the coastal steamer Queensland to stand trial in Sydney. One of the people who identified Frank Gardiner as the shanty keeper at Apis Creek was Oscar de Satge.

Frank Gardiner was at the forefront of bushranging during the golden age in Australia. He was regardedby many as the ‘Prince of High Tobymen’. ‘Darky’ Gardiner was born at Boro Creek, near Goulburn in 1830, the son of a free Scottish migrant and a half­Irish, half­Aboriginal girl called Clarke. The surname Gardiner was taken from an employer.

The epithet ‘Darky’ was given him on account of his sallow complexion. He was still a teenager when he had his first brush with the law – he and two friends crossed into Victoria and stole 32 horses. The best of these were entered in “races” against the police but the owner of the horses caught up with them before they sold them and Gardiner, for his part in the business, was sentenced to five years in Pentridge Gaol, although he escaped within a few weeks. Returning to Goulburn in 1854, he stole more horses and this time found himself at Cockatoo Island prison in Sydney Harbour.

Upon his release he became a butcher at Lambing Flat but butchering didn’t bring in as much as bushranging and he became the people’s nightmare who dwelt between Lambing Flat – now Young – Yass and Gundagai.

John Piesley, who was later hanged, often rode with him and it was claimed that it was Piesley who rescued him when Gardiner was arrested after shooting Sergeant John Middleton in the jaw, and Trooper Hosie in the arm. Piesley later claimed he had paid £50 to Trooper Hosie to release Gardiner. After Piesley, Gardiner moved on to the Weddin Mountains, south of Forbes where he formed a gang which included Johnny Gilbert, a Canadian gunman.

It was in 1862 that Gardiner pulled the robbery which was to make him famous in Australian history. He knew that each week a coach, guarded by police, left Forbes from Sydney. Its cargo was gold from the diggings, also banknotes. Sometimes the amount exceeded £30,000. Calling on his friends, Gilbert, Dan Charters, Alex Fordyce, Johnny O’Meally, Johnny Bow of Penrith, Harry Mans, and a cattleman who was embittered with the authorities, Ben Hall, he made his plans. They were to lie in wait at Eugowra Rocks for the coach on the 15th of June, 1862, and when it appeared they would bail it up and steal its contents.

As it appeared, Gardiner and his gang with their faces blackened, dashed out and fired upon the coach with muskets and pistols. Sergeant Condell was felled with a musket ball in his ribs and Constable Moran was wounded in the groin. The driver, John Fegan, had the uncomfortable feeling of a bullet passing through his hat while Constable Rafferty wisely dropped his rifle. Meanwhile, in the chaos, the horses had bolted with the coach which hit a boulder and turned over. Following them, Gardiner loaded the first two horses with gold and banknotes and took them to his hideout at Wheogo. The plunder was then divided evenly amongst his accomplices using a set of butcher’s scales to weigh it. The banknotes were also shared out.

All would have gone well had not the Inspector of Police, Sir Frederick Pottinger, begun to track them. Pottinger was a British baronet, the black sheep of an aristocratic English family who gambled away his family’s fortune at the racecourse, and most of the time he was regarded scornfully by members of the force, but on this particular occasion his luck was in. He was just heading back to his headquarters with two constables when he met Johnny Gilbert in company with his brother Charley and Harry Mans, who was leading a packhorse. Gilbert took off, riding the 70 miles in 11 hours on his stolen thoroughbred, to inform the rest of the gang who were at O’Meally’s shanty in the Weddin Mountains. The gang rode back, and holding up Pottinger and his men, rescued Charley Gilbert and Harry Mans. Pottinger ran away – an act which many called cowardly. He then brought in so many suspects that people sneered at him that he’d arrested everyone except Frank Gardiner! He actually did almost arrest Gardiner when he learned that Gardiner visited Kate Brown, his mistress, every night at her cottage near Wheogo. Pottinger lay in wait with eight troopers and when Gardiner appeared, they opened fire at a range of little more than five yards. Remarkably, they missed, and the next day Gardiner was gone.

It wasn’t until Gardner was spotted at Apis Creek in Queensland that he was heard of again. In the meantime, Sir Frederick Pottinger, on the 5th of March, 1865, at Wascoe’s Inn in the Blue Mountains on his way to Sydney, accidentally shot himself in the upper abdomen while boarding a moving coach. He recovered enough to be moved to the Victoria Club in Sydney where he died four days later at the age of 34.

Frank Gardner and Kate might have lived on contentedly at Apis Creek had not Kate written to her sister Bridget, who had eloped with a farmer called Taylor. Taylor got drunk and talked, hinting at something interesting to be discovered at Apis Creek.

In 1864 Gardiner was tried for wounding Sergeant Middleton with intent to kill, but was acquitted by the jury. At a second trial in July he was found guilty on two non­capital charges, one of which was armed robbery, and Chief Justice Sir Alfred Stephen gave him a cumulative sentence of 32 years hard labour to be served in irons for the first two. In 1872 ,William Bede Dalley, who had defended Gardiner, organized petitions to the governor to use his prerogative of mercy. Sir Hercules Robinson decided that Gardiner had been harshly sentenced and in 1874 released him subject to his exile.

On the 27th of July, 1874, Gardiner embarked for Hong Kong and by February 1875 was in San Francisco where he ran the Twilight Star Saloon. The press continued to note his activities, including his supposed death in Colorado about 1903 allegedly as a result of gun duel following a poker game. But just how and when Gardiner died is open to conjecture.

While Gardiner had been incarcerated, Kate Brown, his mistress, had gone to New Zealand to get away from “the ridicule of respectable citizens” and it is believed she eventually committed suicide there.

In search of Thunderbolt’s caves

By TP

My interest in Captain Thunderbolt (Frederick Ward) started back in 1973 when I was looking for an area where I could combine some fishing, exploring, fossicking and swimming. I’d been told of the Pretty Gully Goldfield, in northern NSW, by my late fossicking mate, Mark Davidson. The area had been a regular haunt of Thunderbolt in the late 1860s. The area can be reached from Brisbane by either going through Woodenbong, Toolom or Tabulam. The property owner of the area kindly allowed me to camp at the junction of the Cataract and Clarence Rivers, which was an ideal spot nestled in undulating hills, and typical bushranging country. It was only a 15-minute drive from the campsite to the Pretty Gully Goldfield. Mark Davidson had told me of an old hermit/prospector who lived on the goldfield so I decided to pay the chap a courtesy visit. The track down to Vic McGlashan’s shack passed very close to the tombstones in the small cemetery that had nearly been taken over by the bush. It was a rather dull afternoon and the trees grew very close to the track. Up ahead lay Vic’s old tin abode with smoke lazily rising into the sky. A pile of empty beer and wine bottles lay at the right-hand corner of the old dwelling. An open, rusty 44-gallon drum was located at the left-hand side of the door.

VIC LETS HIS GUARD DOWN

The rainwater was fed into the drum by guttering secured at various intervals by pieces of fencing wire. As I approached, two cats raced out of the only door and headed for the nearby scrub. The table was cluttered up with books, magazines, items of various foods, and a kerosene hurricane lantern. Vic’s ancient metal and wire bed was on the other side of the table. The old wood stove was to the right as you walked through the door, and there was a sort of attic accessed by a rickety ladder made from saplings. This was where Vic stored his other meagre possessions. Vic was in his late 60s and was rather reticent at first, but when I told him I was a friend of Mark Davidson, he let his guard down. He offered me a cup of tea and then walked outside with a large old blackened kettle to the 44-gallon drum and filled the kettle by using an empty jam tin nailed to a stick. Vic then put the kettle on the stove, stuck some kindling on the fire and blew like mad for a short time to get the fire going again. All of Vic’s enamel cups were chipped and, as he gave them a quick wipe, I couldn’t help but wonder what else he wiped with the cloth. Vic first came to the area during the 1930s, the Depression years, and had prospected and explored the surrounding district until he was too weak to climb and prospect the hills and gullies. He was content to just walk the 30 metres from his shack to the nearest gully after heavy rains and pan a dish or two. On a later visit to the Pretty Gully area, I met a ‘tickie’ who was employed by the government to ride horseback in the district and check the fences that prevented tick cattle from entering tick-free areas.

HE FOUND THE BUSHRANGER’S CAVE

Vic described to me an area where he had discovered one of Thunderbolt’s caves at the dead-end head of a steep-sided gully. The cave still had the remains of a saddle, a frying pan and some empty food tins. It was about 10 years earlier that Vic had found the cave and had left everything as it was, which I thought was great. A couple of days later I decided to search for Thunderbolt’s cave and made my way up the steep-sided gully Vic had mentioned but halfway up, the thick lantana growth prevented me getting any further. I had to make a detour climb up along the edge of the gully but access down to the cave’s entrance was then only by rope, something I didn’t have, and I left disappointed.

A SKULL WITH A BULLET HOLE

The following year, old Vic told me some very interesting news which might have involved Thunderbolt. When he and I were enjoying a few glasses of wine and feeling a bit mellow, I mentioned that I’d been searching for one of Thunderbolt’s caves. Vic asked me where I’d been looking and when I told him he replied, “Good, it’s not the one I found fifteen years ago when I was taking a short cut to another gold area. I was checking out some porphyry rock and then went for a splash and when I happened to look up, I saw the narrow entrance to a cave above me. There was a good-sized sapling growing up past the entrance so I climbed up and squeezed through the small opening. What I saw with my little torch really scared the crap out of me. “I found a skeleton with a neat bullet hole in the forehead of the skull. “I almost panicked but when I saw all the ‘boodle’ I got over my initial shock. The skeleton was that of a small person, a man most likely as what was left of the clothes belonged to a man.” I told Vic that I’d love to see the cave sometime but he said, “No way! You might pinch the boodle!” I didn’t even know what boodle was, so he explained that it meant a hoard of stolen loot. Vic went on to say that there were a couple of gold watches, sovereigns, a wad of old banknotes from the last century, rings, bangles, brooches and some very rich gold-bearing quartz. There was another entrance to the cave but Vic didn’t elaborate.

WAS IT A LONELY MAN’S DAYDREAM

He then said to me, “You can’t find the cave as you haven’t any idea of how far to go or what direction it is from here. I didn’t tell the police about the skeleton in the cave. I was afraid I might become involved in some murder ‘cause I didn’t find a gun in the cave. Anyway, the cops would probably keep the boodle for themselves. I thought about going back to the cave many times but now I get the pension and it’s plenty for what I need.” I wondered if his story was true, and thought it might have been just another daydream story that had become real in the mind of an old man who had spent most of his life alone, searching for a fortune in gold that forever eluded him. My wife reckoned old Vic told me about the treasure in the cave to keep me interested in coming back as I always brought him some food supplies and a plug of dark tobacco on my visits to the area. I told Vic I knew of a bushranger named Wilson who was shot in the nearby ranges, so the north of NSW had its fair share of bushrangers. A couple of years later on another visit to Vic, while yarning and drinking wine together, I casually mentioned his secret cave once more. He said he might take me one day but, as it was a fair walk and with his heart not the best, it might not be possible. Instead, he pointed in the direction of the cave and explained how long it would take to walk there.

SEARCH FOR THE CAVES

I have since wondered about his story and find it odd that the guy in the cave was murdered yet all the loot remained in the cave. I have heard from another source that a coach in the area during the late 1800s was bailed up by a bushranger. The chap sitting next to the driver of the coach got a shot off first. The bushranger slumped forward in his saddle, turned his horse and rode off. Even so, one would imagine anyone being hit in the forehead would have certainly died before getting back to the cave hideout. Was the chap in the cave murdered by another bushranger who might have intended to come back later but never did. As I said earlier this was all told to me in the 1970s and old Vic passed away in March, 1989, taking the secret location of the skeleton in the cave with him. Some years later a mate and I went searching for Vic’s cave with the aid of topographical maps and a compass. We spent two whole days tramping and climbing the hills, exploring gullies and small creeks, but failed to find any cave.

Vic outside his old tin shed

PROSPECTOR’S SHACK VANDALISED

We called in to have a look at old Vic’s shack and found a note on the door requesting visitors to leave the shack in its original state as a monument and reminder of an interesting old hermit/prospector. It was rather disappointing to see that this notice had been ignored. Some people had been digging inside looking for any coins that they thought Vic might have hidden. Quite a few items had been removed from inside and the shack was starting to fall into disrepair. It was sad for me when I checked out the area where I used to camp and swim at the junction of the Cataract and Clarence Rivers. The area was full of houses. If you want to have a stab at finding Vic’s boodle cave, be warned that the ranges and valleys in the area are very rugged. Whoever discovers the cave will certainly have earned whatever reward lies within. But perhaps the cave only ever existed in the mind of a lonely old prospector in need of something interesting to tell a stranger. As for Frederick Ward, aka Captain Thunderbolt, his success as a bushranger can be largely attributed to his horsemanship and splendid mounts, to popular sympathy inspired by his agreeable appearance and conversation, and to his gentlemanly behaviour and avoidance of violence; he also showed prudence in not robbing armed coaches, or towns where a policeman was stationed. The last of the professional bushrangers in New South Wales, Ward was the most successful. However, on the 25th of May, 1870, he was surprised while testing an inferior horse and was chased and shot dead by Constable Alexander Binney Walker at Kentucky Creek near Uralla. He was 35 years old.

Prospecting for gold at Ararat

Jim Foster tells you where to go (in a nice way) and what to expect when you get there.

MCDONALD PARK

This is one of the easiest spots to find and is right on the edge of town. Thousands of nuggets have been found in the park over the years. The biggest nugget I know of that came from the park was 10oz while the biggest nugget I have actually seen weighed 4oz from just outside the park boundary on the lower slopes of Bridal Hill. My biggest was 24 grams but there were a lot of smaller bits in my bag as well.

To find McDonald Park take the Adelaide Road out of Ararat for about 3.5 to 4km from the post office and you will see a track going into the bush on your left. There is a large parking bay/rest area on your right so you can’t miss it. I don’t need to direct you to any particular spot here as the entire park has gold scattered around. The main gullies have old diggings but it is the unturned ground that is the best prospect these days. Map co-ordinates are 37. 15. 02. S. 142. 54. 39. E.

BRIDAL HILL

Camping is not allowed in MacDonald Park but there is a good camping area at Bridal Hill. A few hundred metres before you get to the McDonald Park turnoff there is another track leading up to Bridal Hill. It is the first turnoff past the last house on the left before McDonald Park.

The Quarry at the top has been revegetated but like McDonald Park, this entire hill is good prospecting ground. Map co-ordinates are 37. 15. 16. S. 142. 54. 35.

OTHER LOCATIONS

McDonald Park is part of the Ararat Regional Hills Park. The entire park has gold on it to a greater or lesser degree. McDonald Park and Bridal Hill were probably the richest but there are many other good areas in the Regional Park as well.

On the northern boundary of McDonald Park there is a gravel road, Majors Road. Take this road just past the northern boundary of McDonald Park and you will see a small white hill on your left. Many nuggets have been detected on this hill and surrounding ground and a new model detector/coil combination is almost certain to turn up more gold. Running right alongside the road on the side opposite McDonald Park is a gold-bearing gully with diggings along it. This gully has a good deal of rubbish in it but some good gold has been found there by the handful of people patient enough to put up with the trash.

Back near the highway across from McDonald Park, a track can be seen turning into the bush just above the power lines. This track will lead you into numerous diggings and gullies where you are likely to find gold. Following the track right through may be impossible during the winter unless you have a 4x4 as the one big gully you have to cross gets very slippery when wet. If you do follow it through, it brings you out at Petticoat Gully. If you aren’t driving a 4x4, drive further up the gravel road until you find a road going off to the right. This road is a bit narrow and winding but you won’t get stuck on it.

In 1857, a party of Chinese miners en route to the Central Victorian gold fields, struck gold at the Canton Lead. This marked the beginning of a settlement that took its name from Mount Ararat, 10 kilometres south-west of the town. Ararat is the only city in Australia to be founded by Chinese people and it boomed until the start of the 19th century, after which its population dwindled. Today it is home to some12,000 people in the town and surrounding areas

PETTICOAT GULLY

This spot can be found at map co-ordinates 37.13.52. S. 142. 53. 17. E. The other option is to drive along the highway for about 3km past McDonald Park until you see the sign posted turnoff on your left at map co-ordinates 37. 13. 39. S. 142. 53. 34. E.

The slope above the gully is your best prospect as many small, and some larger, nuggets have been detected here. Across the road is a hill with some tempting diggings running down the face but do not enter here without permission as the owner can get a bit snarly if you do. Most of the gold I have found here was on the new ground, not the diggings.

ARMSTRONG

This is another large area but a fair bit of it is privately owned. Despite this, it is always worth asking for permission. A way I always made myself welcome was to give the landowner a bit of the gold off his land, assuming you find some. Most are thrilled to get a bit of gold and I always carried a few little display pods to put the gold in for them.

EAGLEHAWK GULLY

To find this gully continue on past the Petticoat Gully turnoff for about 1.5km to the Eaglehawk road. Follow this until you come to the end. The country along the creek is public land. You can walk up the creek and up the hill to Murphy’s Hill or take the other track in from Armstrong Road. Back toward the highway you will see a house next to the road. If you ask at the house and gain permission to enter, you will find a good many diggings over the rise on private land. I found a fair few nuggets on these working with VLF machines but have never been back with a pulse induction (PI) detector. And by walking up the creek you can enter the public land section of Hospital Hill where good gold can also be found.

Hospital hill can also be entered from the highway by asking at the nearest house opposite where Thomas Road enters the highway. I did well on Hospital Hill many years ago with VLF machines but haven’t been back with a PI.

MURPHY’S HILL DIGGINGS

Continue only a little way past Eaglehawk Road and take the next left into Garden Gully/Armstrong Road. Continue over the bridge and take the next left, Westgate Road. Immediately turn left onto the track that crosses the creek. The creek up along Westgate Road has diggings for a fair way and the slopes have also produced a great many nuggets for detector operators over the years, and will continue to do so.

Taking the left-hand track once you’re over the creek will take you up to some good areas where you have an excellent chance of finding gold. Taking the right-hand track brings you to the Hard Hill workings after passing through more good areas.

Back on Westgate Road drive a short way up the hill and take the first road on your right. This track leads into the public land area next to Hard Hill. There are many diggings here in the main gully to keep you busy and you can also camp here. Hard Hill itself is on private land and you must ask permission to enter. Do not sneak over the back fence! Map co-ordinates are 37. 12. 43. S. 142. 52. 09. E.

HARD HILL

Hard Hill was a particularly rich hill with nearly every face producing gold. The biggest nugget I know of from around this hill was a 10-ouncer from low down the eastern slope just above the road.

If you’re lucky enough to get permission to detect you will see some marvellous examples of Chinese diggings. These are perfectly round shafts that still look as if they were dug only a few years ago. There are also some nice examples of how the old- timers tunnelled in under the conglomerate capping near the fence on the southern side of the hill. Under no circumstances try entering these drives and shafts.

As you leave Westgate Road and negotiate the track into Crown Land, you will notice the track splits to the right as well as continuing straight ahead. If you go straight ahead over the gully you will see another track cutting off to your right below a fence line.

The entire slope below this fence is well worth detecting until you come to a small surface patch, and then the fence-line where the track ends. A patch of nuggets amounting to about 14oz was once found just below the beginning of this fence-line. Map co-ordinates 37. 11. 36. S. 142. 51. 52. E.

Ararat’s main goldfields have produced a great deal of gold to detector operators and will continue to do so for many years. Using maps of the area around Ararat makes it easy to find all the spots mentioned here but the areas suggested are merely starting points to enable you to find more of the many good prospecting areas around Ararat.

I suggest maps: Vicmap 1:250,000 Topographical Stawell South. This map covers Ararat’s McDonald Park north to Great Western and west to Moyston but not far enough north west to cover Londonderry. For coverage of Londonderry (Jallukar) you will need Vicmap 1:250,000 Topo map Bellellen.

Using Google Earth in conjunction with the above maps will further enhance your ability to find gold around Ararat. A good camping spot is Greenhill Lake a few kilometres out of town on the Ballarat Road. A small fee is payable but it is worth it to have running water and flushing toilets.

The mystery behind every cache of valuables

Gold Gem & Treasure was recently contacted by a long-time detectorist in Victoria who has persisted with his efforts to uncover treasure from a rubbishy area adjacent to a busy road. Up until a couple of months ago, he had been reasonably successful despite the opinion of others that he was wasting his time detecting in the area. Too much rubbish they reckoned. Far too many targets that were worthless scraps of metal. And then he found a rusty old tin with nine 1820 gold sovereigns in it! He did the right thing and took the sovereigns to the local police but they weren’t very interested in doing the paperwork. They told him he could keep the sovereigns as no-one would be lodging a claim for coins that were more than 200 years old. The fact that the coins could have been part of a modern-day collection that had been lost or stolen didn’t cross their minds. We’re hoping the finder of the sovereigns will elaborate further on his experience so that we can share it with you, but it reminded us of a story we published some time ago about another cache found by one of our readers. Back then he told his story writing under the pseudonym Argonaut. “It was 1986 when I joined a safari, organised by John Dyer, to wave metal detectors over the alluvial goldfields of Western Australia.

