"Joes,"
which sometimes run along it from one end to the other, reminded me of the early days of digging, when thousands were upon some new rush within forty eight hours after its being opened. In fact, it looked really like a"diggings,"
every morsel of ground I having been ransacked, or being in course of undergoing that process. So much is this the case, that it is only with much difficulty that a person on horseback can make his way across amongst the numerous holes, and heaps of refuse or washing stuff. Leaving Sydney Flat at its north-western extremity, a short mile brings me to the head of the Sawpit Gully, now nearly deserted as it is considered to be worked out. Some few diggers, however tempted, no doubt, by the records of its former richness, still linger about the spot,‘fossicking’!
in the old holes, or searching for washing stuff left behind by some careless miner. These men are mostly such as have not the funds necessary to enable them to bear the expense of sinking holes in the more promising localities. Passing down the Sawpit Gully, in which a few scattered huts are built, I come upon the creek, into which as I have before said, this gully empties itself. Between this point and the street of houses before described two dams have been erected over the creek, the upper one being constructed in a most substantial manner, with strong uprights having their ends sunk in the bed of the creek, and each upright being secured by a stout shore at the lower aide. Against these, logs have been placed across the creek, and over all have been thrown a sufficient quantity of stiff clay to bind the whole and make it water tight. The second dam is not of so extensive a character, being a ruder work, and nothing more than a rough obstruction to the water. Following along the western bank of this creek, I now skirt along the foot of Mount Jones then cross a short ridge on which many huts are scattered, and come down upon the Mount Welsh Creek, the mountain towering up to my right, or westward, almost denuded of trees, and showing by its upturned subsoil how large an amount of labour his been expended upon it. For fully a mile the road now traverses some fine open forest ridges, that come sweeping down gently from Mount Welsh into the creek of the same name, all as yet unworked, until at the end of that distance another cluster of houses, stores, shops, inns, and a branch of the Bank of New South Wales is passed. Just at this spot, one of the great works of the diggings has been constructed, in the shape of a bridge, which has served as a theme for"our own correspondent"
of almost every newspaper in the district, and has been pointed to as one of the greatest and most remarkable efforts of public spirit ever witnessed in the colony. It is certainly, an useful structure, if not very ornamental, and has been erected in a substantial if not in the most finished manner. Crossing this bridge, another close group of houses, stores, &c, is gathered on the opposite side. From one of these house I heard the notes of a fine-toned piano-forte rattling out a lively polka as I passed. This caused me almost involuntarily to look round upon the wild hills and the primeval forest that on all sides hemmed in this little oasis of civilization; and I thought of the wonderful effects of gold in so soon making such a change, and I pictured to myself the astonishment with which some patriarchal opossum must have listened from the branches of his favourite gum tree to the unwonted sound of ball-room music. Whilst I still thought and dreamt, the still sweeter and blyther music of female voices broke in with a merry laugh upon the strains of art, and dispelled my. poetic vision. Pushing along down the creek, a short distance brought me to the river, the banks of which I skirted for about four miles to Daunt's Inn, near which the last lot of diggers on the river are at work. At every three or four hundred yards at this length small parties of diggers are at work, some working the banks, some ground sluicing, and some engaged in the shallow sinkings that are here and there to be found. Sometimes a lonely pair of miners may be found at work at some fancy spots, at others groups of parties are seen sinking or cutting down the river banks, and in one place within half a mile of Daunt's, a party of six had a puddling machine at work by horse-power, and had also cut a race for bringing water to a long sluice through which they were passing their washing stuff. The appearance of the river was but little varied throughout the whole course on which the miners are at work. Occasional points or reefs of granite run down into the stream on either side, giving a sharp turn or bend to the water, and somewhat relieving the monotony of the scenery. These reefs do not appear to have been hitherto favourite spots with the miners, as they have been little, if at all, worked. The Government camp, the residence of the officials of the diggings, is barely a mile from Daunt's Inn in a westerly direction, and is about three miles from Mount Welsh, rather an awkward distance in bad weather, particularly as the road to it lies over nasty swampy flats almost impassable to the foot traveller after a heavy fall of rain. The buildings are all of slabs in the ordinary bush style, and have nothing at all remarkable about them, except perhaps a certain air of cleanliness and regularity that makes one certain that he is looking upon a military establishment. This hasty sketch of the diggings may perhaps give some idea of the localities, but I will confess at once to a considerable difficulty in conveying my impressions of these places, there is really so much sameness in the scenery that there is nothing striking upon which to seize; the same long sloping hills, the same granite rocks, the same gum trees characterise every spot, so that one only becomes a mere counterpart of the other. Where digging has been carried on or where diggers have clustered their houses more closely together may be known by the almost total absence of trees -- felled for firewood; whilst where diggers"most do congregate"
