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.