The party of about 30 were to be guided to various locations and instructed on metal detectors and their operation by David de Havelland, a well-known prospecting authority and the author of the Gold and Ghosts series of books. Starting from Leonora, the group searched several areas of known alluvial ground with very modest success. The caravan wended its way over many unproductive areas, however, that period of the excursion was rated successful by a handful of detectorists in the group who had found several ounces in nuggets. The caravan eventually set up camp near the old workings of the ‘Famous Blue’, near Laverton. To that point in the expedition my Garrett ADS detector had only located rusty tins, .22 bullets and shells and a silver 1885 English sixpence.

That night we had a lecture on where there were possible targets on the old workings. “Dig any signal, it could possibly be of value,” was the advice. Next morning the message was “Stay on the far (west) side of the lode as we (David de Havelland and his mate) have cleaned out whatever was on this (east) side.” I walked up the east slope noting that the bulldozing there had left a virgin strip of ground where, after swinging wide to avoid a grove of trees, the operator had failed to doze a long strip of diminishing width which had served as a road into the camp site. By the time I reached the west slope, after checking the old shaft and dumps on the rise, the whole area had been claimed. The area was thronged with fellow enthusiasts who, in my absence, had each marked out an area of the slope as their claim, leaving very little vacant ground for my attention. I did find a spot down on the edge of the scrub that gave a response from my detector but on further exploration it proved to be the location of the old blacksmith’s shop, so I didn’t dally. Some of the “claims” were proving productive. Bill Sears was successful in locating a patch of small pieces and recovered quite a few. Our guide had shot off on his motor bike to parts unknown, then I sighted John Dyer going over the line of lode to disappear out of sight onto the east slope. Not having an area available to me on the west slope, I moved around the edge of the scrub to look up the length of the east slope. There, on that proclaimed worked out area, was our safari leader detecting over the windrows left by the recent bulldozing.

Fair enough! Obviously, he begged to differ with de Havelland’s claim that the area had been cleaned out. No-one gets all the gold, right. So, I started detecting from the extreme end of the eastern slope, on a line which would take me down the centre of the strip of the track leading up to the grove of trees. There were no signals right up to the edge of the trees, so, still swinging my detector, I decided to skirt them. Ahead of my path numerous tufts of paper protruded from the ground, indicating that the recent occupants of the campsite in the trees had, during their stay, buried the kind of waste you really don’t want to find. I consequently changed course to follow a line just clear of the lower edge of the grove of trees. Wham! The signal at the base of a tree rocked me. Surely in that location it must be a tin can the campers had buried, but, well aware of the instructions given to us, namely ‘dig every metallic signal’, I drove my pick into the centre of the target. That was unfortunate as the blow shattered a rusty biscuit box but, when I pulled the blade of the pick towards me, it brought into sight a lump of quartz freely laced with gold. The size of a billiard ball, it was the first of many. I can now admit I momentarily lost control. “John, I’ve struck the lost lode,” I shouted. This brought the whole party over to “the lode” to marvel at the specimen pieces I unearthed with every stroke of the pick. These soon filled my hat and a linen specimen bag, a relic of my service in the mining industry. It was evident that the plant had been contained in a tin because when we sieved the dirt that came from the hole, numerous fragments of rusty tin were found. On wetting a trial panful of the soil with the limited water available from a nearby gamma hole, it was evident it was float gold. Upon stirring the dish, the water was soon covered with a sheen of fine gold particles. I didn’t persevere with panning but rather bagged all the soil to bring it home as ballast and recover its values at leisure. David de Havelland was generous in his praise. “You’ve made history this day; the first known cache found in Australia.” I had no further finds on that trip but it was really a quite rewarding safari for me as it financed a world trip for my wife and myself.” David de Havelland might have been right if he was describing Argonaut’s find as the first cache of its kind ever unearthed in Australia, but it was certainly not the first cache ever found. There were numerous valuable finds pre-dating Argonaut’s, though not of specimen gold.

Apparently Hall’s last words were, “I am wounded; shoot me dead.” He died a few seconds later having already been shot at least 30 times by eight police. It was the 5th of May, 1865, four days short of Hall’s 28th birthday

For example, in June 1941, five schoolchildren found 24 sovereigns and five half sovereigns, worth £64 18 shillings, in a paddock at Gulgong, NSW, but did not know what they were. The children were crossing the paddock on their way to school and found the sovereigns in a tin near an old shack which had been vacant for years. The children showed the sovereigns to their school teacher, who took them to the police. The sovereigns were never claimed and the children got to keep them. In July 1950, two small boys found 83 sovereigns in a corroded insecticide tin. The boys were playing outside a 70-yearold mud-brick house in Kilmore when one of them noticed a loose brick and pulled it out. He put his hand inside and found the tin. The boys thought the coins were only Chinese half-pennies so they put a few in their pockets and dropped the rest on the ground. At home that evening the father of one of the boys examined the coins and then probably broke the existing world record for the 100-yard sprint in order to get back to the old house and recover the remainder of the coins. The coins were later legally claimed as treasure trove by the families of the two boys. And then there is the story of what might be the biggest cache of gold ever discovered in Australia. As reported in the Gundagai Independent newspaper of the 19th of July, 1954, some time in the early part of the century, the Weddin Mountains, specifically a place called ‘Trig Hill’, was visited by three Americans who were searching for some secret object. But before we elaborate, a little bit of background information is required. On the Sandy Creek Road, Piney Range, on the old Whelogo Station, on a property owned by Mr Jack Butler at the time the article appeared, stood six or seven posts of an old building which was the homestead of the famous bushranger Ben Hall. Just over the rise were the remains of the old stockyard, where most of the fine horses owned by Hall perished for want of food and water when he was arrested and taken to Forbes to await trial on a charge of armed robbery. When he was acquitted after a key witness changed his testimony, Hall returned and found most of his horses dead in the yard. This was possibly the catalyst for him cementing his association with Frank Gardiner and embarking on a full-time, though short-lived, career as a bushranger. After the Gardiner-Hall gang robbed the gold escort at Eugowra on the 15th of June, 1862, it was often surmised that most of the 2,700 ounces of gold stolen was still hidden in the Weddin Mountains. On the hill about 5km south of Ben Hall’s old homestead there is a standing rock about 14 metres high which was given the name Trig Hill. Now, back to the three Americans and here we will quote the story that ran in the Gundagai Independent: “Three mysterious strangers arrived by train at Grenfell. They spoke with an American accent and asked the direction of Ben’s old homestead. They said they were prospecting for some minerals that were not gold. When they found the homestead they were not long in locating the trig rock right on top of the hill which could be plainly seen from the starting point. They trenched round the rock on the eastern side for some twenty feet or so and if a visitor called on them to ascertain what success they were meeting with, they always ceased work and would not continue until his departure. One morning, however, they called on a neighbour and gave him their tools, hiring him to drive them to a railway siding on the Forbes-Stockinbingal line where they disappeared as mysteriously as they had come. After a time the old hands put two and two together and came to the conclusion that the three strangers were friends of the notorious Frank Gardiner, who was leader of the gang when the Eugowra escort hold-up took place, and was afterwards arrested, sentenced and then deported to America.” There’s a good chance the three Americans didn’t leave empty handed. It’s a long way from the United States to the Weddin Mountains in NSW. Not the sort of journey one person, let alone three, would have undertaken more than 100 years ago based on a hunch or a rumour. The finding of any cache of valuables, be it gold nuggets, gold coins, or gemstones, begs a number of questions, not the least of which are who hid the valuables and why were they hidden, but most intriguing of all, why did that person never return to collect them.

Organic “gemstones” are still popular

Organic gemstones have been used for ornaments, decorations and jewellery since prehistoric times. Their use is universal and varies only according to the materials available to different cultures. Many of the organics have historical significance and quite a few find application in jewellery and art forms today.

SHELLS

Shells, often shiny, brilliantly coloured and durable, are among the oldest and most universal of organic gems used decoratively by humans. Their obvious use is evident in their general adornment of garments and in the form of string beads or necklaces and belts. They are a by-product of a good food source; have been used as tools and utensils; have been employed as a currency of exchange; and have often been transformed into toys and musical instruments. Shells are still used for jewellery with pearl shell, abalone and coral being the most popular today. The most renowned is the Mother of Pearl shell which was discovered in almost inexhaustible quantities along the Ninety Mile beach of Western Australia. Around the turn of the last century, Broome, with several hundred luggers operating, was the pearling centre of the world and was rivalled only by the traditional historic Persian Gulf industry. Operations extended from Shark Bay round the north-west coast as far east as Thursday Island, Cape York and the Coral Sea. The pearl shell is the home of an oyster which belongs to a group of molluscs or bi-valves that produce a shell with a pearly or nacreous lining. Should a piece of grit or grain of sand get between the outer shell and the softer inner mantle, the irritation caused is eased by the secreting of nacre which is cemented to the shell. The deposition of this pearly substance around the irritant is arranged in layers of minute aragonite crystals, giving the pearl a concentric-like structure. It is this smooth bulge or blister that is removed and used in jewellery.

Mother of Pearl earrings with some diamonds and emeralds thrown in for good measure

In the hey-day of the industry, all pearls were natural, but by the middle of the last century the effect of the long, intensive operations and the advent of plastics which wiped out the demand for natural pearl buttons, threatened the demise of Broome and the industry. However, instead of natural pearls, a new industry in the form of cultured pearls, gave the town a new lease of life. Rather than letting nature take its course to create one pearl among thousands of oysters, man simulates what happens by performing a surgical operation, during which a nucleus is inserted into the oyster. Natural pearls can take about 10 years to mature while the cultured variety matures in less than a quarter of the time. The popularity of beads for adornment has led to their imitation on a large scale, worldwide. Glass and plastics are the main materials, the beads created being coated with a “pearly essence” in the form of “string dipping”. Among the shells used for ornamental materials are the conch, helmet, mussel, trochus and the abalone of Paua. The hardness of shell, which is a calcium carbonate, is about 2.5 on Mohs scale. It comes in almost every colour, with the shining iridescent variety being of particular interest to lapidaries, as well as the layered coloured shells for cameos. The Paua shell of New Zealand, with its brightly coloured blue and green nacre, continues to be used extensively for a wide range of jewellery items.

An example of the art of scrimshaw on a whale’s tooth

CORAL

Coral, which is really the home of the coral polyp, a minute primitive sea creature, can be aptly expressed as the scaffolding upon the surface of which the boneless animals live as a colony. The chemical composition of coral is a calcium carbonate and it has a hardness of about 3.5 on Mohs scale. The coral polyp is very sensitive to changes in temperature, preferring waters between 13 and 16 degrees Centigrade, which are still and clear. The Mediterranean region, Malay Archipelago, Japanese waters and the Gulf of Mexico in America are the most renowned areas. Most of the processing of the extensive Mediterranean Sea region is an Italian industry, fashioning beads, small carved objects and cameos. With continual changes in the level of the water these coral forms or calcified skeletons continue to build up within the cavities of reefs or atolls. As a result, good-sized pieces with relatively large diameters are obtained. Multi-coloured polished specimens from Tampa, Florida, are highly prized.

IVORY

Another historical and valuable item among the organics is ivory. More than 20,000 years ago, in what is now France, a prehistoric artist carved a piece of ivory from the tusk of a woolly mammoth into the stylized figure of a woman. The tombs of the great Pharaohs of Egypt have revealed beautiful objects and the Bible makes frequent references to this material. Ivory found general use in the fashioning of charms, amulets, tools, weapons and decoration for clothing and personal adornments. The Middle Ages saw the prominence of Chinese artisans who at first produced pieces of domestic or utilitarian significance, but later placed importance on ornamental nature. This craft finally reached supreme elaboration in work which showed two or three distinct layers of carvings cut one behind the other in the thickness of the ivory. In more recent times, the Japanese, using legends and stories, have produced in fine sculpture, scenes from folklore, birds, flowers, animals and children, along with mythological creatures of wild imagination. Much of the ivory used in the prehistoric era came from tusks of the extinct mammoth or mastodon, whose bones or tusks are well preserved in the refrigerated climate of Alaska and Siberia. Today, the ivory trade is the commercial, largely illegal, trade in the ivory tusks of the hippopotamus, walrus, narwhal, mammoth, and most commonly, African and Asian elephants. In this writer’s opinion, ivory as a jewellery item or piece of craftwork belongs to a less enlightened age and its use today for any purpose, should be totally banned. What would you rather see, a bit of jewellery carved from an African elephant tusk, knowing that in order to get the tusk the animal was slaughtered, or a live African elephant? A material often labelled as vegetable ivory is provided by the hard seeds or nuts of certain palm trees which can be used for small carvings, rings, beads and pendants. The best known of these ivory substitutes is the Tagua nut of Columbia, resembling a Brazil nut, the size of an egg with the potential for a brilliant off-white polish. Associated with ivory is the craft of scrimshaw, an art form that developed in the golden age of whaling, when sailors, often away from land for months or even years, spent a part of their leisure time scratching pictures on polished whales’ teeth. A smooth, glassy polish is obtained before a very fine steel pen is used to etch outlines which appear when excess black ink is wiped off, leaving the dark lines standing against the polished white ivory.

The tragedy that is the illegal trade in African elephant tusks continues but governments are finally making the game just as deadly for the poachers

JET

Jet, a beautiful lustrous material of a deep rich black, is a type of inferior coal, best known for its association with the seaport of Whitby in England, where a remarkable craft industry has existed since the Roman occupation. Lapidary and jewellery activities reached their peak in the middle of the 19th century and continue to this day. Traditionally, the material was pre-eminent for certain types of jewellery, particularly those for ecclesiastical purposes and mourning rituals. Beads, pendants and charms have been found in early burial mounds in widely scattered parts of the British Isles. It is thought that in Jurassic times, water-worn fragments of a monkey-puzzle tree drifted into the sea and ultimately became water-bogged and sank. In stagnant seas, the wood was preserved in a compressed form and metamorphosed under the influences of heat and pressure, with considerable distortion of the original wood structure. Most of the jet carved into brooches was derived from debris picked up on the beaches or by tunnelling into the sea cliffs. As a gem for jewellery, it is easily worked with simple tools, has a hardness of 2-3 on Mohs scale and its dense structure produces a lustrous mirror-like polish.

AMBER

Amber, a complex mixture of several resins mainly from the Baltic Sea region, is the result of slow fossilization of the sap of a pine-tree species which bled more than 20 million years ago – probably in the Oligocene Period before the great Ice Age. Amber is transparent to translucent, with a greasy lustre and yellow or brown in colour. It is often clouded, sometimes fluorescent, with a hardness of more than two on Mohs scale, and it takes a potentially high polish which makes it suitable for carving, cabochons, pendants and beads. A characteristic of Baltic amber is the frequent inclusion of leaves, pieces of moss, lichens and pine needles, also flies and other insects within the fossilized resin. The kauri gum or copal resin of New Zealand, in jewellery is indistinguishable from amber, but is more recently formed, not having undergone metamorphosis that renders amber the more resistant of the two. A string of amber beads, now hard to obtain unless money is no object, is a prized item of jewellery. From the ancient world of myths and superstition to the high-tech world of contemporary artists, organic gemstones have been, and still are, a source of inspiration in the decorative arts.

Earrings made from Baltic amber

Rubies are really a girl’s best friend

According to folklore, fine rubies serve to preserve and restore the health and spirit of the owner. Some Myanmar people still believe that to benefit from the full power of the gem, it should be worn inside the flesh to integrate with the body. Apparently, to wear a ruby in such a fashion is sufficient to protect the person from attack by spears and swords. Bullets don’t get a mention. So, what exactly is a ruby, where do they get their colour from, and are they more “powerful” than diamonds? Rubies and sapphires are basically the same mineral, corundum, which is a chemical composition of aluminium and oxygen. Pure corundum has no colour, but such gems are very rare. The characteristic colours of red for rubies and blue for sapphires, are caused by impurities of a metallic oxide called chromium. Other common colours for corundum include brown, yellow, green and violet. Probably the rarest gemstone, after clear corundum, is one tinged with orange. In modern times, diamonds are generally believed to be the most esteemed and valuable of all gemstones. This in no small part is due to very intense and clever marketing strategies by corporations such as De Beers, which has a hand in everything from diamond mining and diamond retailing to diamond trading and industrial diamond manufacturing. There’s a saying that the greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing the world that he didn’t exist. Well perhaps the greatest trick ever played in the diamond game is convincing people that they are rare.

Just like the Black Prince’s Ruby, the Timur Ruby is actually a spinel. The name of the stone comes from Timur (Tamerlane 1336-1405), the founder and namesake of the Timurid Empire in central Asia. The irregularly-shaped cabochon spinel weighs an impressive 361 carats. The stone is etched with the names of five of the men who owned it: Jahangir (1569-1627), the 4th Mughal Emperor; Shah Jahan (1592-1666), the 5th Mughal Emperor; Farrukhsiyar (1685-1719), the 10th Mughal Emperor; Nader Shah (1688-1747), Shah of Iran; and Ahmad Shah Durrani (1722-1772), King of Afghanistan. Jahangir also had the name of his father, Akbar the Great, engraved on the spinel.

For hundreds of years the famous “Black Prince’s Ruby” set in Britain’s Imperial State Crown, was regarded as the world’s largest ruby at 170 carats, however it is really a spinel. The ‘Timur Ruby’, of 361 carats, is the centrepiece of a necklace that is also in the crown jewels and it too has been classified as a spinel. Spinels are valuable gemstones but carat for carat they are not in the same league as rubies of the same size. They were only recognised as an individual mineral some 180 years ago. Spinels may occur in colours of red, pink, violet, yellow, orange, blue, dark green or black and are mined in some of the same places as rubies. The chemical composition is different from that of rubies, consisting of magnesium and aluminium oxide. The world’s major ruby mines are in Myanmar, (formerly Burma), Sri Lanka, (formerly Ceylon) and Thailand (formerly Siam). Gemstones from the different regions may have a characteristic colour although this is not a very precise way of tracking down the origin. Thai rubies are a violet shade of red, called ‘Thai red’, while gems from Sri Lanka, or Singhalese rubies, are slightly pinker in colour. These are described as “rose red” or “Ceylon red” by knowledgeable traders. The most prolific and valuable ruby deposits are in Myanmar, to the north of Thailand. The finest Myanmar rubies are called “pigeon’s blood” with the red in the middle of the red spectrum. If you see a blackish or bluish tinge to the stone, you could be looking at top quality. Rubies with a pink tinge may look pretty but are considered of lesser quality. The most famous ruby fields in the world are near a town called Mogok, which is situated in a deep valley in northern Myanmar. To get there, first fly to the capital of Yangon (Rangoon). Next, it’s a plane or train journey to the ancient capital of Mandalay. The train trip is an adventure in itself. About 200 kilometres northeast of Mandalay is your final destination, the town of Mogok, which is sometimes accessible by road but otherwise, it’s a helicopter trip.

Nobody knows when the Mogok ruby mines were first discovered, although it is known that the mines date back several hundred years. It seems possible that these mines were worked more than a thousand years ago, since this region of Asia was settled first. Many fine rubies mined in Mogok grace the golden spires of the countless pagodas throughout Myanmar, icons of the Buddhist faith, which attracts some 80 per cent of the Myanmar people. Early rubies were cut as cabochons because of the difficult cutting techniques required to facet such a hard stone.

This 8.62 carat ruby was bought at auction in 2014 by London luxury jeweller, Laurence Graff. He paid US$8.6 million at the time. Regarded by many as the finest ruby in the world and named the Graff Ruby, it comes from Mogok in Myanmar. At the same auction a 27.54-carat Kashmir sapphire sold for a record $US6.78 million

The entire country of Upper Burma was annexed by the British in 1886 and part of the British plan was to prevent the ruby mines from falling under French control. Before long, a company calling itself British Ruby Mines Limited, was floated. This new enterprise leased the mines around Mogok from the British administration for an annual fee plus a share of the profits. Initially, mining was done by primitive native methods consisting of driving narrow shafts down through the soggy earth until the ‘byon’ was reached (‘byon’ is the alluvial gravel where rubies are found). These vertical shafts were between six and ten metres deep. The mining company sought to increase profits for the shareholders by introducing advanced, alluvial mining techniques as mechanical extraction tended to crush the precious crystals. One major problem was that much of the ruby-bearing ore was underneath the town of Mogok. The buildings had to be purchased, demolished and rebuilt away from the ore body. Perhaps the biggest problem faced by the new miners was the very nature of the territory. Although only 200 kilometres from the then capital of Mandalay, the dense jungle was the source of tropical fever and home to dangerous wildlife such as tigers and snakes. The mule track from Mandalay to Mogok valley also had to cross a mountain range more than 1,300 metres high. Heavy pieces of mining equipment could only be hauled during the dry season, and the difficult journey sometimes took weeks.

Despite all these setbacks the stoical British, willingly supported by their Burmese subjects, constructed a power station, drainage tunnels and washing mills for separating the precious stones from the soggy dirt. The company prospered until early last century when the technique for synthesising rubies was discovered. Rubies became hard to sell and the price fell accordingly. Before long, the American ruby market collapsed as a result of the Great Depression. The Burma Ruby Company struggled on for years before finally handing back its mining lease to the British administration in 1931. Native miners continued to mine gems until the Mogok ruby fields turned into a battlefield for the invading Japanese army and the 14th British Army. Since World War II, Burma has been caught up in some bizarre political and social events. Governments come and go. Leaders are drawn from the military regime as was the case last year when the democratically elected leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, was ousted in a military coup led by Senior General Min Aung Hlaing. However, one thing is certain, while it’s a no-go zone at the moment, Myanmar will one day again entice affluent travellers from around the world. And rubies, the world’s most sought-after gemstones, are still mined at Mogok.