is told by the, public-house, the store, the bowling-alley, and by other tokens that the observant eye can but too readily remark. Taking now the localities I have named in the preceding part of this letter, I should consider the population of the Rocky River to amount to somewhere about 1600 souls, distributed in the following manner: -- On Sydney Flat, 600; on Mount Welsh and gullies, 200; in the Sawpit Gully and ridges, 50; on Mount Jones, surfacing, 100; and on the river, ground sluicing and shallow sinking, 250; giving a total of 1200 diggers, then allowing 400 for storekeepers, tradesmen, &c., we have a total of 1600. This I would warn you is only a calculation of my own, and can go therefore for just as much as my power of observation is considered to be worth; but I believe that it will not be found wrong in the total, and in the distribution only very slightly so, and only because I have preferred taken round numbers in apportioning it. Whilst on the subject of population I may mention that licenses have been granted for eighteen inns here, and that several butchers and bakers are regularly established, sending out their carts to supply their customers precisely in the same style as is done in the large towns of the colony. The chief mode of working here, both as regards yield and the number of men employed upon it, is the deep sinking. This is being pursued on Sydney Flat, to some extent on Mount Welsh, and on a slight elevation or mount not yet named at the western extremity of Sydney Flat, and may be said to give employment to about 800 of the whole population. The sinking has been the same in every spot yet tried on these diggings. The depth at which the bed rock has been reached has averaged upon the whole workings fully 100 feet, ranging from 80 feet to 130 feet, the greater number of holes being from 110 to 120 feet in depth. The first ten or twelve feet sinking is through sandy, alluvial soil, and light gravel or debris of granite, then through a heavier stratum of half-decomposed ironstone, down to a blue stone, rock, lying first in boulders, then much honeycombed and afterwards in a hard compact mass, only to be got through by blasting. Immediately under this is a light, friable, yellow deposit, certainly not pipeclay, though generally called so by the diggers, lying to a depth of from three to six feet, and below this is the washing stuff or drift, having every appearance of being a coarse grained granite decomposed. In this, the gold is found at times very thickly distributed, at others barely in quantities to pay, whilst too many have gone through all the work of sinking without being rewarded with even a speck of the yellow metal they were seeking. I was glad to observe on the Sydney Flat that many of the holes were ventilated by the Californian blowers or fans, kept in motion by the action of the windlass, and creating a current of air by their action in the deep shafts, much more readily and efficaciously than by the ordinary wind-sail. On the banks of the river there are many spots that have been and are now worked by sinking, but as the ordinary depth does not exceed 12 or 14 feet, these are termed shallow sinkings, the earth being raised from the holes by a long sapling working on the ordinary lever principle. An upright pole, to which it is bound at the centre, furnishes the fulcrum, and a rope at each end the means of raising the bucket. This work is comparatively easy, being through, a gravelly soil and a red sandy ironstone, but the yield has never of course been so great as from the deeper sinkings of the mountains. Nevertheless it has been found to be a good paying game, and many prefer it to the chances offered by the heavier work of Sydney Flat. The utmost that I have ever heard of this shallow sinking turning out per man has been £20 per week, and that not for any great length of time. In the deep sinking on Mount Jones and Mount I Welsh much larger sums have been obtained, the largest yield, from any one claim having been 620 ounces. This particular claim belonged to a person named Ryan, who is said to have netted from claims with which he was connected, or in which he was interested, over £5000, from the Rocky River. I give only common report in this matter, though I know for a certainty that the individual is very well off. The most remarkable thing connected with his claim is, that all those around got nothing, or next to nothing, in their claims, whilst for him the whole gold of some twenty claims seemed to have been gathered together. One man assured me that he had sunk upon the very edge of Ryan's claim but had struck the rock at not more than 48 feet below the surface, Ryan's claim being over 120 feet deeper; thus the rock had made a sudden slip down, as though in his favour, as if to cut off any other from sharing in his good fortune. In shallow sinking there is also this advantage, that not more than two persons need be engaged in a party; whilst in the deeper holes much stronger parties are necessary, in order to give the necessary relays in working. The ground-sluicing, or bank-washing I have already described, but not very many are employed upon this kind of work at the Rocky River. As far, however, as it has been tried, it has paid passably well, and