The Dee River rush
By Matt Fitzgerald
While researching the Dee River goldfield, situated a few kilometres north-east of Mount Morgan, I found the locals to be most helpful, with one old timer supplying me with valuable information about the goldfield, which was once known as Peter’s Rush. Who’s rush? Well, I’ll tell you. My great-great-grandfather, Peter Fehring, was a typical prospector. He lived in the nearby township of Bouldercombe and prospected the surrounding areas. On one prospecting trip to the Dee River, he stopped at a rock bar, liked what he saw, sampled and decided to peg a claim. Deciding to dig down a bit, to his amazement and at a depth of only two feet, he unearthed a fist-sized gold nugget followed by a number of smaller nuggets. Peter hurried home stashing his find in a bag of wheat in the kitchen for security. Together with his son-in-law, George Talbot, and close friend, Thomas Moore, they formed a syndicate known as “The Prospectors”, and headed off to the local pub for a few beers. This would prove costly as word of the find leaked out. When the men returned to the claim days later, the area around it had already been pegged out. Peter had only staked out one man’s ground and the opportunity to expand the claim was lost, although they could have pegged another claim reasonably close by. Believing there would be ample gold for all three on his claim, Peter convinced his partners to only work the one claim. More than one thousand ounces of quality, rounded nugget gold, some nuggets in excess of one hundred ounces and affectionately named “mangoes”, were found by Peter and his party. Their largest nugget, named the “Northcote”, weighed 171 ounces and a replica went on display at the Sydney Metallurgical Museum.
Unfortunately the Dee River today has the reputation of being one of the most polluted rivers in Australia, having been polluted by acid mine drainage from the Mt Morgan gold mine for more than 100 years. The Mount Morgan mine is a ‘classic’ legacy site – generating enormous wealth in its heyday but leaving an environmental disaster which will ultimately cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars
The field, though small, produced more than 5,000 ounces. The gold was found at varying depths, from two feet in the creek bed to 20 feet on some banks, and was usually associated with water-worn shingle or bluish-coloured pug. The sheer number of nuggets found suggested there would still be large gold nuggets waiting to be unearthed so I decided it was time to drag out the detector and find me a “mango”. I detected the creek bed and surrounding banks all day with no luck, my only reward being the finding of the exact spot where my great-great-grandfather’s nugget was discovered.
The next time I visited the Dee River I was better prepared, armed with Minelab’s latest (at the time) SD2200D. This detector took some getting used to, especially the discriminator, but once mastered it saved you hours of tedious junk digging. There are professional detector operators today who swear by the 2200D and still have one in their detector armoury. I was just getting into the swing of things only to be interrupted by that oh so familiar “wonk” sound. A quick dig and my first ever Dee River nugget (no mango unfortunately) came to light. A very nice 6-grammer. Within 30 minutes and only ten metres away, I unearthed another nugget, this time eight grams. Finding gold is one thing but this was the icing on the cake. Having drooled over the pictures of Peter’s gold nuggets, I’d often dreamed of finding one. The gold “The Prospectors” found had to be sold in accordance with Government regulations of the time, and only replicas of the large nuggets exist in museums today. It was a real buzz to be able to show people the early photos and handle some real Dee River nuggets.
During the following trips to the Dee River, we managed to find several small nuggets, all of which were top quality but none larger than eight grams. Most of the gold we found came from mullock heaps, and I presume they were simply lost or forgotten by the miners in their haste to find larger nuggets. Gold found in this field has a distinctive look, usually well rounded and smooth, from grain to rockmelon in size, free of quartz and with almost no impurities. It was the shape of the gold and the fact that only “The Prospectors” party had found gold during the first few days of the rush, that led to some interesting rumours.
A quantity of gold had been stolen from the Mt Morgan gold mine years earlier and some miners believed it was this gold that had been melted down and was being passed off as nuggets. But it wasn’t long before these rumours were proven totally unfounded as some 4,000 ounces of nuggets were unearthed in other claims, over a distance of one mile along the creek.
I’ve been to plenty of goldfields but I’d never seen so many diggings; it looked like World War II was fought right here. I can only imagine the thousands of men labouring with picks and shovels in their claims, hard yakka all right. Whenever a new nugget was discovered, the diggers would attack their claims with new-found vigour. Not surprising when you consider the biggest nuggets, in descending order, were 182, 179, 171, 114, 108 and 100 ounces, while a further 23 nuggets exceeded 50 ounces. When discovered in 1903, the area was overgrown with lantana, an impenetrable noxious weed. Unfortunately, a lot of the diggings are now covered by this plant and access and detecting are difficult.