But why are they so expensive, you ask? Ruby-bearing earth is very difficult to detect geologically. They generally occur in areas of contact metamorphism and few deposits have been discovered in the last thousand years or so.

Bill Spargo – pioneer prospector and snow skier

By FW

William ‘Bill’ Benjamin Spargo, pioneer of skiing on Mt Hotham, came to the mountain in about 1924 and brought with him the kind of toughness you needed to survive there, even now. He was the first alpine road patrolman employed there by the Country Roads Board, moving from the Omeo/Tallangatta Road which was then referred to as the Omeo Highway. He began skiing on Mount Wills on split woolybutt (Alpine Ash) skis, with working boots nailed to the ‘boards’ instead of bindings – like those used by the Kiandra Goldfield miners of that gold rush period. This story is about gold and Spargo was just the bloke to find it. He built the but you can still see across the Swindlers Creek valley from the Great Alpine Road. Hidden almost by the snow gum trees that have grown so well since the great fire of Black Friday, 1939, Spargo’s but was built from local round timber and lined with tarred paper known then as ‘sisalcraft’. He transported the material via the Mt Loch Spur with a horse-drawn sledge.

Around 1934, when Spargo built his hut, he did so with the intention of finding the gold most prospectors know exists in the deep alluvial leads, and hopefully finding some of the reefs that might have shed gold in claims such as Sol Morrison’s at Boiler Plain, where he panned 12 ounces in one dish!

Bill Spargo was not a big man but what he lacked in size he certainly made up for in spirit and determination. When the great wildfire of Friday 13th January, 1939, came roaring over Hotham and across the deep valley of Swindlers Creek, Bill was ready for it. He had a permanent water supply piped, frost-safe and buried, into his hut from a spring some distance up the hill from the hut.

One winter, quite a few years ago, I took a party of Omeo Ski Club members around from Hotham to Spargo’s, on skis. There we had a good look at the neat little dwelling in which he’d spent so many lonely years.

There was the old tin bath, with the water still running in, filling it and running out through a pipe exiting outside. I was able to tell my party how Spargo had stood there with a gold dish bailing water onto the inside walls while the flames swept over the hut like a tidal wave

H was once asked what it had been like in the hut at the time and he just said “It was a bit steamy what, with the iron getting nearly red-hot and the water coming back at me scalding hot.” That’s how tough Spargo was.

He was also skilful enough to eventually discover the richest reef ever found in this part of Victoria. So determined was he to work it himself, he knocked back an offer of $120,000 for it from a Sydney syndicate.

Like all good prospectors, he dug an awful lot of holes. He paid two fellows to drive a tunnel into the side of Mt Higginbotham because he had the idea that there was a mother lode within reach. He spent seven or eight fruitless years looking for that lode.

Bill Spargo’s hut on Golden Spur was once Australia’s highest residence

One day Bill was wandering around the side of that part of the Mt Loch range that falls into the Cobungra River, towards Dungy’s Gap. It was summer and the bush flies were swarming around his head and about ten kilos of them were hitching a ride on his back. While flicking them off with a snow gum branch, he spotted a likely looking bit of quartz at his feet. His eyes fairly bugged out when he saw that it was studded with gold.

Because there are only two ways you can look in those mountains – either up or down hill – Bill reckoned it must have come down hill, so he looked up. What he saw there, apart from it being awfully steep, was a few red robin birds fluttering above something. “Ah!” he thought, “Must be a snake up there,” and he struggled on up the slope, keeping his eye to the ground looking for more specimens like the one in his bag. Where the robins had been there was no snake – what there was, was an outcropping quartz reef with lots of gold showing!

236 OUNCES IN ONE CRUSHING

The Red Robin reef had just been discovered. Bill sat down and let the adrenalin settle a bit, before grabbing his pick and shovel and digging down beside the reef. It wasn’t very wide on the surface but boy was it rich. There was gold in the quartz everywhere he looked.

So remote was the area there was virtually no chance of if being found by another prospector or stray bushwalker, so Spargo decided there was no need to rush off and register it as a claim. He just kept on digging.

The first parcel of two tons of ore, crushed at the Bairnsdale School of Mines Battery and taken there by Doolan’s Transport of Omeo, returned the astounding clean- up of 236 ounces of gold. That ore was packed out to the chalet on pack horses, just like in the old days.

Next year Spargo packed out a further 2.75 tons which brought him a total from both crushings of 353 ounces, an average of nearly 75 ounces to the ton. A road was dozed to the Red Robin from the Alpine Road around the western side of Mt Loch to Machinery Spur, and a small battery was set up.

When the war intervened, Spargo held the claim for three years, came back in 1946 and crushed another two tons for 106 ounces.

On 27th February, 1946, he married Evelyn Maud Piper, née Davies, a 45-year- old widow. They lived in the high country during the summer months but soon parted and Bill went back to his hut and the Red Robin mine. The ‘One Alone’ became another of Bill’s shows but was never as rich as the Red Robin. From nine tons, a crushing produced only 36 ounces whereas in 1947, six tons from the Red Robin went 32 ounces to the ton from an underlying shaft down to 25 feet. It was still good stone but as could be expected from most reefs in this country, the values were decreasing with depth.

In 1948 the shaft was down to 50 feet and another eight tons produced 207 ounces.

The monument to Bill Spargo credited him with three more years of retirement living than he actually had, dying as he did, in January, 1959

ADOPTED A SOLITARY EXISTENCE

About this time a road was brought up from the Kiewa track and more work was done at the mine. Bill Spargo retired in 1952 having sold out to some Harrietville friends. He retired to Queensland and settled on Magentic Island, which was a strange choice for a man who loved the mountains and had taken pride in living in what had been Australia’s highest residence. Having purchased two houses, one of which he lived in, Spargo reverted to a loner existence and spent his last days in a retreat he built under the tank stand. He died on 7th January, 1959, at Mount Olivet Hospital, Kangaroo Point, Brisbane, and was cremated.

That rich outcropping Bill worked always had me thinking about the gold that must have travelled down the slope from that reef as the country wore down over millions of years. Maybe someone

will try there with a metal detector one day. Maybe they already have.

There are a lot of pockets of gold that the old timers missed in their hard rock mining. A mate of mine struck such a pocket in an old tunnel out in the Gippsland bush. Keen as mustard, he was testing the sides and roof of an old drive when his detector gave a loud cry. One of the bits he weighed on my old gold scales went nearly two ounces.

When the old timers had worked that particular area, they had no such thing as a metal detector, just a candle for light, so it was pretty easy for a pocket of nuggetty gold to be missed. But not every rich pocket was associated with visible quartz.

Before you go clambering down an old shaft, or poking about in any old tunnel, you need to know the risks. The timber that holds all that rock up might be pretty rotten and even a cough or a sneeze can bring it all down on your head.

Tapping the walls and overhead rock will give off a drumming sound if it’s a bit loose, and most visible rock falls have not finished falling. Rotten mine timbers are a sure sign of instability, so my advice is to steer well clear of the place.

The last laugh at Charters Towers

By JL

The good citizens of Charters Towers thought Cornishman, Richard Craven, was mad. The shaft he had dug was the town joke. They called it Craven’s Folly because he’d been digging deeper and deeper, for three long, expensive years, with barely a sniff of gold. But the people of Charters Towers wouldn’t have laughed quite so hard and for quite so long if they’d realised the joke was on them. Self-confident and boastful, Craven was a well-known figure in the Towers. He had arrived during the first ‘rush’ in March 1872, just after gold was first discovered there by the aboriginal boy, Jupiter Mosman. In fact, while Mosman and party were jubilantly staking their claim, Craven was not far away, on the Mt Leyshon diggings, following the lure of the precious metal, as he had done since his arrival in the colony six years earlier.

As soon as he heard of the new find, he joined the rush of diggers to the new field. Fourteen years later, Craven was still on the field and still following the lure of gold. A mechanical engineer, he had acquired interests in a couple of mines and was director of one of the town’s 29 mills. But for 10 years he had been obsessed with the idea that a huge deposit would one day be found in the area where two rich reefs joined – the Queen reef to the east and the Day Dawn reef to the west. But other ‘junction’ mines had been tried before and all had failed. Everyone had given up on the area, everyone except Richard Craven who, in 1886, took up a lease of 25 acres in what the townspeople called “the barren ground”. But he could find no one who was prepared to risk money backing his dream. By chance however, an old friend, W. Ivers, who had already struck it rich with the fabulously wealthy Day Dawn PC mine (PC stood for Prospecting Claim), and had retired to live in London, returned to the Towers for a visit. Craven persuaded Ivers to invest £12,000 to finance the sinking of a vertical shaft on his lease. Thus, the Brilliant PC Gold Mining Company was formed, with Richard Craven the Chairman of Directors.

Digging got underway and continued for three years with no success and the futile progress of the shaft was watched with much interest and much derision by the townspeople.

Towards the end of 1889, the shaft was at 900 feet – already much deeper than Craven had originally thought necessary, and capital was running out. The directors met and refused to spend any more money digging any deeper.

However, they agreed to give Craven one last chance – not to go deeper but to go back and explore a slightly promising formation at the 700-foot level. Here, one of his miners had previously noticed a 6-inch quartz leader jagging off to the east but at the time it wasn’t promising enough to hold up the deep sinking of the shaft. Now it was Craven’s only hope.

The miners returned to the formation and had driven into it barely a few feet when, to everyone’s astonishment, this humble leader immediately opened out into a reef about three feet wide from wall to wall. The width of the reef increased to eight feet as the drive continued. The quartz in the reef was so heavily charged with gold that the drive was later described as looking like a jeweller’s shop. The rock face literally sparkled in the light of the candles.

This wasn’t the junction of the Queen and Day Dawn reefs which Craven had convinced himself was the root of all riches, but a fabulous new ore body, later called the Brilliant Reef.

The red flag of triumph appeared at the poppet head. Craven was jubilant! So elated was he with his luck, and so incensed by the derision long-levelled at his scheme, he immediately piled his buggy high with some of the rich stone and drove up Gill Street, the main street of Charters Towers, telling all the sceptics in no uncertain terms just what he thought of them. He and his friends then toasted the success of the Brilliant with immense quantities of the best champagne.

Richard Craven

Cables broadcasting the fabulous new mine flew all over the world and in the excitement that followed, the Charters Towers Stock Exchange opened for business in the new Royal Arcade. With each call of the board, the price of its shares rose.

Work commenced and in just three months of the reef being struck, the Brilliant had yielded 5,469 ounces of gold from 1,976 tons – nearly 30 ounces to the ton!

In two years the mine had become the biggest producer on the field averaging 2,500 ounces of gold every three weeks. Over the next 10 years the Brilliant Mine PC yielded £2 million worth of gold. It needs no stretch of the imagination to realise just what it would mean if such a discovery was made today at current gold prices.

The success of the Brilliant proved the value of deep sinking on the Charters Towers goldfield. Speculation and investment, both local and overseas, followed quickly.

The “barren ground” suddenly became very busy with all adjacent ground taken up in leases. Soon there were many more shafts driven into the earth – deep, vertical shafts sunk on the boundary of each lease closest to the Brilliant PC reef, until its ore body was struck. It wasn’t long before the Brilliant PC was surrounded by sister mines.

By 1891 the Brilliant and St George, the Brilliant Freehold, and the Brilliant Central had all tapped into the reef. The Brilliant Block was next but it didn’t hit the reef until a depth of 1,090 feet. It was obvious that the reef was heading downwards.

In 1893 the Brilliant Extended cut the reef at 2,000 feet, while in 1896, the Brilliant Deeps struck the same reef at 2,558 feet, the deepest shaft at that time on the Charters Towers field.

The Brilliant lode, with all its mines, reigned supreme for many years. It was the most productive reef ever discovered in Charters Towers.

Total gold from all reefs, offshoots and crossovers of that lode accounted for approximately half of all the ounces mined on the field. Richard Craven and his Brilliant PC mine had started a new boom for the town, one that was to last for many years and act as the catalyst that turned the town into a city.

Wealth from the Brilliant mines also helped supplement the dwindling coffers of the State of Queensland. By the turn of the century, a disastrous drought plus labour problems had hit its primary production and the Government had run so short of funds it was even forced to retrench many senior civil servants. Profits from the Brilliant lode mines helped to prop up the ailing economy.

In October, 1904, seven miners were killed when a huge fire swept through the Brilliant and into the surrounding mines. Fanned by oxygen from the many tunnels connecting these sister mines for the purpose of cross ventilation, the fire raged for three days with noxious fumes, smoke and incredible heat issuing from the many shafts. Some of the victims were members of rescue parties who were killed by poisonous fumes as they tried to save their fellow workers. Charters Towers went into mourning and the Brilliant PC never re-opened.

A parade down Gill Street, Charters Towers in 1912. Richard Craven organised his own one-man parade driving a buggy full of gold ore down the same street more than 20 years before

Today, all that remains of Craven’s Folly is a jumble of concrete blocks near an overgrown and fenced-off shaft, barely noticeable now in the “barren ground” beside the railway yards. And Richard Craven, the man who helped transform Charters Towers into a city, is remembered only by a narrow laneway that bears his name.

Richard Craven left his mine and the city of Charters Towers in 1892 and retired to live in Sydney, but a long and prosperous life was denied him.

The following obituary appeared in The Sydney Mail, 28th January, 1899: Few men were better known or respected in Northern Queensland, where he resided for upward of a quarter of a century, than the late Mr Richard Craven, who died at his residence, Preston, Birrell Street, Waverley, on the 17th January.

A native of Preston, England, he came out to Queensland some 34 years ago, when the mining industry in that colony was practically in its infancy, and being possessed of indomitable energy, pluck, and perseverance, the essential qualities of the pioneer and prospector, he soon joined the great army of gold seekers that invaded Northern Queensland. He was the prospector of the celebrated Brilliant line of reef on the Charters Towers goldfield, eventually becoming interested in every mine on that lode. His sterling qualities und open-handed generosity were fully recognised by his fellow-citizens of the North, among whom be was deservedly popular. A born sportsman, he was one of the founders of the Charters Towers Jockey Club, of which he was one of the leading spirits during his long residence in the North, and when he came to reside in Sydney, some seven years ago, he quickly identified himself with the national sport, spending money with a liberal hand in the purchase of blood stock, but in neither colony was his success on the turf commensurate with the interest he took in the national sport.

Upright and honourable in his actions, he was greatly respected by all with whom be came in contact, and the esteem in which he was held in this city was manifested at his burial in the Waverley Cemetery on the 18th January, when the cortege included citizens of every grade, and floral tributes from his intercolonial and local friends were many and beautiful. Mr Craven died at the comparatively early age of 53, and left a widow and 10 children to mourn their loss.

The legend of Russian Jack

Or a lesson in how you should never let the facts get in the way of a good story

Outside the Halls Creek shire office in the far north-west of Western Australia, is the statue of a man known as Russian Jack, who, at one time, had the reputation of being the strongest man in Australia. His feats of strength, such as bending a “oneand-a-half-inch octagonal steel crowbar across his knee”, and his incredible endurance, reportedly wheeling a sick man in a wheelbarrow 480km through the Great Sandy Desert to Wyndham, are both legendary, and in many instances, apocryphal. And, though he was described by some as “a magnificent specimen of manhood,” he wasn’t two metres tall as a few newspapers of the day claimed. The Halls Creek sculpture, by Perth artist, C. P. Somers, was unveiled in 1979 as a tribute to the tough old gold prospectors of the 1800s. Ironically, in spite of being a Russian immigrant, big Jack was regarded by his peers as personifying the great Australian tradition of mateship, for the statue’s inscription reads: “His feat symbolised the mateship and endurance of the pioneers of the region, then lacking all the amenities of civilisation.” The “feat” is his wheeling of a sick Englishman named Halliday to Wyndham (or was it Halls Creek?) but far from it being 480km, Peter Bridge in his book Russian Jack, correctly puts the distance at closer to 50km. Which is still an awfully long way to push a wheelbarrow loaded with supplies and a sick man through the desert. While alive, Russian Jack’s loyalty and kindness to his fellow prospectors was legendary and, since his death, his reputation has been magnified in Western Australian folklore.

Photograph of Russian Jack (aka Ivan Fredericks) taken in 1890

A Grand Monument

The Russian Jack statue, financed by a grant from the Western Australian government and a contribution from the Shire of Halls Creek, stands about two metres high, is two metres in length, a metre wide and weighs about two tonnes – a grand monument indeed to a magnanimous spirit. Russian Jack was born in the White Sea coastal city of Arkhangelsk (Archangel) in Northern Russia in 1852/53, and not 1864 as indicated on his headstone and as claimed by a number of other sources. His real name was John Frederick Kirkoss (aka John Fredericks and Ivan Fredericks). When the Westralian Worker (Perth) reported his death in 1904, they gave his age as 49 but he was actually 52 or 53 when he passed away from pneumonia in a Fremantle hospital in April of that year. He arrived in Derby, WA, by ship in 1886 and so began the legend. While nothing approaching two metres in height, Russian Jack was around the six-foot mark, give or take an inch, and weighed about 16 stone (100kg). One of Jack’s mates remarked that he had exceptionally big forearms, a barrel-like chest and didn’t know his own strength. However, by another observer Jack was conversely described as “Stumpy in body, grizzled of face, unable to write but able to curse, a gentleman to females and a lout to gentlemen…” H. Wilson, in Gateways to Gold, absurdly wrote: “Russian Jack was reputed to be an exceptionally strong and powerful man, over seven feet tall. When he leant across to whisper to the barmaid…all the glasses shook.” What was undisputed was his love of a drink and a hearty meal. “He had occasional drinking bouts but was always a gourmand (glutton),” said one prospector who befriended him. “Three pounds (1.5kg) of steak, a dozen eggs, a loaf of bread and a pound of butter would disappear in no time. “He enjoyed emu eggs. “There was a ‘terrible lot of eating in them,’ Jack would say.”

Abnormally Large Wheelbarrow

In the town of Derby, Russian Jack constructed for his own use an abnormally large wheelbarrow, with shafts 214cm. long, and a specially fashioned wide wheel (which he illegally obtained from an unidentified source) to make it easier to negotiate the sand-dune country where he went in search of gold, often pushing loads in excess of 50 kilograms. It is said that one time, when Jack and a mate were halfway to the Kimberley country, his companion fell ill so Jack loaded his swag and stores onto his barrow allowing the sick man to walk alongside. Having travelled some 60km it became obvious that Jack’s mate was too sick to walk any further, so the big Russian put him on top of the load and wheeled him along the track until he died. Jack then buried his body beside the road and continued the journey alone. During one of his first overland jaunts, the big Russian came across a couple of elderly prospectors who were too exhausted to carry their swags any further and were resting in the shade of a tree, waiting for fate to deal the next hand. Russian Jack quietly loaded all their gear onto his already overburdened wheelbarrow and helped push the weary diggers to the nearest settlement, 60 kilometres away, over waterless plains. During the latter part of the journey, one of the old men collapsed and had to be loaded onto Jack’s wheelbarrow for transporting to the nearest settlement. And I have already mentioned the Good Samaritan act he performed for the desperately ill Englishman, Halliday. In 1907, the eccentric journalist, Daisy Bates, while travelling to the Murchison area, met the big Russian. She wrote: “About 25 miles (40km) from the Peak Hill goldfields, we had stopped our buggy to wait and rest when out from a bush camp stepped a big, burly man with a huge melon in his hands, and from his mouth boomed the words: ‘Melon very good, lady. You like rest and eat?’

No Answer Would He Give

In a moment I thought of Russian Jack and, sure enough, it was he. But no answer would he give to my question about his work or love for his mate; all I could persuade him to say was: ‘That was long time ago. That was nothing.’ “His mate had married and settled down, and Jack was cultivating a vegetable garden for the Peak Hills goldfields, and was in charge of the coach horses plying between the gold area and the coast. “Still he kept his good name with everybody and helped many a ‘down-andouter. “In honesty, in singleness of purpose, in the clean simplicity of his life and his religion, this Russian Jack was a great man, but greatest in his ideal of the real friendship that means so much when men are thrown together far back in a continental interior like Australia.” Another recorded incident concerns Russian Jack and a mate returning from an unsuccessful prospecting venture inland when their food supply ran dangerously low and they decided to shoot a kangaroo to help feed themselves along the track. Jack’s mate spotted a kangaroo and decided to chase it on foot but unfortunately, he tripped and broke a leg. In typical fashion, Jack lifted his injured mate onto his wheelbarrow and pushed him to safety. When the pair eventually arrived in town, one of the locals mentioned that Jack must have travelled over a certain rough track, one noted for its pot holes, stones and gullies. Jack told the admiring on-lookers: “I pushed him over 100 miles (160km) in that damn wheelbarrow.”

The Man With The Broken Leg

The man with the broken leg, from Russian Jack’s wheelbarrow, remarked drily: “Yes, and I swear so far he hasn’t missed a rock.” On the early goldfields of Halls Creek and Cue, the name of Russian Jack quickly acquired the aura of a legend. An article appearing in The Murchison Times newspaper noted: “Our old friend, Russian Jack, whose memorable feats wheeling a heavily laden wheelbarrow all the way from the coast to the Kimberley goldfields has returned to Cue ...” Russian Jack, it is recorded, was one of the earliest arrivals on the Murchison goldfields. He was also one of the first visitors to Cue at a time when it was only a scattering of tents and makeshift buildings. The police station comprised two tents and a makeshift yard for the police horses but there was nowhere to secure any law breakers, so it was decided to transport a large tree stump at Milly Soak to Cue on the back of a wagon. The stump was set up near the police tents and a strong chain was attached to it. Cue now had a goal with offenders secured to the stump for the duration of their sentence or at least until they sobered up. While prospecting in the Cue area, Russian Jack came into town one time for provisions, and as was his habit, he also stopped at the hotel for one beer too many. When the time arrived for Jack to return to his prospecting site, he hastily threw onto his great wheelbarrow all his groceries, a bag of potatoes, drilling gear and explosives. His dynamite was secured in a wooden box but a tin of 50 firing caps, which were extremely sensitive objects, were casually thrown on top of the unwieldy load.

The memorial to Russian Jack at Halls Creek

Carelessly Arranged

Jack tied nothing down. Everything on the wheelbarrow was carelessly arranged. With the slightest mishap, the firing caps could easily explode, causing severe damage or worse. Jack did not care; he was happily drunk. Some observers on the main street watched apprehensively as Russian Jack effortlessly took up the shafts of his great wheelbarrow and uncertainly tried to push it in the right direction. But, being inebriated, he progressed haltingly, weaving all over the road. A policeman, observing Jack’s erratic steps, remarked to a companion: “Russian Jack has a load up inside as well as on his barrow,” and decided to intervene by escorting him safely out of town. Along the way, however, the policeman spotted the tin of firing caps balanced precariously on top of the load. Jack informed the constable he had recently received some money for gold nuggets sent to the bank, and was intent on proceeding to his mine, the “Fairlight”, about 13km out of town. For his own safety, the policeman decided to arrest Russian Jack but was uncertain how to do this, as the big Russian was an unusually strong man and had to be handled cautiously at the best of times. Jack continued staggering all over the road, bellowing out a song in his raucous, booming voice. As he drew near the police tents, several policemen intercepted Jack, suggesting quietly that he should re-pack his barrow. Ever so diplomatically, the police offered the big man a cup of tea as, together, they planned their course of action in getting the drunken Russian safely out of town and back to his bush camp. By this time Jack was thirsty again and he agreed to sit down quietly for a spell. As Jack rested, he started to doze off and the police took the opportunity to repack his barrow securely while waiting for the billy to boil. Soon Russian Jack was fast asleep, so the policeman handcuffed the big man to the huge log, their intention being to restrain him until he had sobered up and was capable of undertaking a safe journey back to his camp.

Chained To The Huge Stump

Overnight, the on-duty policeman was summoned urgently out of town to Cuddingwarra, about 16km to the west. In his haste, the policeman completely forgot about Russian Jack being left chained to the huge stump near the police tents. Later in the day the policeman suddenly remembered the big drunken Russian he had left behind at Cue, chained to a log, and hastily rode back to town. Upon arrival at the police tents he was stunned to find that Russian Jack was gone, and so was the stump. It would have taken three or four men to lift the ‘gaol’, he reasoned, so perhaps some of the residents had moved the stump and Jack to a place out of the sun. When the policeman conducted a quick search of the town site, at the hotel he discovered Russian Jack sitting quietly in the bar having a conversation with the barman. The stump was propped up on the counter and Jack was still chained to it. It was learnt that Jack had awakened during the night with a terrible thirst. He could see a waterbag hanging inside one of the police tents but when he called out for a drink, there was no response, so he heaved the great stump up onto his shoulder and walked to the tent. He then promptly emptied the waterbag and, satisfied, went back to sleep. When he next awakened, it was daylight, and the merciless sun was beating down on him with a vengeance. Desperate for a drink, and not particularly fussy how he obtained it, the big Russian wrenched the tree stump from the ground, balanced it on a shoulder, and walked away in search of refreshment at the nearest pub, which was almost half a kilometre away. When the hotel opened its doors, there was Russian Jack, chained to a stump, asking for a cool ale to prevent him dying of thirst.” “I thought I left you in goal Jack,” the policeman said. “So you did,” Jack replied, “but it was low-down of you to leave me all night with no drink. Anyway, you have one drink with me now and I’ll go back to gaol.” With an amazed police officer in tow, Russian Jack again shouldered the gaol stump and strolled back to the police tents where he restored the makeshift ‘gaol’ to its original location.

Removed Jack’s Chain

At the police camp the officer removed Jack’s chain and put a billy on the campfire which they shared. Jack’s physical strength was known to be immense and many were the stories told of his magnificent feats. At one time, when working as a labourer on Doorawarrah Station, he was dismissed by his employer for wrecking equipment. Jack allegedly bent a 4cm octagonal crowbar over his knees in an angry moment. As a gold prospector Russian Jack was ordinary and when he wasn’t on the gold, which was often, he turned his hand to whatever put food on the table. On a Peak Hill goldfield he ran a crude eating house for a time. A Frenchman, Albert Duclos, set up his camp close to Russian Jack’s business, hoping to steal some of his customers. Jack took quick action and chased the Frenchman off the field with a meat chopper, threatening to “make him the mince meat”. In his grubby eating house the big man waited on his customers, all of them rough gold diggers, without ever wearing boots and with his unwashed trousers rolled up to the knees. A passing coach driver who’d paused outside Jack’s premises, offered him a drink from a half full bottle of whiskey. “No, thanks,” said Jack. “I’m not drinking now.’ When the offer was repeated, Jack grudgingly consented to “haff a sip”. He then poured the half bottle of whiskey into a mug and downed the lot in one gulp. The coach driver’s only comment was that he would have hated to have seen Jack when he was drinking. One time Jack was asked what he would most like to achieve in his life. He said he would like to retire near a city in Western Australia, grow lots of vegetables, and then sit down by himself and eat the lot.

Severe Bout Of Pneumonia

According to the official burial report, Russian Jack died in a private hospital, Mandurah Road, at Fremantle, Western Australia, on 17th April, 1904, aged 40 years (though we know he was at least 12 years older), after succumbing to a severe bout of pneumonia. He was buried two days later in a local cemetery in the public grave section CC, No. 245. His burial particulars state his parent’s names were unknown nor was it known whether he was ever married. At the time of his death it was believed he still had a brother living in Archangel. His burial was presided over by Roman Catholic priest, John Smythe, and drew a crowd of three – George Murdoch, J. O’Donnell and W. H. Jones. Russian Jack’s last years were spent in a shelter for the homeless with the occasional stay in gaol for being drunk and disorderly. He died intestate and was buried in a pauper’s grave with no headstone. His death certificate recorded his profession as “market gardener” revealing that the big man might have finally achieved his life’s ambition of having his own private supply of vegetables. Three weeks after he died, the following obituary appeared in the Murchison Advocate: An old identity, John Fredericks, but a hundred times better known as “Russian Jack”, died a few days ago in a private hospital at Fremantle. His death came as a great surprise, for no one could imagine death in the prime of life to one of such herculean strength. He was so far as physical manhood was concerned, a picture, but he combined the strength of a lion with the tenderness of a woman. Though he had a loud-sounding, sonorous voice that seemed to come out of his boots, there was no more harm in it than in the chirp of a bird. Many instances are known of his uniform good nature, but his extraordinary kindness was manifested a few years ago to a stranger suffering from typhoid fever whom he picked up on the track in the Kimberley district. The stranger had a wheelbarrow and some food, and the burly Russian took the sick stranger and wheeled him nearly 300 miles to a haven of refuge. “Russian Jack”, if there are Angels in Heaven who record the good deeds done on earth, thou wouldst have sufficient to thy credit in that one action to wipe out many of the faults that common flesh is heir to.” Almost a century later, Russian Jack was chosen as “a symbol of nobility” by the Russian Orthodox Church and a marble headstone and cross was erected on his grave.

This simple headstone now marks the final resting place of Russian Jack, even though they got his name and date of birth wrong

Forever unsolved – the Beaconsfield bank robbery

During the boom days of Beaconsfield’s gold era, which spanned a period of around 40 years, coaches transporting the precious metal on its hazardous journey to Launceston each carried a contingent of armed guards to prevent the valuable cargo from falling into the hands of bushrangers, who were an ever-increasing scourge of the times. However, when the Beaconsfield branch of the Bank of Tasmania was robbed in 1884, the names of famous lawless characters were markedly absent from the list of suspects, and instead, a small number of locals, described as being of “somewhat dubious character”, were at once deemed responsible for the robbery. The story goes that on the evening of 23rd July, 1884, when the then acting bank manager, 21-year-old Cecil A. Stackhouse, was on the return journey from one of his regular visits to the Richie family’s home and store at nearby Swift’s Jetty, he was brutishly grabbed from behind, gagged, bound to a tree, and robbed of his keys. Stackhouse was never able to identify his attackers, but in his account of the incident, told how he was guarded by two of the men for some hours and only released when a shot, fired by an unknown person, echoed from the direction of the town. For the times, the amounts stolen in the robbery were quite substantial, namely £2,100 in notes, £500 in gold and silver coins, 30oz of alluvial gold and a number of cheques. Prior to the theft, the bank had issued notes overprinted with the word BEACONSFIELD in red in the top righthand corner, and then, immediately after the crime was committed, they recalled these notes and restocked the branch with new batches bearing BEACONSFIELD in blue across the centre.

One of the highlights of a trip to the Beaconsfield Mine & Heritage Centre is an inspection of the head frame and the miner’s cage

News of the crime spread like wildfire, and in Beaconsfield, small-town gossipmongers were kept exceedingly busy, as in fact was the entire state of Tasmania, where an unprecedented amount of interest was shown in the case; a set of circumstances which greatly assisted a police party from Launceston, who, in a pre-dawn raid, swooped on several homes in the Beaconsfield area and arrested seven locals, namely, William and John Barrett, George and Richard Collins, Charles Ward, Edmund O’Keefe and Walter Masters. Then followed a most remarkable chain of events, which began when police decided Masters had no connection with the crime and would be released, while the remaining six alleged offenders were placed under guard in the local hotel until they could be transported to the lock-up in George Town. When their trials began in Beaconsfield Court on 4th August, the Collins brothers’ case was immediately dismissed due to lack of police evidence. Trials of the remaining four men were adjourned to 8th August and when proceedings were about to begin the court received urgent notification, by way of telegram, that the bank did not consider it had sufficient evidence to convict the men and had decided to drop the case against them. Elated by the quite amazing outcome, the seven freed men then got their scheming heads together and decided to sue the bank for false prosecution and wrongful imprisonment. Each of the successful cases was heard in the Hobart court and reaped George Collins and Walter Masters the tidy sum of £150 damages, Charles Ward received £300, and when the bank decided to settle out of court, William and John Barrett and Edmund O’Keefe each collected an even larger windfall of were awarded £175, while Richard Collins received a neat £225. Charles Ward, who claimed to be a man of the highest integrity, stated that his reputation had been most seriously defamed and was awarded an undisclosed amount.

The police, however, remained determined to make an arrest. They understood that the cash and bullion from the loot could not be identified but the old notes were a different proposition, and it wasn’t long after the prisoners were released that notes started to appear around the town with the red BEACONSFIELD having been none-toocleverly erased with chemicals. For the people of Beaconsfield, solving the crime had become a community project. Rumours kept circulating, and in December, Charles Ward was rearrested and charged with giving false evidence at the damages trial. Then, just two months later, John Barrett was again taken into custody while attending the Launceston races and charged with having in his possession, bank notes which appeared to have been treated with chemicals. Barrett was then charged with the robbery and with receiving stolen goods. However, in March, in the Hobart Supreme Court, again due to lack of evidence, John Barrett was acquitted of the robbery charge but found guilty of the charge of receiving and was sentenced to four years hard labour. The next day, in the same courtroom, Charles Ward was sentenced to six years gaol when the prosecution proved he had lied under oath in the damages case. Ward had a string of previous criminal convictions under various aliases but had somehow forgotten to mention this when claiming that his character had been assassinated as a result of being falsely charged with robbery. Finding himself again marooned between prison walls, Ward realized his only road to freedom was to turn informer, and as a result of his new information, police rearrested Edmund O’Keefe, along with a Mr John Rice, a new man on the scene. Both were charged with assaulting the bank manager and robbing him of his keys. The trial was to be held in Launceston, and after the offer of a bribe, together with a short stay in solitary confinement, Barrett was only too willing to give evidence with Ward. In his statement he alleged that Rice and O’Keefe had planned the robbery, and that they had guarded the bank manager while he and Ward carried out the theft. He told how the proceeds had been divided five ways at nearby Brandy Creek, the fifth share going to none other than the bank manager’s host that evening, Mr Ritchie of Swift’s Jetty. Ward also claimed that the men’s legal costs for their actions against the bank were all financed from the proceeds of the robbery. Nevertheless, despite all the preparation by the prosecution, the jury refused to accept the evidence, believing that the men had been coerced into their confessions by the police, and they were again set free. To this day, no person has ever been convicted of having robbed the Beaconsfield branch of the Bank of Tasmania. And to give the story its final comical twist, it was reported that in a friendly gesture, the people of Beaconsfield presented Walter Scott, the Sub-Inspector of Police, with a horse, saddle and bridle for his ardent work on the case and his success in recovering part of the money. No doubt some contributors, especially those who held prominent positions in the town, were eternally grateful that their reputations had remained unscathed.

NOTE: Beaconsfield became the centre of attention once again when the Beaconsfield Gold Mine collapsed due to an earthquake on 25th April, 2006. Of the 17 people who were in the mine at the time, 14 escaped immediately following the collapse. One miner, Larry Knight, was killed and the remaining two, Brant Webb and Todd Russell, were found alive on the sixth day by miners Pat Ball and Steve Saltmarsh. Webb and Russell were rescued on 9th May 2006, two weeks after being trapped nearly one kilometre below the surface. The mine closed in 2012.

A Yankee desperado’s career in WA

Adapted from The Sunday Times (Perth), 31st January, 1909

You have heard of Jim Connolly. He was a great bushman and a fine prospector, and could fire two revolvers at once. The left hand was as deadly as the right, and either was certain death if Jim had any interest in terminating your existence. He was a curious mixture, this man; for he could be generous and genial so long as he was “flush”, and because of his masterful good-fellowship he was popular with the boys outback.

At the same time, he had no more compunction in taking a life than he had in killing a boodie rat. He was reckless, yet a coward. He was brave behind a six- shooter, but it is certain that he feared the hangman’s death trap, and by a strange piece of business, he escaped it.

Connolly was fairly well-known among the pioneer brigade who cut the tracks through the Mulgaland north of Kalgoorlie from 1893 to 1896. He was unerring in direction, and locality and had an instinct for bushcraft. If he had had a year with blacks he would have beaten them at their own game. Bushmen are born, not made, and that’s the way it was with Connolly. The prospectors admired this uncanny mastery of unfriendly nature as they were astounded at his manipulation of his revolvers. To demonstrate his deadly precision, he had been known to put a circle of bullet holes around the lock of a door, and finish up by lodging a leaden pellet in the brass door- knob, and he could do that with either hand. If he stayed at one camp for any time, the spot would be marked with hundreds of empty cartridge cases where he had been practising. Revolver practice to Connolly was like piano practice to Paderewski – it was an obsession.

But at heart he was a cur – a vindictive, heartless cur. Big and athletic, and not ill-looking, he was also a favourite with a certain class of women who are fascinated by a spurious personality. This is the type of female who likes the male to be aggressive and garish. Jim Connolly’s history with these will never be fully told now, but he knew two at Menzies when that centre was a mere iron and hessian camp, and both of them died violent deaths. One was barmaid at a primitive pub; the other was cook or housemaid at the same place. Connolly was very friendly with the saloon Hebe, but a coolness arose between them, and one day the girl was found with her head in a tank of water – dead. I don’t suggest anything, nevertheless let us look at the sequel.

Above: Shenton Street, Menzies, in the late 1890s

In 1897 Connolly had been in Coolgardie for some time, after a knock-

about up north, where he had been mining and prospecting, and had made a bit of a rise. He was an American and a Pacific Slope gambler (Editor’s note: The Pacific Slope describes geographic regions in North American, Central American, and South American countries that are west of the continental divide and slope down to the Pacific Ocean) and the Old Camp 12 years ago afforded plenty of scope for speculation at poker or two-up, or any other variety of backing chance. A few weeks of this, and a fair consumption of alcohol at a bob a nobbler (Editor’s note: a shilling for roughly a double-shot of whisky) had not improved his bank balance, so one day he hired a sulky, and taking a New Zealander named Robert Reid with him, they started off along the dusty old Ninety- Mile track. It was a heavy trail cut in soft red loam, that came up in a cloud with the revolving wheels.

Just six miles out there was a wayside shanty kept by a woman, who came out in answer to a call from Connolly. What passed is unknown now, but the woman was heard to say “I’ll report you” and the next moment she was staggering back to her hut, with a bullet through her. That was the end of the second woman from the Menzies pub, shot dead by the admirer of her barmaid “mate” who was strangely drowned in a small corrugated iron tank. Dead women tell no tales. The sulky with its murderer and miscreant dashed away, and there were plenty more “thrills” to be experienced within the next few hours.

A couple of miles along, a camel train in the charge of an Afghan obstructed the trail. Connolly ordered the descendant of Mahomet to get to Hades, at the same time sending a bullet through his turban and into the hump of the leading camel. Mahomet fled while the camel collapsed with a broken back, cracking one of its legs in falling.

A little further on there was another hessian shanty standing close under Mt Burgess, that one insistent landmark of the Coolgardie goldfields. It was kept by a man who looked like a derelict as he came shuffling out to Connolly’s summons. “Down on your knees and say what you’ve got to say, because you’re going to die,” Connolly said, pointing a revolver at him. “Get down quick,” he reiterated, as the confused derelict hesitated. “Look here,” stuttered the trembling wretch, “Have pity on me. I’ve got a wife and children.” “I don’t care what you’ve got. You are going to die now. Down on your knees.” Whether Connolly really intended to shoot the man or was just having some sadistic fun with him we will never know. “Don’t shoot him, Jim,” pleaded Reid, “he’s a friend of mine.” Connolly glanced quickly at Reid, to see if he was joking or not. “It’s all right, Jim. I really do know him.” The woman-slayer relaxed. “Very well,” he said. “I intended to perforate him, but as he’s a friend of yours, well, he can go.” The reprieved man, shivering and shuffling, supplied the two desperadoes with a drink, and they drove off. No more adventure was encountered until they swung into the 25-Mile, a small mining camp with a couple of pubs and a store. Here the local constable, unaware of their dastardly doings, allowed them to pass on.

Meanwhile the report of the murder had reached Coolgardie with picturesque embellishments, and Inspector McKenua, with Sergeant Sellinger, accompanied by a volunteer detachment of the Goldfields Light Horse, started in pursuit. The auxiliaries, under Vet. Surgeon Nathan, got as far as the six-mile, but there the full details of the bloodthirsty American and his deadly aim quickened their memories, and they recollected that they had appointments back in Bayley Street which were too urgent to be broken by following a mere murderer. Vet. Surgeon-Major Nathan, however, decided to stick with the police, and no doubt they felt fortified by his presence.

The party hurried on, picking up accounts of what had happened to Mahomet, the camel and the derelict grog merchant. Past the 25-Mile they went, and on to the 42-Mile, following the sulky’s wheel tracks easily.

About six miles before reaching the 42- Mile they struck a condenser, and the owner came out, and dumbly pointed a significant thumb over his shoulder. The officers dismounted and rushed in to capture Reid asleep, with a Winchester rifle alongside him.

He gave no trouble, but declined to supply any information about his death- dealing companion. He was handcuffed to Surgeon Major Nathan, and consigned to the charge of a policeman. The Inspector and Sergeant pushed on, but they found that the trap had been abandoned, and that Connolly had mounted the grey horse, and gone forward with the object of getting as far away from justice as possible.

It was night before the officers reached the 42-Mile and as it was impossible to follow the tracks, they decided to camp at the wayside hotel.

As they were sitting in the little dining room, Sergeant Sellinger said: “I’m going to look for that fellow. He can’t be far away. His horse must be pretty tired, judging by the way it’s been driven.”

“What! Are you going alone?” asked the Inspector.

“Yes, I’ll just have a look around.”

“All right, but you’d better take the constable with you.”

The Sergeant, who by the way was swathed in a porous plaster, got his revolver, called the constable, and they started exploring the scrub in the moonlight. Sellinger was ahead, looking for the grey horse, because he knew the owner would not be far away. After they had gone some distance, the sergeant thought he discerned the horse, and had half-turned to direct the constable’s (Harris’s) attention, when he saw two eyes close to the ground looking at him. Then he made out a man with a rug, and a movement going on under it. All these things are seen and divined in a flash. The Sergeant knew he had run his man to earth, and that whoever was quickest would win, so he literally threw himself at the figure’s throat, and thrusting his revolver against its head, he said: “Move, and I’ll blow your brains out.”

“All right,” said Connolly, “you’ve got me.”

Constable Harris was up by this time, and the handcuffs were adjusted. When the rug was pulled back there were the ruffian’s two “bull-dogs”, fully loaded, but he’d made one mistake – he’d forgotten to sleep with them out of the holsters. Under his head was a bag of cartridges.

He was brought into the hotel, and asked Mrs Hastings Scott for a drink of water.

“Yes,” she replied, “I’d give you a drink of water if it would choke you. You cur! You could shoot a defenceless woman. Why didn’t you shoot the Sergeant?”

The rest of the story is well-known. Connolly and Reid were tried in Perth and – acquitted! Acquitted in the face of daunting evidence. And the same night Connolly entertained the jury at supper. The boys outback had subscribed a big sum, but he swindled all who had saved his neck, including Mr. R. S. Haynes, K.C., and absconded without paying his debts.

A year or two later the scoundrel was shot and killed in Dawson City, Yukon, by the notorious ‘Soapy Smith’.

When the trial was concluded, Sergeant Sellinger said to Connolly: “There are your revolvers and Winchester – they are yours.”

“Oh, you can have them Sergeant. Do you know how you are alive today? Well, I couldn’t get one of those barkers out of the case. If I could, you’d have been a dead man.”

Sergeant Sellinger has since been promoted to Inspector, and is one of the finest officers in the force.

Dodgy gold and crooks aplenty

Colonial goldfields were breeding grounds for crimes of every description – bushranging, hotel holdups, burglary, thuggery, murder and, of course, blatant and successful confidence trickery.

The goldfields attracted diggers from all over the world and it was not surprising that this vast migration of men also contained certain criminal elements. There were no national boundaries as far as these types of people were concerned. They came from Germany, Britain, South Africa, South America, China and a host of other countries. Having arrived on the various goldfields in their thousands, the Chinese, for example, were generally hard working and honest men who often laboured under terrible conditions in order to make even a modest living. Highly respected by some for their industry, they were reviled by many and largely shunned by the white communities. Yet there were those among them who found great difficulty in making a decent living on the goldfields and who, instead, turned to a life of crime and subterfuge. In many instances their activities brought them very significant rewards. Perhaps one of the more rewarding of these subterfuges was the manufacture of spurious gold, that is, gold nuggets that had all the appearances of being genuine but which were later found to be manufactured from various elements, including a small amount of gold but largely from metals of far less value. A gang of Chinese spurious gold manufacturers operated at Mia Mia Flat rear Talbot, Victoria, in 1862. Apparently they had been selling their counterfeit gold for some time but their operations were finally discovered by a storekeeper at Mia Mia named Mr Crump, who informed the police. Accordingly, a detachment of police officers including a Detective Lloyd, Senior Constable Boyle and Constable Bain, went to Crump’s store where the Chinese counterfeiters were expected to put in an appearance. Crump had been caught out with a parcel of spurious gold and was determined to have the criminals arrested when next they came to sell him their false nuggets.

DENSE TANGLE OF BUSHES

When they arrived at the store, Constable Bain hid himself in a dense tangle of bushes near the building while his two fellow officers went inside to hide in one of the rear rooms. Soon afterwards a Chinese digger was seen approaching the store but when this man saw one of the police horses, he became suspicious and beat a hasty retreat. Detective Lloyd ran from the store, mounted his horse and went after the fleeing figure. He was in time to see him enter one of the many Chinese diggers’ tents in the area. Meanwhile another Chinese gang member had also arrived at the store. He was permitted to enter and, unsuspecting, sold some ‘gold’ to the storekeeper. When Detective Lloyd returned, the transaction had just been completed. Lloyd asked the Chinaman what he was selling and the man said “good gold, got in Back Creek and belong to four men.” Crump had handed over more than £10 for the gold (knowing that the police would soon pounce and retrieve his money), and, having received this money for his spurious gold, the Chinese man was now open to arrest. This Lloyd quickly did, slamming closed the front door of the store. Lloyd placed the man under arrest for selling ‘bad gold’. The counterfeiter insisted that all his gold was good but Detective Lloyd ignored the protestations and searched his prisoner. In the man’s pockets the police officer discovered, in addition to the money paid to him by Mr Crump, “...two spurious nuggets one weighing about half an ounce and the other about one pennyweight; there was also a parcel of beautiful looking spurious nuggets, in all about four ounces.”

Taking this man with them, the police officers then made for the Chinese camp on the diggings where about 400 or so Chinese diggers lived and worked. There they entered the prisoner’s tent and found four Chinese nationals busily manufacturing spurious nuggets with a crucible and bellows. The press later reported: “These rascals were at once arrested and, after being handcuffed, the police searched the tent and found several ounces of spurious gold in addition to the implements with which it is made. The five prisoners were then placed in a cart that started for the police camp at Talbot.” The real gold that the counterfeiters used to manufacture their false nuggets was actually bought at the Alma field where they paid about four pounds an ounce for it. Apparently the colour of the gold from the Alma region was slightly darker and therefore more easily disguised.

It was hard enough to make a living on the goldfields but the diggers and gold buyers were also plagued by conmen

POSED AS BEGGARS

There were also, occasionally, men who posed as beggars on the goldfields hoping no doubt to generate sympathy from those who had been fortunate enough to win some gold from their claims. For example, in 1862 a man who gave his name as Sam Kong, was operating just such a deception at Emerald Hill, Victoria. He actually started posing as a beggar on Christmas Day 1862. The colonial press subsequently reported, “...to ensure success he got himself up in true mendicant fashion and appeared with a bandaged arm and limbs so weak as to require the support of crutches.” However, his ruse was suspected and the police were called. The officers of the law soon found a ready cure for his infirmities. The bandages were removed, the crutches were confiscated and, like a wondrous cure, it was discovered that Sam Kong had no further infirmities. When searched it was discovered that he had managed to beg the incredible sum of £12 pounds 10 shillings in just a few days of ‘malpractice’. The ‘beggar’ was arrested and taken to Melbourne for punishment. In October 1863, a Chinese digger called at the store owned by a Mr Alderson at Wesley Hill, Forest Creek. Alderson knew the Chinese digger as he had conducted a number of previous transactions with him and therefore had no reason to suspect him of any kind of skullduggery. The Chinaman informed Alderson that he wished to purchase 20 ounces of gold. Alderson told him that he had only 13 ounces on hand and said that if the man would call a few days later, he would have the full 20 ounces ready for him. On the evening of the arranged day, the Chinaman returned to the store to complete the transaction. Alderson greeted him warmly and showed him the full 20 ounces of gold dust. They negotiated and agreed upon a price for the gold, and then the Chinese digger produced a piece of paper and told Alderson that he would wrap the gold in it. To this Alderson readily agreed and he watched carefully as the gold was wrapped into the twist of paper. When he had the parcel ready the Chinaman looked up at Alderson and asked for a piece of string with which to secure the top of the parcel. Alderson nodded agreement, turned his back for a moment, took a short length of string from a shelf and handed it to his customer. The digger took the string and, with great care, secured the top of the paper parcel. When this was done, he took one more step to safeguard the contents. Asking Alderson for some sealing wax and a candle with which to heat it, he proceeded to seal each of the four corners of the parcel to ensure that it could not be tampered with. Into each molten seal he wrote the word ‘Wong’. Having thus secured his gold he gave Alderson a one pound note as a deposit and handed the parcel back to Alderson saying that he would collect it in a few days when he would also pay the balance of the money.

TOOK THE DEPOSIT

Alderson agreed to this arrangement. He took the deposit and the parcel and the Chinaman left the shop. Come the following week the customer had still not returned for his gold but Alderson was not concerned because he had the one pound deposit and also the gold so there was no problem. Except one. During those few days the price of gold on the goldfields had started to drop and Alderson became concerned that if he were stuck with the gold he would have to sell it for less money than he had actually paid for it. When another businessman arrived at his store and expressed a wish to purchase some gold, Alderson had no qualms about selling this new customer the 20 ounces of gold he had reserved for the Chinaman. Taking the gold from his safe he carefully broke each seal in turn, undid the tightly knotted string and opened the crackling paper. To his horror, Alderson found that the gold had been substituted for 20 ounces of lead shot. Apparently the Chinaman had prepared the parcel of lead shot beforehand and when Alderson had turned his back to get the piece of string, the Chinese digger had switched it with the real parcel of gold. It was he who had brought the paper into the store in which to wrap the gold and so the two pieces of paper were identical. It only then remained for the Chinaman to tie the top of the parcel and seal it completely before handing the lead shot to the storekeeper. What became of the Chinese digger is not known. He was never arrested for the crime and as a ship sailed shortly after for Hong Kong, it was believed he had returned home with his ill-gotten gains.

Christy Palmerston – the man versus the legend

by Bartle Frere

(Adapted from the Townsville Daily Bulletin, 11th January, 1946. While the article paints Christie Palmerston as an heroic explorer with an unblemished character, he was actually quite a violent man who thought nothing of robbing white prospectors, and murdering both Chinese diggers and Aborigines when it suited him. But more on that later.)

In 1874 explorer James Venture Mulligan (who had discovered payable gold on the Palmer in 1873, and whose report led to the sensational rush) led another expedition from Cooktown to the Upper Mitchell River. He then discovered the St. George River, which he named in honour of the mining warden, and the McLeod River, which he named after a member of his prospecting party. Both these rivers are tributaries of the Mitchell. On this expedition explorer Mulligan was assisted by a young prospector named Christie Palmerston, who had been mining on the Palmer goldfield. This man was destined to play a very important part in the future development of the coastal district lying between Cooktown and Cardwell. Along this stretch of coast we now have the ports of Port Douglas, Cairns, Innisfail and Mourilyan Harbour, and the sugar mill areas of Mossman, Hambledon, Mulgrave, Babinda, Goondi, Mourilyan, South Johnstone and Tully. Many of the original tracks leading from the Daintree, Mossman, Barron, Mulgrave, Russell, North Johnstone, South Johnstone and Tully rivers to inland centres such at Thornborough, Coolgarra and Herberton, were explored by Palmerston. The East Palmerston and West Palmerston areas, lying west of Innisfail, on the Palmerston Highway to Millaa Millaa and Ravenshoe, commemorate the name of this remarkable man.

To obtain some reliable description of the dense jungle country explored by Palmerston during this period and lying between the Daintree River, on the north, and the Tully River on the south, we will refer to the narrative of explorer William Hann, after he had travelled to the head of The Daintree, in October, 1872. “At our feet,” stated Hann, “lay miles of thick and impenetrable scrub, covering ridges and gullies alike; to have ventured into it, with or without horses, would have been sheer madness, as the sea lay miles away, not even in sight. The prospect was worse than anything seen by us hitherto. Cape Tribulation and the country for miles around its base was a sea of scrub, which extended as far as our vision in a southerly direction. We turned away from the prospect with a dismal sensation of disappointment, as we had hopes that this was one way out, whereas, it proved a gate shutting us in more completely than ever. But still there was one other hope, and that was the road indicated by the natives, so we buoyed ourselves up for another trial, and returned to camp.”

On 12th October, 1872, Hann started early, accompanied by three companions with a native guide. Two or three miles to the south-east a site was selected for his camp. One of the party was sent back to bring up the expedition to this point and the others penetrated about six miles further to the south-east and got on a high hill.

“Our doom is sealed,” stated Hann. “All further progress south is debarred us, and the retreat to the westward has become imperative. It is now a case of personal safety. I saw at once how completely I was frustrated in my desire to reach the coast, which, if I had reached it, would have wrecked the expedition. From this eminence I had a view of the whole country beneath us. Towards the sea stretched miles of broken country, densely covered with scrub of an impenetrable character. To the south, the Dividing Range towered to an immense height, forbidding approach, and also covered with scrub, which seemed to spread over the whole country. The range ended abruptly over the sea, and as far as I could discern, maintained the same character south, as far as visible. There my last hope vanished, and I descended the hill with a feeling of disappointment exceeded by anything I had felt the previous day, when I found my first road was shut against me. I have struggled ahead, but to no purpose; all my endeavours have been frustrated by the completely impassable nature of the country for white men with horses.”

Hann had been informed by an old aboriginal through his native interpreter, that there was no possibility of reaching the sea – that they themselves reached it by canoes which came up saltwater creeks to within a few miles of their camp. The navigable channel thus indicated was the Daintree River.

Dr. R. L. Jack, formerly Government Geologist for Queensland, referring to this incident of Hann’s Expedition states: “It was by the grace of God that Hann had the wisdom to admit his defeat. Had he been endowed with the unbending pertinacity or obstinacy of Kennedy, he would have gone on at all risks to perish with his whole party.”

In the period 1873 to 1880 the Palmer country swarmed with bands of armed whites. Thousands of Chinese miners toiled for the alluvial gold in the river beds and gullies along the Palmer River and its tributaries, many of them in isolated camps or on stretches of the bush tracks such as Battle Camp or Hell’s Gates. Many were waylaid and robbed of their gold, which was carried in chamois leather pouches. As tons of gold were carried away from the Palmer and as an unascertained quantity was sent to the coast and taken to China by miners returning home, this would create a temptation amongst less fortunate and evil-minded tramps to acquire some wealth while it was being carried along the bush tracks from Palmerville to Laura, and thence to Cooktown. (Ed. Note: Palmerston openly declared his hatred for the Chinese early in the piece. In this he had an ally of virtually every European miner in the north).

After the conclusion of J. V. Mulligan’s expedition to the St. George and McLeod Rivers in 1874, Christie Palmerston discovered the Daintree Pass and from 1875 to 1885 he spent his time exploring the virgin country which was bounded on the north by the Daintree River, on the south by the Tully River, on the east by the Pacific coast, and on the west by the Hodgkinson, Thornborough and Herberton goldfields.

Pompo and Christie Palmerston

Palmerston was really a mystery man. No one appeared to know exactly who he was, nor whence he came, nor where he was going. Probably in the early days of the Palmer diggings, when miners rushed there from all the Australian colonies, as well as from New Zealand and other countries, people did not make any searching inquiries. But, when Palmerston had established his reputation as a ‘prince of pathfinders’ and had carried out most difficult exploration work from the Hodgkinson goldfield to the present site of Port Douglas, and on the country surrounding Herberton, as well as between Mourilyan Harbour and Coolgarra, then inhabitants in the settled districts began to interest themselves in his strange career. (Editor’s note: This article perpetuated the legend that Palmerston was an Englishman, the natural son of Viscount Palmerston, former Prime Minister of Great Britain, but the reality was Palmerston was born in Melbourne, the son of Casino Jerome Carandini, the 10th Marquis of Sarzano, and Marie Burgess, an Englishborn opera singer. Palmerston was baptised Cristofero Palmerston Carandini and this is the name he gives on his marriage registration in 1886, when he listed his father as Casino Carandini.) Palmerston arrived in Queensland about the time of the discovery of the Palmer goldfield. There is no evidence that the youthful Palmerston acquired any great wealth on the diggings, but his nomadic life there gave him a valuable knowledge of bushcraft and the mode of life amongst the blacks. This was to prove of great assistance to him when he cut himself off from all contact with the civilised world, and lived in the dense jungle on the banks of rivers such as the Mulgrave, Russell, North Johnstone, South Johnstone and Tully, without supplies of fresh beef, bread, tea, sugar, salt, milk, fruit, vegetables or other such articles of food which we regard as necessaries.

It has been stated that at the time Palmerston entered upon his exploration work, he was on the point of being questioned by the Maytown police regarding his movements and activities at Battle Camp, and Gates of Hell on the tracks leading from Endeavour Inlet to the diggings and that he was virtually a fugitive from justice.

With the frequent movements of diggers from the southern colonies to the mining fields of North Queensland (extending from the Fanning River to the Cape River, and later to the Gilbert and the Etheridge, thence south again to Ravenswood and Charters Towers, and finally northwards to the most sensational alluvial field of the lot, the Palmer River, in the Mitchell River country), is was perhaps inevitable that occasionally young men on the track, between the various newly discovered goldfields would be wrongly or even maliciously accused of some attempted highway robbery and other such offences. That said, in 1869 while working as a drover, Palmerston had been convicted of horse stealing and sentenced to two years in a Brisbane prison.

To get some perspective of this scattered auriferous country during the first 10 years of Townsville’s existence, we must bear in mind that in 1866, the year after Cleveland Bay (Townsville), had been proclaimed a port of entry, payable gold had been found at Keelbottom Creek, not from the Main Range, by two Peak Downs miners, Gibson and Seymour. These men took into the township of Dalrymple the first parcel of gold which had been offered for sale in North Queensland. Prior to that, W. A. Ross had discovered some gold near the Fanning River. His name is commemorated in Ross River, Ross Creek and Ross Island (very early name places in the Townsville district). To him is due the credit of the first successful prospector for gold in the northern division of Queensland.

Dalrymple, named after explorer George Elphinstone Dalrymple, was the principal inland township at that period. There were no railway lines in North Queensland then, and all roads from Bowen, Townsville, and Cardwell, on the coast to the large pastoral holdings and the newly discovered mining fields of the inland, converged on Dalrymple. This settlement was situated in the south west of the Burdekin River, about 75 miles from Townsville and 160 miles from Bowen. It had been settled shortly after Bowen (1861), and before Townsville (1864).

Palmerston photographed with Malays a short time before he contracted fever and died

After the discovery of payable gold at Keelbottom Creek in 1866, a rush set in from Bowen to the Star River Diggings, in the same locality. From these mining fields, Townsville began to receive gold exports and this assisted the progress of the new seaport on Cleveland Bay. Soon after the Star River gold was produced on the Cape, and also at Specimen Gully, and Gehan’s Flat (seven miles nearer Townsville). Very soon there was a rush of 3,000 men from the southern goldfields to the North Queensland fields. The miners of the Upper Cape River, 15 miles from the main camp, gradually moved north to the Gilbert River. In 1869 mining was commenced on the Gilbert Goldfield, in 1870 on the Ravenswood Goldfield, in 1872 on the Charters Towers Goldfield, and in 1873 on the Etheridge Goldfield and the Palmer Goldfield. There was no railway communication anywhere in the north. Supplies were delivered from the sea ports by horsedrawn wagons, or packhorses. The stretch of coastal country lying between Cardwell (Rockingham Bay) and Cooktown (on Endeavour Inlet), was a continuing mass of dense scrub, inhabited by wild blacks. In 1871 Admiral John Moresby (R.N.) then in command of Her Majesty’s cruiser Basilisk described the aboriginals in the coastal district north of Cardwell as follows: “Various tribes of Aborigines range about the vicinity and, not unnaturally, regard the white men who are rapidly dispossessing them of their homes as mortal enemies. They show this feeling by committing murders and outrages, and suffer terrible retaliation at the hands of our countrymen, who employ native troopers, commanded by white men, to hunt down and destroy the offenders.” When Palmerston entered this coastal belt, extending 200 miles from Cooktown to Cardwell, with a depth from the eastern coast to the goldfields in the hinterland of about 75 miles, he did not organise a party of botanists, geologists and zoologists, with carters, labourers and shepherds, as well as horses and carts, and with a flock of sheep for food, as explorer Kennedy had in 1848, when he set out from Rockingham Bay, near the present town of Tully. Palmerston kept coldly aloof from his fellow white men and lived in the scrub and jungle like a native. Leading this life he probably carried small medical supplies, maps and instruments, and relied on his own weapons for personal protection and on the jungle for his food, such as wild game, fish, wild fruits and nuts. He must have accustomed his stomach to the diet of the wild blacks, and he was certainly trusted by the natives, as they appear to have rendered him every assistance in his exploits, where they had previously offered violence and molestation to Kennedy and the other early arrivals in this coastal country. Palmerston had a deep knowledge of the Palmer River country leading towards the Bloomfield and Daintree Rivers.

Prior to this departure from the gold diggings, when officers of the Native Police sought to interview him, Palmerston would vanish out of sight and, by using the mountain passes then known to him in the scrub country, would travel across a district in two days, which the mounted police would spend a week in encirclement. At one stage of his career, Palmerston made his camp at Cedar Creek near the present site at Ravenshoe. From this base he could reach the head waters of the Tully River, which he could follow in an easterly direction to the coast near the present site of Tully Sugar Mill. He could also reach the head waters of the North and South Johnstone Rivers, either of which he could follow in an easterly direction towards the present site of Innisfail, at the confluence of these two rivers – a few miles from the Pacific coast – on to the Mourilyan Harbour. On the north, near the future site of Moomin, he could reach the head waters of the Wild River (the main head of the Herbert River, which flows south through the Ingham district to Hinchinbrook Channel) and he could also reach the head waters of the Walsh River, which flows west to the Mitchell River and the Gulf of Carpentaria, and at Moomin he would be near the head waters of the Barron River, which flows north to the present site of Biboohra and thence easterly by way of the Barron Falls to Trinity Bay, near Cairns.

Palmerston also established a camp at Palmerston Rocks, on the north side of Berner’s Creek, on the present highway named after him and leading from Innisfail to Millaa Millaa and Ravenshoe.

Palmerston’s daughter, Rosina Marie (Carandini) Vaughn-Smith (1889 – 1935) became an accomplished musician

When the agitation for railway communication between the Herberton goldfield and the Pacific coast was brought to the notice of the Queensland Government, he opened a track from Mourilyan Harbour to Coolgarra. He also lived in camp at the Russell River Diggings, Towalia Goldfield and Boonjie, and after displaying nuggets of gold obtained by him in these localities to the chairman and councillors of the Johnstone Shire Council – then Divisional Board – at Innisfail he undertook to guide prospectors through the jungle to the auriferous areas near Mt. Battle Frere. His sole companion on many of his hazardous undertakings was his faithful aboriginal boy, Pompey (correct spelling Pompo). (Editor’s note: This is the only mention of Pompo. Men who lived away from towns sometimes kidnapped aboriginal boys as servants, companions and/or for sexual servitude. Probably seeing a white man for the first time, young Pompo proved intelligent and resourceful. He quickly learned English and adapted to the alien lifestyle. Meanwhile, Palmerston learned from Pompo about traditional foods, medicines, language, and native tracks. Undoubtedly much of the credit given Palmerston as the ‘prince of pathfinders’ belonged to his uncredited companion, usually dismissed as ‘Palmerston’s black boy’). The Jordan Goldfield was opened by prospectors McNeil and Donaldson in 1897, but Palmerston had previously named Henrietta and Rosina Creeks, in honour or his relatives, many years before. During his long period of jungle dwelling Palmerston must have learned how to construct a mia mia (Editor’s note: No doubt Pompo had a hand in teaching him) from lawyer cane vines and branches of trees to shelter himself from the heavy tropical rains, as he does not appear to have carried any camp equipment, and he is certain to have learned the food value of snakes and grubs when supplies of scrub hens, scrub turkeys, fish, and eggs ran out. The blacks’ method of making fire by causing a friction from a rapidly revolving round length of hardwood, about half an inch in diameter and 18 inches long in a central hole of a flat piece of dry soft wood, had no doubt been carefully observed by him early in his Palmer days. He would require some substitute for his matches during the vicissitudes of a long sojourn in the dense tropical jungle. His journeys through the rain forests between the present sites of Innisfail and Millaa Millaa, and his passage across swiftly flowing mountain streams would soon diminish his supplies. He would also have acquired the art of trapping birds and fish, locating the eggs of scrub turkeys and scrub hens in their laying mounds, and robbing the wild bees of their honey in the forks of tall trees. It is probable that Palmerston carried very little money, as he could obtain rations in the few northern settlements on his infrequent visits there by trading his gold nuggets with the storekeepers. The Queensland Government at that period (1875-85) was faced with great pioneering difficulties in opening up this country of mountain, jungle and scrub situated more than 1,000 miles from the seat of Government (Brisbane). The value of this man with uncanny jungle instinct, was officially recognised and he was encouraged to search for suitable road and railway routes from the Thornborough and later the Herberton goldfields to suitable ports in the Pacific coast.

He discovered a track from the inaccessible tableland country to Mourilyan Harbour which in later years enabled cattle to be brought from the Evelyn Tableland to the Johnstone River, when the Hon. T. H. Fitzgerald built the first sugar mill in the Innisfail district in 1880. In the year 1876 the town of Cairns was founded on Trinity Inlet, as an outlet for the Hodgkinson Goldfield, but the access to that port proved difficult from the hinterland, even when two pack tracks (Smith’s and Douglas’s) had been cleared and £10,000 had been spent on the Thornborough Road from Smithfield to the Middle Crossing at Kuranda. In the month of April, 1877, reports were received that Palmerston had found a road to the coast at White Cliffs but no safe anchorage could be found. On 30th June, 1877, the S.S. Corea, in charge of Captain D. H. Owen, called at Island Point (now Port Douglas), with a party from Cooktown. They were met by a party from White Cliffs about nine miles south. In the month of September, 1877, this port was gazetted Port Douglas, in honour of the Premier of Queensland at that time (Hon. John Douglas, C.M.G. F.R. G.S.). On 1st December, 1877, Port Douglas was declared a port of entry, and a road was opened over the range to the Hodgkinson Goldfield. In the month of February, 1878, the Police Magistrate at Cairns was moved to Port Douglas and early in the year 1879, the Government Lands Office and the District Court were moved from Cairns to Port Douglas. The gold escort from the Hodgkinson had already been diverted to Port Douglas in October, 1878. The discovery of tin at Herberton in May, 1880, was speedily followed by the opening of a road there and in July, 1880, the work of explorer Palmerston in cutting through three miles of scrub at Martintown (now Tolga), made it possible to take loading through to Herberton from Port Douglas.

From this view of Palmerston’s exploration, it can be seen that his work was from 1875 to 1885 almost always that of the pathfinder, opening up tracks and short cuts through jungle and scrub, connecting one small settlement with another, and piercing deep into virgin country, which is now Australia’s richest sugar province. When he had completed his exploration north of Mourilyan Harbour, he accepted an appointment for similar work in southeast Asia by the Straits Development Company. Palmerston moved to Borneo and then Malaya where he contracted fever in the jungle and died at Kuala Pilah on 15th January, 1897. He was 46.

WOULD THE REAL CHRISTIE PALMERSTON PLEASE STAND UP

Palmerston joined the Palmer River gold rush of 1872-1874 but old timers on the field noted that while Palmerston never seemed to do any mining, he was always flush with gold and rumours abounded that he, along with his gang of aboriginal men, either murdered or beat up other miners for their gold. In 1880, Palmerston was again part of a private expedition led by James Venture Mulligan to search for gold at the heads of the King and Lukin rivers in northern Queensland. On the King River, Mulligan wrote about how Palmerston shot two aboriginal men and returned to camp with a stolen ‘little blackboy’. At night, they handcuffed the child to Pompo, Palmerston’s other ‘boy’, to prevent him from escaping. The expedition failed to find any significant signs of gold deposits. Towards the end of the 1880s on the Russell River field, as the field played out and was abandoned by European miners, Palmerston induced Chinese miners to come to the diggings by promising them certified amounts of gold per day and guaranteeing protection from aboriginal attack. He charged them £1 per head and the offer was taken up by 30 miners with a further 200 following soon after. The promises were hollow but then, as a standover man, with the backing of his armed aboriginal gang, he extorted money from the Chinese, prevented supplies from reaching the diggings so that he could charge exorbitant prices for meat, and effectively imprisoned the Chinese diggers by beating up any miner who attempted to leave the field. During the 1880s, large parts of coastal far North Queensland were still covered in dense rainforest. Palmerston boasted of shooting a large number of Aborigines in Mamu territory. According to his diary of the Russell River expedition, in the early hours of the morning of 8th of September 1886, Palmerston and his aboriginal bearers from the neighbouring tribe tracked a group of aboriginal people to a cockatoo bora ground on the western bank of the upper Mulgrave River. Just after dawn, Palmerston and his men opened fire from three sides, the river being on the fourth side. Palmerston wrote that afterwards he reduced “heaps of war implements to ashes” and took two young boys as captives but the boys escaped during the night, “shackles and all”. In 1886, possibly around the 22nd July, Palmerston allegedly raped and murdered an aboriginal woman, on the South Johnstone River. Six months later on 6th December, 1886, he married Teresa Rooney at St Joseph’s Church, Townsville. They had one daughter, Rosina, in 1889, but Palmerston abandoned both of them in 1890 when he left Australia for Borneo and Malaya, never to return.

A Coober Pedy opal gouger remembers

by the late J.E. Grund

It was 15th September, 1946, when a letter arrived from my brother, Max, who was at the Coober Pedy opal fields. He suggested I should take his place on the claim, as the opal had cut out and he wanted a spell. Instructions were for me to borrow dad’s 1928 Buick and meet him at Port Augusta. I was to catch the East-West train that night and make my way to Coober Pedy via Kingoonya, and the weekly mail truck. These instructions were followed, and we exchanged positions at Port Augusta, my brother Max to return to the farm and I, to become an opal gouger. The rest of my journey was played by ear as I had no idea what lay ahead. I waited all that Sunday for the train to leave Port Augusta at 7pm, and I arrived at Kingoonya at 3am Monday morning. As the lights at the station went out, I realised I had no idea where the hotel, run by Jack Crosby, was situated. The stationmaster took me past the tennis court, and pointing at the Southern Cross, said, “If you go that way for about 400 yards, you’ll see the pub light.” The first 300 yards over bare soil and loose gibbers seemed to take a lifetime. There was no sign of a light, and I had thoughts of walking completely out of existence, disappearing God knows where into the darkness. It was with great relief that I saw the glimmer of the weak light, and found the pub. After peeping into a few occupied rooms, I found an empty bed and collapsed into it. Next morning when I apologised to Jack, he said everyone was expected to do just that. The mail truck from Kingoonya to Coober Pedy left on Saturday mornings so I was stuck at Kingoonya for a full week. The road from Port Augusta to Alice Springs had not been developed during the war as the rail system had sufficed for troop movements. The mail truck stopped at every station homestead, overnighted at Mount Eba, and continued to Coober Pedy the next day. I struck up quite a friendship with Jake Santing, the hunchback who operated the mail run. We had on board, in addition to supplies for Coober Pedy, two Aboriginal people and an opal buyer, Bill Francis. Bill’s father was a buyer of White Cliffs fame, and Bill was brought up the hard way, being made to buy opal when only 13 years of age.

Entrance to a Coober Pedy opal miner’s dugout back in the 1940s

THE MAIL TRUCK

The arrival of the mail truck was the weekly event at Coober Pedy. Arriving late Saturday evening, it was greeted by most of the 110 residents of the fields. Personal parcels were collected as the truck was unloaded and then it was around to Bill Oliver’s post office hill to collect the mail as soon as it was sorted. My partner, Walter Bartram, and son, Harry, met me and later we made our way to the Eight Mile where they had two army tents with the floors dug out a couple of feet for extra head room. The rear tent was for sleeping, and the front one for living and eating. Cooking was done in a camp oven out in the open, and a kero primus stove was used for casual cooking. This system was augmented by an old Adelaide No. 2 wood-stove later on, and Keith Wright’s father, old Pop, an ex-pastrycook, used to perform miracles with it. Provisions were kept in boxes and a safe. Beer was bought by the case, four dozen at a time, with each bottle in its own little straw jacket. The beer was placed in a pit and the straw jackets were wetted. The cold night air would settle into the hole, and the beer and the butter would remain cool. When two shafts were connected, beer would be placed in a wet bag as there was always a draught down the hole.

Today, most of the miners live in 5-star luxury compared with the pioneers of yesteryear

Alf Turner, of Mabel Creek, would kill a bullock and Saturday morning was the day he delivered it to Coober Pedy. He would cut it up as you asked for it and anything left over would be given to the Aboriginal people. This meat was supplemented by wild turkey and an occasional chunk of red ‘roo, cooked in the beef fat in the camp oven, and just as good as beef. We all took turns making bread, using dry yeast, and regardless of whether it rose or not, it was always eaten. We never worked on Saturday or Sunday. These days were used to clean up properly and wash our clothes. On Saturday afternoons the two 44-gallon drums were filled from the 250,000-gallon government underground tank, the water being raised by hand pump. Provisions were obtained from the underground store. Sometimes we visited friends, and if we had opal, arrangements were made for a buyer to pay a visit. The mail truck was always met, whether you had anything on it or not. It was a link with the world, Kingoonya being the nearest pub, down a two wheel-mark track 200 miles south. It was a very slow tortuous track threading its way through the mulga. We went for a trip to the crater, 27 miles north of Coober Pedy. Here a neighbour had picked up a buckboard load of large red and white floaters. The colour of this magnificent opal was still visible in the bleached and cracked specimens. On breaking them, they remained weathered to the very centre. The field had been worked 20 years before us, and costeans were all over the half-square mile sunken area. Clear blue potch was in evidence in most of them, and we dug some of it from the banks for doublet backs.

Coober Pedy, despite its harsh geographic location, is a modern, fully serviced town with a population of 1,762 according to the 2016 census

Never a trace of colour was found; evidently the opal level of the floaters had been completely eroded away. A mile or so from here, in the Stuart Ranges, is the most beautiful display of coloured eroded sandstone hills in the world, aptly named by my cousin, Vince Wake, as the Christmas Pudding, the Castle, and the Sleeping Camel. He had a pleasant two mile walk from one vantage viewing point to another. All shaft sinking and gouging was done by pick and shovel. I can recall only twice when a plug of gelignite was used. The handles of the pick and shovel were shortened to save space while sinking. None of the holes I worked was deeper than 12 feet, and with practice, the mullock could be landed on top with hardly any falling back. Footholes were cut in the side of the shaft and this method was used to considerable depths. A completed hole looked like an inverted mushroom as gouging extended six feet all round, then a new hole was sunk in line with the run.

KING STONES

The opal in the Bartram claim was mainly bar vertical running about three feet wide, making and breaking all the time. It continued for well over 120 yards. Occasionally the verticals ran octopus-like into blobs, and the king stones of these deposits were truly magnificent, weighing many ounces. This remarkable claim produced very little potch, and no ‘trace’ at all. A few side shoots missed originally were worked by later diggers. Opal was found at the Eight Mile when Aboriginal women saw it cast out by rabbits. This claim was worked by Barney Leonard, a station hand who married an Aboriginal woman. Below the Bartram open-cut, two claims were worked by King Billy John and his kinfolk. Other successful claims were worked by Frank Hillman, Levi Robins, Keith and Pop Wright, and Bert Wilson and his family. In total about 10 of the claims were successful.

Bert Wilson, a true Australian bushman, overlanded from Queensland direct to Coober Pedy in an army 4 x 4 truck. Before reaching his destination, a tyre gave out completely, so Bert laboriously stuffed the casing with cane grass and continued his journey. He then walked the last eight miles to the new field, finishing with his boots in his hand as rain had prevented any movement of vehicles. The opal used to run horizontally at about the ten-foot level, and in places inclined at about 45 degrees to the surface. The opal I eventually found surfaced in this manner. Sick of finding nothing, I decided I was picking the easy places, so I started in an ornery crab hole covered with spear grass and old man salt bush. It was also covered with the grey billy jasper common to Coober Pedy. While trying to penetrate the hard, brick-red crust which capped the kopi, my pick bounced off a potch vertical two inches thick. Alongside it was the true red opal, and next to that, the blue-green vertical. When this small run cut out 20 yards later, at a depth of ten feet, I broke into Walter Bartram’s prospect hole. He had missed the trace by less than an inch.

DYSENTRY

Our camp, along with the rest of the field, had been decimated by a type of tropical dysentery and, unable to throw it off, Mr Bartram had been flown to Adelaide via Mount Eba Aerial Service. The Flying Doctor Service provided us with the new drug, Sulphaguanadine, which eventually slowed us down to a walk again.

Waiting for the bank to open, c.1935

I am not superstitious, but I believe in coincidence. A big, green praying mantis had taken over our tent, and each day he would be over somebody’s bed. That person would come home with his little opal bag full. The day I found my strike I tipped it out of my boot. I had long since given up carrying an opal bag, and having nothing to put the opal in, I filled up my boots. About three weeks or so later, after my mates had gone home for Christmas on the day that I broke into Pop Bartram’s hole, I found the mantis dead, crushed under my blankets. I had also found my last stone. Opal buyers of those days were Phil Sherman, father of Greg; Harold Brady, a gold blender who suffered continuously from stomach ulcers; and Leo Boygan, an American from 48th Street, New York, who brought with him £200 in twoshilling pieces to trade with the Aboriginal people.

Old Tom Brady, Harold’s uncle, was the pick of them all. Trained at White Cliffs, he always wore a tie. He would sit at the top of our shallow holes, sucking on a roll-your-own and spitting occasionally. The spittle would always land on his tie and drip off the bottom. He would carry anything up to £20,000 in King George V ten-pound notes stuffed inside his shirt, held there only by his trouser belt. He had no fear of being robbed, and no one ever tried. Tom would get the Aboriginal people to throw their stones up and he would throw them down the money. When he was sick with the dysentery, I nursed him in our tent and stuffed our valuable sulphur drugs down his gullet. Tom died in his Adelaide home in 1952, an old man. His overseas contacts were taken over by Vince Wake, author of The Opal Men. There is nothing like success to make one contemptuous of money. Soon are forgotten the weeks and months of failure when opal rolls in at ‘X’ thousands a day.

Why they dig at Coober Pedy

Kiandra – unique in Australia’s gold rush history

by Wal Ellison

Kiandra would have a lot to brag about if it still existed. For the short time it flourished, it was a rich gold producer; it was the highest and coldest of our goldfields and reportedly the birthplace of skiing in Australia; it was the site of a unique transport enterprise; and it was where one of the most outrageous Gold Commissioners of the 19th century committed his dastardly deeds. As I said, a lot to brag about if it still existed. But it ceased to exist in a physical sense in the 1980s when the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service (referred to in many rural areas as the National Pests and Wildfire Service), committed its own dastardly deed. They, the bureaucratic pencil pushers in the city, took their snouts out of the public trough long enough to have one of their meetings. They decided Kiandra didn’t serve any real purpose and therefore needed to be torn down. Despite the inevitable uproar from the local communities and elements of the media, those bureaucrats have never, to this day, satisfactorily explained why they did it. They just roared in with the heavy machinery and ripped the soul out of the place. They left some signs and an information board where an historic town had once stood, so I suppose they figured that was a fair swap. What used to be a thriving gold town but is now a mostly barren locality, Kiandra lies about midway between Tumut and Cooma along the Snowy Mountains Highway, about 90km from either one. From both directions the approaches to Kiandra take the traveller through some of the most breathtaking country in Australia. Originally called Giandarra, meaning ‘sharp stone’, by the local Aboriginal people, the first European name was Gibson’s Plains after an early settler, Dr Gibson, who lived in the area around 1839.

The first town map of Kiandra

The discovery of gold came about by chance and not because someone recognised the land as likely gold country and started digging for it. Initially there wasn’t any drama or excitement, just a couple of cattle men bringing their stock up for a bit of high-country grazing as the weather warmed up towards the end of 1859. David and James Pollock had been coming up every year, but this time they found payable gold in what became known as Pollock’s Gully and the rush was on. The gold would prove to be mainly coarse alluvial with many “good sized lumps” found. Within six months more than 10,000 hopefuls had arrived from all over the world. A rudimentary timber village sprang up on what was then known as the Snowy River Diggings, the present Eucumbene River being known as the Snowy River back then. Inevitably, bushrangers and other vultures were attracted to the district by the stories of rich pickings and it became so lawless that for a time the area was known as Mount Rascal. By March of 1860, the bushrangers were a secondary concern as the diggings became a place where many would battle to survive against the bitter cold, the snow, the mud and the freezing slush as that first cruel winter set in. Some had had the foresight to build simple wooden dwellings, but many survived as best they could in canvas tents.

The rush was frantic but relatively shortlived. Within two years most of those first hopefuls had moved on to the numerous other goldfields opening up throughout NSW and Victoria. One of the main reasons for the rush petering out was the local climate in Kiandra. Anywhere else in the country, if conditions were too wet, too dry, too hot or too steep, it simply meant a digger could leave and go somewhere else. But if a heavy snow fall hit Kiandra and closed the track, that’s where you stayed. The harsh reality was that you either survived the winter in place, or you didn’t. The first town map, drawn in 1862 by surveyer, Thomas Evans, a couple of years after the first main rush, shows quite a bustling setup for such a remote and hard-to-get-to place. The map shows the locations of eight licensed pubs, at least 21 other named businesses, the post office, the ‘Alpine Pioneer’ newspaper, the hospital, two independent doctors, the police barracks and the Gold Commissioner’s quarters. It also shows that banks haven’t changed in that they’ve always been overly greedy. Six banks are shown on the town plan, and three of them have other business enterprises in addition to the banking. Several buildings just have the name of whoever lived there without indicating whether there was also a business operating at the same address, and some buildings are simply identified as ‘Diggers Hut’ with no name. In the winter of 1861, Scandinavian miners introduced ‘snow-shoeing’ or skiing to the region but many of the other diggers came from parts of the world where skiing was well established. Although we now see skiing as a sport or a pastime, in those days it was just a practical means of travelling over snow-covered terrain. So, even though some people make the outlandish and completely false claim that skiing was invented at Kiandra, it might well be the place where skiing purely for fun had a start. The miners were in the main fit and healthy people, there was nowhere else to go on the skis, the severe weather meant working on the diggings was often curtailed, so they figured they may as well have some fun.

This image from a glass plate negative entitled ‘Post Office, Kiandra’ shows a weatherboard cottage built in 1900 as a post and telegraph office in Kiandra. It closed in 1969 and was demolished

In common with just about every other goldfield throughout Australia, Kiandra had a community of Chinese, about seven hundred at most. They had arrived with every intention of gold mining, and this they did with some success until that first dreadful winter of 1860 arrived. As the conditions worsened, so the digging became more arduous and less productive. By mid-winter the goldfield was at a virtual standstill, fully snowed in, and it was the severity of that winter which led to the formation of a transport company unique to Kiandra.

The Celestial Carrying Company came into being after some local European businessmen decided that the good news story of Kiandra needed to be spread further afield. The newspaper covering the general district was The Alpine Pioneer and Kiandra Advertiser, published by Thomas Garrett, and it was decided that it would be a good idea to have a branch operation of the newspaper based in Kiandra. The local businessmen in question, Messrs Templeton, Wilson and Cook, hoped to get it established and make some money out of the enterprise but the weather wasn’t on their side. The Braidwood Observer and Miners Advocate reported on 11th August, 1860, that the printing presses for the newspaper couldn’t get through to Kiandra from Russell’s station. The drays couldn’t get up the blocked tracks which covered a distance of about 20km. The paper said the machinery was ‘twice locked in by the snow in endeavouring to get from Russell’s to Kiandra, and had been sixteen days in getting six miles.’ The problem was the load weights on the drays carrying the equipment and supplies. The loads would have to be broken down into smaller lots.

It was well known that the Chinese weren’t afraid of hard physical labour, so Templeton, Wilson and Cook established the Celestial Carrying Company and staffed it using the out-of-work Chinese miners. The loads would be broken down and carried on the backs of individual men. The first priority would be getting the printing machinery up to Kiandra. The Braidwood paper reported that ‘fifty Chinamen were engaged for this job, the drays were got at with considerable difficulty, and the entire loading, weighing 4,400lbs, was carried a distance of fourteen miles though snow, and over very broken country in about ten hours.’ This meant that the men first had to fight their way through more than 20km of steep, broken, snow-covered terrain to get to the drays, and when they got there, unload everything, break it down into individual man-sized loads, and then carry it back. Each man carried an average of about 40kg on the way back and completed the journey in about 10 hours. By any measure this was a remarkable effort.

After the success of this first transportation venture, the Celestial Carrying Company grew. The Chinese were often living on the edge of starvation, earning nothing because the diggings couldn’t be worked, so the work was financially good for them, and Kiandra could get the supplies it desperately needed. The Celestial Carrying Company hired 200 Chinese carriers at £2 each per week, set up a sort of halfway base between Russell’s station and Kiandra, and started bringing all sorts of goods in, charging by the ton. By reverting to the use of manpower rather than relying on a large cart pulled by horses, Kiandra was able to carry on. There was even a proposal to expand the operation as far as Merimbula and Eden, with appropriate way stations but I’m not sure this enterprise got off the ground. The story of Kiandra’s early days would not be complete without mention of the quite shocking conduct of Assistant Gold Commissioner Frederick Cooper of the Kiandra and Crack-Them-Back (Thredbo) Goldfields. Until researching this story, I’d always been of the belief that the Gold Commissioners were senior civil servants appointed to the position by the Crown. Somewhere around the level of a senior police officer and carrying the same status and responsibility. The reality was very different. As a brief aside, in the June 2020 edition of this magazine there was an excellent story about the Queensland gold escort and a Gold Commissioner found guilty of the murder of two of his own men. So, it’s clear these guys weren’t always the paragons of propriety and justice I’d always imagined.

Almost from the time he was appointed a Sub-Commissioner in 1860, Cooper was involved in outrageous scandals concerning his behaviour. The following extract from an early report serves to illustrate just how far from the expected behaviour of a man of his standing he was wont to stray. This took place at the Crack-Them-Back diggings. The report reads: ‘Mr Sub-Commissioner Cooper, on or in January 1860, walked through the diggings in a state of drunken nudity, speeching to a drunken mob, after having shouted for some thirty to five and thirty pounds worth of champagne, which he subsequently refused paying for, threatening to fine Rawson for sly-grog selling in case he was requested to pay, and instructing the police so to do’. Cooper came from a very well-to-do Sydney family, and his pretty useless life as a young man possibly led them to try to find him a government position, where being useless was often a virtue. In fact that’s something that hasn’t changed in the best part of 200 years – dolts and wastrels still gravitate towards politics and public service. Cooper resigned his seat in the NSW parliament when he was 26, probably due to a scandal involving his drinking and outrageous behavior. Before this he had been the first undergraduate to be expelled from Sydney University. His family were probably relieved when the fool was packed off to the goldfields but the very fact such a useless person could be appointed to what was a pretty important position, highlights the very real problem that existed on many goldfields. Initially I thought that Cooper would be an anomaly, that he’d be the one bad apple in the barrel, but the more research I did, the more I realised that the Commissioners, as a group, were a pretty dodgy bunch, and that almost the entire barrel was rotten. Even though gold was providing the various levels of government with huge revenues, gold mining was still seen as some sort of rough or unseemly trade, not a real profession. Because of the grubby image it had, the administration of the gold mining industry didn’t appeal to serious and experienced civil servants. It wasn’t seen as being suitable for a ‘gentleman’. This led to positions such as the Gold Commissioner being filled by less than properly qualified people. Another letter published in the Alpine Pioneer on 12th October, 1860, makes this very point. In part it reads as follows: ‘Another crying evil connected with the goldfields is the appointment, by the Government, of Commissioners whose incapacity is the subject of general remark among the miners. Experience seems to be regarded by the Government as of no weight in selecting Commissioners...They appear to have been selected without any test of ability for this situation.’

For the most part, the Commissioners were young and inexperienced, and it seems the main requirement for the position was that they come from a ‘good family’. They were paid well, about £700 a year, and generally lived in selfindulgent comfort. One Commissioner bragged, ‘Those were snug times! We had handsome salaries, all our expenses paid, as many servants as we pleased, all paid for. Nothing to do but order whatever we choose, and send in the accounts’. The Commissioners often designed their own uniforms according to reports of the time, though many just used a police uniform, adding to the confusion. A writer at the time describes them as: ‘Petty tyrants encased in musical comedy uniforms. Young men for the most part they were, a-glitter with buttons and braid and eating their heads off at the expense of a community ill fitted to subsidise such parasites’. I don’t doubt that there were honest and hardworking Gold Commissioners here and there, men who sincerely tried to bring proper organisation and decency to what was a relatively chaotic and brutish industry, but unfortunately, it appears they were in the minority. All of this barely scratches the surface of Kiandra’s past. It’s a place with a rich and fascinating history, and I really do recommend further reading about Kiandra and the rest of our ‘high country’. If possible, go there, take in the emptiness, and listen to the endless whisper of the wind. You’ll hear voices that will tell the story far better than I ever could.

Note: Much of the information about Kiandra and its fascinating and very unusual history, came from the excellent website of the Kiandra Historical Society. Do yourself a favour and check out the site for yourself. I contacted Hugh Capel of the Society and he kindly gave me permission to use material from their website for this article.

Women on the goldfields

by Mark Thurtell

While a lot has been written about the trials and tribulations of men on the Australian goldfields, very little has been said about the many hardships faced by the women who accompanied their husbands in the quest for gold. Fortunately, some women kept a day-today diary of life and events on the diggings in the 1850s, and one in particular, an English lass by the name of Ellen Clacy, gives us a birdseye view of what it was like. She writes that while her brother and his friends walked to the Bendigo diggings, she rode on the dray they had purchased which contained all the provisions needed for their adventure. The vehicle was laden with food, camp ovens, tents, cooking utensils, tin plates, pannikins, blankets, and opossum rugs, and she made the trip walled in by canvas and tent poles, leaning against a bag of flour, and with her feet resting on a large cheese. Ellen also states that she was dressed in a common dark blue serge, a waterproof coat and wore a wide-a-wake hat (this was a soft widebrimmed low-crown felt hat). On their arrival at the diggings she describes hearing the rattle of cradles as they swayed to and fro, the sounds of picks and shovels, and the hum of thousands of voices. She mentions the stores, noting that they stocked everything, including East Indian pickles, ankle jack-boots, baby caps, sugar candy, cradles, potted anchovies, needles, and picks, while at one store a pair of herrings lay dripping into a bag of sugar. Ellen noted that an average digger’s tent was a dreary place, the only contents being bedding, which lay on the dirt floor, and his table, which was a block of wood on top of a box. From this primitive piece of furniture, a miner ate his meals of mutton, damper and tea. However, if a miner was lucky enough to have his wife with him, she would make it more comfortable by placing dry sacking or pieces of carpet on the ground, the beds would have had sheets and blankets, and some women kept a pet cockatoo chained to a perch outside their tent so as to have some company while the husband was working their gold claim. Coming to terms with life on the goldfields was far from easy, and while some woman became frightened and angry with the outcome, leading to fights and quarrels with their partners, most settled down with a grin and-bear-it attitude.

A sly grog shop on the diggings

DANGERS ON THE DIGGINGS

An eyewitness account sheds light on a typical night on the diggings: “Imagine some hundreds of revolvers almost simultaneously fired. There was murder here, murder there, revolvers cracking, blunderbusses bombing, rifles going off, balls whistling, one man groaning with a broken leg, another shouting because he couldn’t find the way to his hole, and a third equally vociferous because he has tumbled into one.” There was an abundance of sly grog shanties on the diggings, where an unwary miner might be served a spiked drink, and wake up with his hard-earned gold gone from his pockets. A lot of these illegal dens were thinly disguised as coffee tents but the real source of income came from the business of selling grog. The grog was sometimes watered down and adulterated with herbs or even tobacco to give it a stronger taste to the unsuspecting patron. Ellen writes of a typical female serving grog at a sly grog tent, saying “A dirty, gaudy coloured dress hung unfastened about her shoulders, coarse black hair unbrushed, uncombed, dangled about her face, over which her evil habits had spread a genuine Bacchanalian glow.” Because the crinoline dress was the fashion from the 1850s to the late 1860s, women wore them on the diggings. These were large bell-shaped dresses supported by a cage of spring steel hoops and petticoats, and they were a most dangerous item in themselves. Many women often suffered horrible injuries, and some even died, when these dresses caught fire while they were simply stoking the camp fire or cooking a meal. An example of just such a disaster occurred in June, 1862. A Mrs Steele, the wife of the bootmaker at Rutherglen, was cooking with a camp oven when she made the mistake of turning around and letting her crinoline dress come in contact with the oven. The material caught fire and in a short time she was engulfed in flames. Alerted by her screams, her husband and two other men ran to her aid and did their upmost to smother the flames, sustaining severe burns in the process. But they were too late to stop the poor woman being roasted about her legs and lower body. A doctor was sent for and medical aid administered, but to no avail. According to the newspaper report at the time, Mrs Steele “lingered in great agony until four o’clock the next morning when death mercifully put an end to her suffering.”

ANGELS ON THE DIGGINGS

One prospector with a reporter’s interest in women on the goldfields, was Mark Hammond, who mined for gold at Forbes in 1861-62. He writes about the women who worked in the saloons and states that “The hotels with dancing saloons employed girls. The dancing saloon in such places was every night decorated out like a first-class ballroom, some of the girls appearing in ball dresses as rich and beautiful as money could procure. In short, the women so engaged were as a general rule of good appearance, well behaved, handsomely dressed, and for their services were well paid by the proprietor. “Let us take a peep into one of those first-class saloons during the dancing of a set of quadrilles. The ladies are beautifully dressed, but who are their partners? Not one well-dressed gentleman is to be seen. They are mostly miners in their moleskins. Some are young squatters wearing riding boots and breeches. We as miners on the field understand this, but as a stranger, would hardly think that the man making his fortune would be found dancing with these girls in his clay-coloured moleskins and a Crimean shirt with a coloured sash around his waist, wearing polished or patent boots with a silk handkerchief around his neck.”

Hammond also writes that even though he was a stranger, a woman came to his aid while he was on his way back to Lambing Flat from Forbes. It appears he was suffering from an abscess in one ear and he says, “That evening as I lay down under one of the wagons, an administering angel came to where she heard me moaning. She had a look at me and found the whole side of my head was swollen to a fearful extent. The abscess had broken several times but always appeared to get worse as it came on again. The angel was the good woman who had driven one of the teams all day. She went to her own wagon and brought a little oil and bluestone. She fed a drop into my ear, then she gave me some pills and left. By the next night the pain had ceased and the swelling had almost disappeared. That woman’s kindness did not cost her much, but it won in me a lasting respect which in memory will never be forgotten.” Historian are indebted to another woman who kept quite a meticulous record of what life was like on the Victorian goldfields during the 1850s and ’60s. Her name was Emily (Fillan) Skinner (c1832-1890) who left her middle-class London family in 1854 and courageously sailed, unchaperoned, as an unassisted immigrant, halfway around the world to Melbourne, to be reunited with and marry her finance, William Elliott Skinner, with whom she had previously worked in service. She showed her resourcefulness by quickly befriending a married female cabin companion, to protect her middleclass respectability.

Carte-de-Visite photograph by Richards of Ballarat of a well-dressed woman of the 1850s

When Emily arrived in Melbourne, William had already been moderately successful at the Forest Creek (or Castlemaine) goldfield but was then working in the retail trade. However, four months after their marriage, he decided to try his luck again, this time on the Ovens gold fields, leaving Emily in Melbourne. In May 1855, despite her awareness of stories of murderers, bushrangers and lawlessness in the bush, Emily showed great pluck and determination by traveling alone to Beechworth (or Spring Creek) to join her husband. She was five months pregnant and took the 8-day trip with 11 other passengers, over rough jolting roads, in a light American wagon. The Skinners made several subsequent moves around the Ovens goldfields where they lived for 12 years. In early 1856, they were on the Woolshed before returning to Spring Creek in 1857. They spent eight years in the Buckland Valley from 1859 and then moved back to Beechworth at the end of 1867. These frequent moves were not exceptional for goldminers’ families and the fact that Emily had nine children from 1855 until l880, three of whom did not survive did to adulthood, was also unremarkable. Her variety of homes on the diggings – a bark hut at Spring Creek; green baize-lined tent at the Woolshed; and wooden houses at Spring Creek, Beechworth and the Buckland Valley, as well as the frequent establishment of a garden – were also quite usual. Many women on the goldfields supplemented the family’s variable mining income by washing, ironing, sewing clothes or cooking meals for unpartnered gold diggers. What was remarkable about Emily is that she used her literary skills to write a journal during her sea voyage to Australia and later wrote a manuscript about life on the Ovens goldfields. These were not published but kept, copied and passed down to her descendants for more than 100 years, until Dr Edward Duyker, an academic, researched Emily’s life and in 1995 edited and published her handwritten manuscript. In her shipboard journal, Emily identified fellow passengers by name. Duyker used this to discover the identity of the pseudonyms used for her goldfields manuscript characters. By disguising the identity of her characters, using pseudonyms, Emily could be absolutely frank, accepting, warm and compassionate in her writings, which are matter of fact, like those of working-class women and non-judgmental, as well as empathetic, unlike the critical writings of superior middle-class authoresses.

Her writings are devoid of ethnic or religious prejudice. Her story is free of the verbal contortions designed to maintain the writer’s respectability “as a lady”. She sometimes does not mention events, likely to compromise respectability and so avoids perpetuating the double sexual moral standard of the time. So, she omitted any mention of her marriage to William three weeks after her arrival in Melbourne, when they both lived in the new suburb of Collingwood. She also ignored the possibility of the girls, working in goldfields hotels and restaurants who attended the balls as miners’ companions, being prostitutes. But Emily felt safe in revealing that while on route to Spring Creek in 1856, in one small fully-booked hotel where she was forced to share a room with two fellow female passengers, she had screamed with fright when she woke to find a strange man undressing in her room. In 1998, Joy Hooton included a part of Emily Skinner’s memoirs in her collection of Australian autobiographical writings titled Australian Lives. Emily’s story of her and William simultaneously contracting a fever at the Woolshed diggings and Emily hovering close to death for weeks, while their first-born baby son died and was buried in an unmarked grave by strangers, is judged to be “one of the most graphic and reflective of goldfields narratives”. Emily claimed that her experiences on the goldfields were those of hundreds of miner’s wives. However, women and their experiences were virtually invisible on the masculine goldfields, the predominant male view being that it was not an appropriate place for respectable women. Emily’s presence and actions and those of other women on the goldfields, challenged this.

After William’s retirement, the Skinner’s gypsy life continued when, in 1888, they went to Melbourne to live on William’s government pension, first sharing a house in Brunswick West and then in Sydney Road where 58-year-old Emily died in March 1890 as a result of a stroke. Her death certificate describes her as a “housewife” however she was much more than that. She was a spirited, intelligent, determined, hard-working woman who endured illness, poverty, loneliness, great personal loss and sorrow as well as hard domestic labour. She also left an engaging, authentic, first-hand account of life for a woman on the Ovens goldfields during the goldrush era. She was buried in the Church of England section of the Coburg cemetery in Melbourne. For other women, life amidst the isolated, male-dominated goldfields proved a lonely, alienating experience. Elizabeth Skinner, who suffered as a result of her husband’s unsuccessful pursuit of gold, recalled being lonely and sick and fainting while attending to her children, and wrote: ‘How one longed for mothers and sisters at such times and envied the poorest women at home who in sickness generally have some relative near.’ Copies of the book A Woman on the Goldfields. Recollections of Emily Skinner 1854-1878, edited by Dr Edward Duyker, are readily available online.

Emily Skinner was a remarkable woman of her age

The legend of The Ragged Thirteen

Hollywood has given us the Fantastic Four, the Magnificent Seven, the Hateful Eight and Ocean’s Eleven through Thirteen – all of them fanciful inventions. But more than 150 years ago the gold rush to the Kimberley gave rise to a band of men known as the Ragged Thirteen, and they were as real as it gets.

(Adapted from the Daily Mercury, Mackay, Qld., 20th December, 1938)

The most elusive of all legends in the north is that of the Ragged Thirteen, whose fame extended over the Northern Territory and Queensland and the West. Their story has taken me seven years to verify (writes Ernestine Hill in the Sydney Morning Herald). Thanks to the good offices and the good memory of a Territory historian who knew the leader well, I can now dispel the mists of mystery and romance in the clear light of truth. It was in 1856 that the Kimberley rush set in. Ballarat and Bendigo were cities built on subterranean halls of gold, and the tattered battalions that found them were out round the continent looking for another. They were to find it – Kalgoorlie in the west – but it was 10,000 miles and 40 years to rainbow’s end.

Many a reef of wealth and many a wildcat had called them northward, when a cry of triumph came from a citadel of the blacks in the far north west. Hall and Slattery, two lone prospectors, panning out on the Elvira River, had washed 200 ounces in a week. Not a spectacular find, but, strangely enough, it started a raging epidemic of gold fever. (Ed. On Christmas Day, 1885, Charlie Hall found a huge 870-gram (28-troy-ounce) gold nugget at a site that would eventually be named after him – Hall’s Creek). A motley crowd of some 15,000 crusaders set out from all over Australia, from New Zealand, and California and the Yukon. Three thousand miles across the desert, 6,000 miles round the coast, they rode, and sailed, and pushed their hand-carts, facing death every mile of the way by hunger, by thirst, by spears. Some of them were years on the trail. Too many found “a goldmine in the sky”.

They arrived at last – those who did arrive – at Fata Morgana in the ranges, and there was nothing else but ranges there. The Hall’s Creek goldfield was worked out in less than three months. The first on the field, it seemed, in their broken cradles, had stripped the land bare of its yellow treasure. Knights-errant or highwaymen – you will hear them described as either or both in the north – the Ragged Thirteen were only 13 of thousands, who met in a chance fellowship, shared the road where there was no road, and finally drifted away from each other. Some of the 13 had travelled to Hall’s Creek from Queensland; some had come from South Australia and the Centre. The two groups came together at Abraham’s Billabong on the Roper River. Men from all the eastern States, an Englishman, an Irishman, and a Scotsman, a runaway sailor, a “cocky” farmer, and an old convict – they were the usual band of “mates” that rides in any day to any goldfield, camps on the creek, and fades away forgotten. They could not know that their memory would live in history, but posterity is ever capricious, and chooses its own immortals.

To haggle about the true identity of men such as Will Scarlett, Little John, and Tom the Tinker is to nibble away the bay-leaves of romance, but there is still unending controversy in the top half of Australia regarding the personnel of this heroic band of scallywags. I myself have met at least three dozen men who claimed to have ridden with the Ragged Thirteen but in actual fact, all are dead, and here is the list, as supplied by the leader himself. He was Tom Nugent, later the founder of Banka Banka station, 40 miles above Tennant Creek on the Great North Road, that soon, in its turn, will be a little town. The others were Hughie Campbell, who had left his sailing ship at Port Augusta, and set his course due north across the sand; “Sandy Myrtle” McDonald, from Farina, South Australia, forsaking the gold of fleeces for the gold of earth; “Wonoka Jack” Brown, and George Brown, his brother, of Hawker; Jack Dalley, a farmer of Terowie; “New England Jack” Woods; “Larrikin Bill” Smith, one of Major Colles’s “orphans” from his settlement on the Norman River, North Queensland; Jim Carmody, a New Zealander, brother-in-law of Black Jack Reid, the “Maori Smuggler” of Borroloola; Bob Anderson, founder of Tobermorey station, on the Queensland border; Jimmy Woodford; Jim Fitzgerald, and, last and least, Tommy the Rag.

From Renner Springs, on the Overland Telegraph line, they travelled north together. Just at this time the cattlemen were stocking up that spare million square miles “on the outside” of civilisation, and the 13 certainly brought bad luck to them. Cattlemen are immune to gold fever. A reef, ounces rich, in their own horse paddock, excites little more than derision, and then, as now, they resented the rabble passing. Shepherds watched their flocks by night when “the Kimberley crowd” came along. It was “Bluey” Buchanan, the grand old pioneer of Wave Hill, who camped with them at Frew’s Ponds, tallied them up and told them they were the devil’s number. It was a cattleman named Cashman, looking for them with wrath in his eye, near the “blind tiger” sly grog at Katherine, who gave them their name. When asked which 13 he was looking for, the only name Cashman could remember was Tommy the Rag and so the devil’s dozen became the Ragged Thirteen. (Ed. Or that is at least one version of how they got their name. There are several and any one of them could be correct).

Above: Banka Banka homestead, 1900

But they already had a bad name. At Abraham’s Billabongs, where there was a shack and a fresh meat depot, they had found a beast on the gallows, tried to buy, beg, or borrow a porterhouse steak or two, and when they were refused, made off with the lot. After that, many a bullock on the hoof was fair game, and good eating in a hungry land, regardless of the brand. Men must live, and when they were challenged, they fought the case with fists – “Your best man to our best man, and if we lose, we pay.” Such was the law in the Territory then, and for a long time after.

From Katherine the ragged little regiment turned west for the border and the Ord – past Springvale, to which Alfred Giles had just brought up cattle and sheep 2,000 miles overland for Dr. Brown; past Chinaman’s billabongs; a glory of red lilies; across Vampire Creek and the King River, men and horses swimming a deep and perilous crossing; and the Sardine lagoons and the Flora Falls, where the blacks were “bad” indeed. No doubt they earned a rib roast when they got it. Two hundred miles from the last white outpost, they, at length, rode in to the first slab hut of Victoria River Downs, today the largest cattle run in the world. The manager, Lindsay Crawford, was out with the cattle and only the storekeeper, Lockhart, was at home. Tom Nugent rode up to the station and introduced himself as a potential squatter, looking at the country – which was, of course, technically true.

While Tom played cribbage with the storekeeper, the other 12 took a few slabs out of the side of the store, helped themselves to 6cwt of horseshoes, and made by moonlight for the Jasper Gorge, where the blacks were even worse. That was the only really black mark against them. Horseshoes were worth a king’s ransom, but the robbers were well away. At the Ord River they killed two or three bullocks, and smoked and salted them in the salt pan. So they came to Hall’s Creek, and did penance for their sins in “two years’ hard digging” for no wages, with never a glint of gold. After that they disbanded.

Some of them drifted down with the discoverers of the great goldfields of the West, and some of them drifted back to Queensland’s fields. Larrikin Jack Smith was one of the first in the golden hills of New Guinea; Jim Carmody was drowned in the Katherine River while fishing; New England Jack set out with a borrowed plant of horses and was never heard of again; while a fall from a horse cut short Bob Anderson’s life. Hughie Campbell developed a disease in which he could not perspire – a fatality in that country – and picked up yet another ship for Singapore and England. Jack Dalley became a leading townsman of Cloncurry and when eager, young reporters came for his reminiscences as a member of the Ragged Thirteen, he threatened them with a rifle; Sandy Myrtle ran a pub on the Arltunga goldfield in South Australia and too much of the good life that followed saw him grow fatter by the minute and his life shorter by the day. Tom Nugent, the captain, drove the first wagon from the Barkly Tablelands to Borroloola, opened the road to what was to be a port of the Gulf – and some day may be. His passenger on that occasion was a young naval officer, “bagging it”, as the bushmen say, for education and recreation. When they arrived at Borroloola, there was a letter awaiting that young naval officer, from the Admiralty, appointing him to command. He was later Admiral Creswell. Tom Nugent, as linesman for the telegraph, found a good little pocket of country between Tennant and Powell’s Creek, took up the title deeds from the Warramunga tribe, bought a mob of Herefords – and Banka Banka was on the map to stay. Today the travellers go by at the rate of 40 a day, but nothing passed for months on end in Tom Nugent’s time. When he died, he left the property to three Sydney nephews, who inherited an outpost among the wild blacks. The last of these nephews, Mr Paddy Ambrose, one of the best-known and best- hearted of station-owners of the Centre, has seen a pageant of progress in the past 10 years, on the Great North road from Adelaide to Darwin – but his quaint old homestead, and even the blacks about it, still cherish happy memories of Tom Nugent and the Ragged Thirteen.

THE LAST OF THE RAGGED THIRTEEN

The Forbes Advocate 9th August, 1929

The feats of cattle thieves of the west, with their half dozen or so head of cattle pale into significance with the thefts of one rustler, who has just died on a Northern Territory cattle station, aged 91. According to his own account, he had “lifted” 8,000 head in 10 years! He was a member of the “Ragged Thirteen” a collection of the biggest cattle thieves who ever levied tribute on the stations of Central Australia. Leaving Clermont in the early 80s this band raided every station on route to the Kimberley goldfields, in Western Australia. On the way they sold hundreds of head of station cattle and horses and then established themselves near Anthony’s Lagoon, where they bred from the stolen beasts, and sold the progeny, while the majority of the band took a big draft to the Kimberley goldfields and sold them. Near Anthony’s Lagoon, a main route to the gold fields, and 500 miles from the nearest police station, the gang set up a pub and butcher’s shop, and fairly raked in the coin from travellers, who were plentiful in those days. All the stock slaughtered were stolen from surrounding holdings, and when the squatters started to complain the gang offered to sell out for £1,000. The squatters refused, and sent word to police headquarters. Mounted troopers started out from Cloncurry, but the gang heard of their advent, burnt down the sly grog pub and the butcher’s shop and continued their operations elsewhere. Later, this particular gangster was given a stiff leg for the rest of his days, through being speared in a blacks’ camp during a squabble. Unable to ride, be had to give up cattle-duffing, and settle down for the last 35 years on an outstation in the Territory. He was the last survivor of the Ragged Thirteen.

Tall tales and true from The Ridge

By RW

I once spent eight months at Lightning Ridge supervising power line maintenance and found it a delightful and friendly place – provided you obeyed a few unwritten laws. The main ones were: 1. Don’t ask personal questions, and 2. Don’t move in uninvited. When I learned to open and close my mouth at the right times I was readily accepted, and some of the friends I made and the characters I met I will never forget.

Here are a few of the stories I heard during my time at The Ridge; most of them are true in every detail and one or two were ‘coloured in’ by the colourful character telling the story.

MY MATE DAVE

I became firm friends with a bloke called Dave. He was well into his senior years, but he would only admit to being 76 years young. Dave was a great yarn spinner and never told the same story twice, which is why he was keenly sought after by tourist companies to point out interesting features around the opal fields. Though some of the stories he told those tourists were nothing short of outrageous.

Dave was a survivalist, badly wounded in the Second World War, he lost half his stomach but this didn’t stop him getting about like a bloke half his age.

When a couple of yokels broke into Dave’s house (probably believing he had money or opals hidden somewhere) and found nothing they, hit him on the head with an axe!

“Bloody hell mate, you were lucky to survive that,” I said in disbelief.

“Yeah mate,” he said, “I suppose I was lucky. I had two axes on the wood heap and them silly bastards picked the blunt one.”

WHINGE AND WIN

Two mates arrived at the Ridge looking for a claim. They eventually acquired a lease that had been let go by the previous, owners who were two short blokes, each about five-foot-six in the old measurement. The new leaseholders were an odd couple, one was about five-foot-six and the other was at least six-foot-six. The drive in the claim was 10 metres long and suited the shorter of the two, but the tall bloke was always whinging because he had to bend his head all the way down to the work face. Shorty finally got sick of his mate’s constant complaining and said, “We’ll take a foot of dirt out of the floor and maybe that will shut you up.”

It did. They won £120,000 worth of opal from the floor.

THE LITTLE PILE OF STONES

A good friend of mine was lucky enough to hit the jackpot. He and a couple of his mates opened up a new field and the first shaft was a beauty. They had only driven about three metres when they took out a parcel of gemstones and I was privileged to be included in the celebrations. After a few bubblies with tinnie chasers, it was time to view the spoils.

A small plastic bag was produced and the contents tipped into the middle of the kitchen table. To me it was an anti- climax – I could have covered the lot with one hand.

My mate looked up and asked, “Whadya think of that lot?”

To which I replied, “To me it just looks like an ordinary pile of rocks.” Everyone went quiet and my mate said, “That little lot should cut about a $120,000.” By now readers will have correctly guessed that what I know about opal mining would fit inside the brain of a dust mite.

GETTING OUT QUICK

One of my favourite stories was told by a bloke I met several times. He lived “somewhere else” and when you asked him where (which you should never do at The Ridge) he would point in the general direction of “away”, but he visited the Ridge whenever he got the chance. He had spent many years in the area, shearing for tucker money then opal mining until the money ran out. Here is the story in his own words:

“Just after the war (WWII) I mated up with a pommy bloke who I met while I was working in a shearing shed. He didn’t seem a bad sort of cove, so I suggested we head to the Ridge and do a bit of gouging after the shed cut out.

“When we arrived on the fields there was a lot of talk about the Germans who had been on good opal but pulled out when the roof of the drive kept coming in. It was certainly too dangerous to work but my mate suggested we write to his dad who was a mining engineer back in England and ask his advice.

“Sure enough, back came the details of how to prop the roof to make it safe. We worked our little freckles off putting in those props and when we reckoned it was safe, we started to mine the face. I swear that mine had a jinx on it. We were onto a bit of nice colour when the roof came in again. We made it back past the props but the fall knocked the first three out.

“We gave it a miss for a couple of days and then went down for a look. My mate wouldn’t venture past the last prop so I went on to see what had happened. It looked like there was a large fault in the level and the roof was hanging suspended. I picked a couple of nice looking nobbies from the wall and was looking for more when my old mate yelled ‘Look out, she’s comin’ in again!’”

At this point I interrupted his story with “Shit, you would have had to get out of there in a hurry!”

“You’d better believe I did,” he replied. “I was thirty feet up the shaft before I realised the ladders were on the other side.”

THE NEW CHUM

Shortly after World War Two, a young bloke turned up at the Ridge with the rights to a claim that hadn’t been worked for years, and, to the best of local knowledge, wasn’t much good when it was being worked.

He camped on the claim, took a look down the mine and decided he didn’t have a clue what he was looking for. The lad had a bit of nous and he volunteered his labour for free to any miner who would take him on, provided they taught him about opal.

He worked for the old miners for a couple of months then started to work his own claim. In three weeks he won £50,000 worth of opal, sold the claim and was never seen at the Ridge again.

NEVER BORING

I once met a bloke at the Ridge who was a Pommy born in South Africa, educated in America, living in Australia, buying opals in Australia for a West German firm who flogged them to Russia. Cop that lot.

You could say the Ridge is a little bit different, but never, ever boring.

The Story of Paddy Hannan

As told by the man himself to J. W. Kirwin, M.L.C., President of the Legislative Council. (Adapted from the Western Argus, Kalgoorlie, 6th September, 1927)

Visitors to Kalgoorlie for the “Back to the Goldfields” fortnight will view with interest a pepper tree at the eastern end of Egan Street, near the Boulder railway line. The tree is protected by a small fence, on which there is a notification that it marks the spot where, in June, 1893, Paddy Hannan discovered gold. The discovery was the beginning of a goldfield that has produced to date some £100,000,000 worth of gold. It is a pity that a spot of such historic importance to Western Australia, and, in fact, to Australia, is not marked by some more lasting memorial than a pepper tree, the life of which is comparatively short. The tree was planted in the presence of Hannan on August 3, 1897 – four years and a couple of months after his discovery. The day before the planting I accompanied him when he pointed to the exact spot where the find was made. In the years that had intervened the appearance of the locality had, as he explained, considerably changed. Much of the country had been denuded of bush, streets had been cleared, and buildings erected, but he had the unerring instinct of a bushman. He surveyed the landscape carefully and deliberately walked about for a quarter of an hour, and seemed to have little or no difficulty in fixing the location of the find. Subsequently, we wandered through the gullies to the foot of Maritana Hill, and whilst viewing old camps and deserted alluvial workings, he talked of his great discovery – or rather, I asked questions that he answered. In appearance Hannan was under rather than over the average height, of medium build, with bright beady eyes, a long beard that was then turning grey, and a ruddy complexion that betokened a healthy and vigorous outdoor life. Like many of the prospectors who opened the goldfields, he was an Irishman. He was born in the parish of Quin, County Clare, about 1842, and came to Australia in 1863, and to Western Australia in 1889. In disposition, he was not of the jovial, riotous type, fairly common on the goldfields, and though not a total abstainer, yet was remarkably temperate. When Kalgoorlie was populous and prosperous, he occasionally returned to the scene of his prospecting success, and wherever he went he met those who were eager and even anxious to entertain him, but nothing could induce him to go beyond the limits of what temperance prescribes. On that point he was adamant, even under the strongest temptation to be otherwise. This may not have added to his popularity amongst a few of the gay reckless spirits of the early goldfields days.

Patrick ‘Paddy’ Hannan

He was not garrulous or a good conversationalist, though in some respects pleasant and genial. He was of a kindly disposition, quiet, and reserved, and particularly concerning himself he was not disposed to be communicative. His education was that of the ordinary Irish peasant boy, educated under the national school system, but he wrote a remarkably good hand, and letters that I have before me, penned shortly before his death, when he was an old man, are singular for their clearness of diction and calligraphy. Despite Hannan’s nationality, he was seemingly without imagination or a strong sense of humour. To him all that he went through was prosaic. The romantic side of gold seeking was never realised by him. He was not drawn to the bush by such poetic considerations as “…the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended, And at night the wondrous glory of the everlasting stars.” (Ed. Here Kirwin is quoting Banjo Patterson’s poem ‘Clancy of the Overflow’) Nor was there anything that appealed to him in the goldfields as they were in the early nineties, with the glorious uncertainties that they presented and the tens of thousands of light-hearted, optimistic, adventurous young men that the discoveries of Bayley and Ford (Ed. Fly Flat, 1892 from which Coolgardie was born) attracted from all parts of the world. After the walk and talk with Hannan on the day he pointed out the scene of his find, we went to my office, where his story of the discovery as related by him was written down, and subsequently read to him and checked. There is nothing sensational about it, but at the present time it is worth re-telling. Following are its exact words: “I reached Coolgardie a few days after Bayley reported his discovery. I was at Parker’s Range, about 40 miles south of Southern Cross. There was not much mining going on. Fraser’s mine and the Central mine were the principal properties. “Early in June, 1893, news arrived at Coolgardie of a rich discovery at a place called Mount Youle, somewhere to the east or north-east, and parties left Coolgardie in search of the new find. A few days after the report of the discovery had been received, my mate, Thomas Flanagan (Ed. often spelled differently), and myself, left Coolgardie. We left on June 7, and would have gone earlier with the others, but we could not obtain horses, and so we were delayed two or three days. We were lucky enough to pick up some animals in the bush ten or twelve miles out of Coolgardie. The other parties were mostly travelling with teams, but only one or two of the prospecting groups had horses of their own. “My mate and I had previously made up our minds not to travel with the teams, but to form a separate party of our own. We would thus be left free to travel how and when we liked. We could also by this arrangement, if we chose, prospect any country during the journey.

“On June 10, three days after leaving Coolgardie, we reached what is now known as Kalgoorlie. The other parties had gone on in the direction of the reported discovery, only to find later that the report had been false. Coolgardie was getting dull, and a large number of men had started from there for Mount Youle. There were a great many men travelling all over the country. Only Bayley’s claim was working at Coolgardie, and the alluvial had become exhausted just about the time I left. “Well, as I’ve said, when we came on June 10 to Mount Charlotte, my mate and I decided to stop and prospect the country round about, as we had found two colours of gold. On the 14th we shifted down to near the place I have just pointed out as where the first gold was found. We got good gold more or less from the north end of Mount Charlotte to down south of Maritana Hill.

A more lasting tribute to the legacy of Paddy Hannan

“There was another man, by the way – Dan Shea was his name (Ed. Also spelled O’Shea) – to whom we gave an equal share of our prospecting claim. “On June 17 I started for Coolgardie to apply for a reward claim. I got there on a Saturday night. The news of our find soon got abroad, and people began to set out for the scene. There was a good deal of excitement over my report, and there were 1,400 or 1,500 men dry-blowing in the locality, in about a week. In fact, most of the men who had got beyond Southern Cross were quickly on the field. “The water difficulty, which was usually great, was solved. Rain began to fall when I was on my way into Coolgardie, and continued for some time. The fall was fairly heavy, and, of course, exceedingly welcome. The downpour left plenty of water in the lake, and the supply lasted till the following November. “There were no surface indications that I noticed of the existence of reefs. I think Red Hill was the richest alluvial ground there. There were also some very rich claims between Cassidy’s Hill and Maritana Hill. Two or three hundred ounces were taken out of one claim. As time went on, whilst some of the diggers settled down, others were leaving every day as the alluvial got worked out. A great many went further back. Broad Arrow, Bardoc, White Feather, and the I.O.U. were found. “The first two applications for mining leases at Kalgoorlie – apart from alluvial claims – were those of Cassidy’s Hill and Maritana Hill. Jim Cassidy pegged out his lease first, and the Maritana was pegged out soon after. “Other discoveries took a great many people away from the locality, but there were continually new arrivals from the other side. The population in general began to increase. Before Christmas two hotels were opened.

“I left about January 20, 1894, for a holiday, as I had then been on the goldfields for some years, and had not seen the sea since my arrival in Western Australia, nearly five years previously. I was not at that time in the best of health, and a brief spell away from the fields I felt to be necessary. Life on the fields was of course, much more trying than some years later. It was only now and again we could get fresh meat.” Above are the bare facts of Hannan’s discovery thirty years ago in Kalgoorlie, as told by himself. It was apparently altogether an afterthought that made him think it worthwhile mentioning that when he left to make the application for the claim at Coolgardie they had only two quarts of water left, and, as he observed, “but for the rain I don’t know what we would have done.” There were other incidents of common knowledge that Hannan did not mention. For example, he brought to Coolgardie when he applied for a reward claim, a parcel of gold. Its exact value was unknown, with the result that it was widely exaggerated. Hannan’s application notice was put up at the tent which served as the Registrar’s office, at 9 o’clock in the evening, and during the night and next morning there was a stampede from Coolgardie of men towards the new find. It is said that scarcely fifty men were left in Coolgardie. Some of those who started lost their way, and were days later in reaching their destination. Others were inadequately equipped for the journey. The fall of rain to which Hannan refers, whilst solving the water problem, interfered with the operation of dry-blowing. The difficulty due to the moistness of the earth was, however, met by lighting fires and burning the stuff before it was treated.

Paddy Hannan and party at the pepper tree planting ceremony in 1897

Many stories differing from that related by Hannan have been current amongst old goldfielders. By some it was said that it was not Hannan that first discovered gold near Mount Charlotte. Hannan was then over 50 years of age, but both Flanagan and Shea were older men. Because he was the youngest of the three, he was asked by the others to make the journey to Coolgardie to apply for a reward claim. As he made the first report the find became associated with him, and was known as “Hannan’s”. One old and highly respected resident of the goldfields, who was intimately acquainted with all three men about the time of the find, positively asserted to me that Flanagan was the first to find gold, and that he found it when looking for a horse. Flanagan, like Hannan, came from Clare. Soon after, Flanagan died in Melbourne.

Other old residents say that the three men, when proceeding with a much larger party to Mount Youle, found gold near Mount Charlotte, but carefully concealed the fact of the discovery in order that they might be able to make the most of it. It was asserted that they stayed behind on the plea that they lost a horse. The members of the main party continued their journey unsuspectingly, and when, many days later, they discovered that the Mount Youle find was but a wild goose chase, they were amazed to see the neighbourhood of Mount Charlotte a hive of dry-blowers, most of whom were finding gold.

Hannan’s account differs somewhat from the story of the find as published in W. B. Kimberley’s “History of Western Australia”, which was issued in 1897. This account states: “A few of the men who set forth for Mount Youle camped at Mount Charlotte, and among them were ‘Pat’ Hannan and ‘Tom’ Flanagan. There was feed but no water at this spot, which was at once named Dry Camp, and as the horses could not proceed without a drink, the men remained there for two days searching for native wells or rock soaks. It is said that Hannan returned for water to what had become known as the Nine Mile Rocks, and that in his absence, Flanagan found gold in the neighbourhood. After Hannan arrived from the Nine Mile Rocks, Flanagan induced him to remain and prospect more fully. The two men searched the surface for alluvial for about a week after the other teams, which practically walked over gold scattered on the ground, had resumed their journey to Mount Youle. In three days Hannan and Flanagan picked up about 100oz, but the exact weight is not recorded, for the discoverers did not whisper their secret to every passer-by.” All the accounts given above differ materially from that given by Dan O’Shea, who was a partner of Hannan and Flanagan, and who came to my office in Kalgoorlie not long after the version given by Hannan was published. O’Shea was then very old. Tall, thin, erect, with snow-white hair and beard, and piercing eyes, he was a picturesque figure. He was indignant at the kudos given to Hannan. He claimed that it was he, and not Hannan, who first discovered gold, but his memory seemed to be failing, and he could not give a very coherent account of what actually took place. All that he was insistent upon was that it was he who picked up the first gold. O’Shea died many years ago.

Personally, I believe that Hannan, who had a good memory, was accurate in what he said. As to which of the three first found gold is really immaterial. As already explained, Hannan was not over popular amongst some early day prospectors, and there were perhaps amongst them those who were jealous of the reputation he acquired. Hannan and his mates made comparatively little money out of the find. Hannan never had much wealth, and during his later years he lived in Victoria on a small annuity – £150 – from the Western Australian State Government. I last saw Hannan in Melbourne in 1925. He never married, and was living with his sister, Mrs Lynch, in a cottage in Fallon Street, Brunswick. He was happy and contented, told me he had everything he could wish for in reason, talked with interest and even animation, of his prospecting experiences in Western Australia, inquired about the then state of Kalgoorlie and the goldfield, and asked to be remembered to all old friends in this State. He was then 83 years of age, his beard was snow white and he showed traces of a recent severe illness. Some weeks later he died.

Editor’s Note: While in Bendigo, in November 1899, Thomas Flanagan, 67, contracted influenza and died after a twoweek illness. He was buried in the White Hills cemetery. Dan O’Shea, 71, contracted a chill through persisting in his prospecting habit of sleeping on the floor. Living in Fremantle at the time, he tried to get admitted to the Fremantle Hospital but was refused on the grounds that he was not sufficiently ill. He then made his way to Perth, his condition worsened and he passed away in the Perth Hospital on 8th September, 1908.