men have made from £4 to £8 a head per week; never less than the one or more than the other. It must be remembered also that the sluicing is done in a very rude manner, and not at all upon the systematic plan that our present knowledge of mining would seem to render imperative. Very often nothing more than a cradle is employed, and thus the work is nothing more than washing the bank, whilst where a sluice is employed it is only a very short one, into which water is bailed, as with a cradle, instead of having a regular and continuous stream pouring through the twenty or thirty feet troughs that I have been used to see used in ground-sluicing. A good number of men here are now engaged in surfacing, an idea that only seems to have struck, them some six weeks prior to my arrival. A good part of the surface of Mount Jones has been already washed, and has turned out hitherto from £5 to £& per week per man pretty steadily, after all expenses of carting had been paid. The cost, however, of bringing the stuff down to the river, at 10s. a load, has taken much of the gilt off the work, as the digging and washing are by far the heaviest part of the labour, the mere carting, which is, paid the best, being the lightest part of it. Mount Welsh, the Sawpit Gully, and Mount Jones were all in course of being surfaced during my visit, and to make this work pay, numerous dams had been made across every creek that would hold or accumulate, water, in order that the washing stuff might be accumulated, there and, with the, first rains, that it might be run through long sluices, which, in many cases, I saw had been already provided. By these sluices from twenty to thirty loads' of stuff, and even more, can be run through and washed out in a day; so that with only two pennyweights to the load, a very handsome return may be made out daily, and that stuff which, with a cradle would give only a very poor remuneration to the digger, would, with, such a sluice, make him a very handsome return. These dams and sluices have already been made in every direction. On looking at these works, however, I could not but regret the total absence of machinery here. I could see men toiling along digging and cradle washing, and paying for the carting of their stuff, and at the end of the week netting their £1 a week each, when I knew that with a few mechanical appliances, without any more work on their part than would be necessary to guide the machinery, they might have made fifty and sixty times the amount, since the gold is remarkably evenly distributed throughout the surface stuff. I compared the bulldog muscular work of the Rocky River so characteristic of the Englishman, with the harder, but cleverer managed work of Oban, where nothing was done by hand that could be avoided, and where the go-a-head Yankee spirit had manifested itself beyond all doubt. The gold from the Rocky River is particularly fine and shotty, and is also exceedingly deceptive in weight. I have seen parcels that I would have imagined did not weigh more than 10 or 12 ozs, and yet which weighed 15 ozs. Another great peculiarity of this gold is the numerous, grains of black gold that are found amongst it. These, at first sight, look like specks of black sand or rubbish, but on being taken out from the sample and flattened or bruised, the glitter of the gold becomes distinctly perceptible, although the exterior of the grain has been blackened by electric or other agency. The gold itself, especially that obtained from deep sinking, is of rather a darker colour than that ordinarily obtained -- of its quality, the essayist and gold broker are the best able to judge, though from the heavy weight of some samples, should consider that it ought to stand high in the market. I have said that an ordinary labouring man might, by diligent attention and steady work, make his £4 or £5 a week, and that in shallow sinking he might possibly pocket even more; but at the same time I would not for an instant wish to mislead any of your readers into the belief that these have been a successful diggings. On the contrary, I am bound to say that they have not been so, and that in the deep sinking particularly as much has been lost as ever was returned from the gold produced. Some few have made fortunes no doubt, but they have been so few that it would be idle to mention their names, in the face of scores who could come forward to state the sums they have lost. No doubt good wages are to he made here, but, as I have already said, it is not good wages, or even the very highest wages, that will satisfy the digger. He looks forward always to the one lucky time when he shall fall upon the one incomparable nugget that always haunts him, and which he fancies is reserved within the bowels of the earth solely for his finding. On this account it is that he will leave a spot where he is making his £20 and £30 per week regularly in order to try some place of which he has heard, and where he expects to gain either more, and in"one lot,",
or to, make nothing -- quite satisfied with the latter if he have but the chance of the former. Taking all these matters into account -- looking at the nature of the gold-fields, and the peculiar character of the gold digger, -- I cannot in honesty say that I can expect this to be a favourite diggings. As a field for machinery no better could offer. The holes in the river would turn out as richly as those of the creeks of the Ovens, to the features of which district those of the Rocky are very closely assimilated, whilst the river itself is a steady, well-behaved stream, not coming down in floods or freshes in the capricious manner that has baffled miners in other parts. At the same time, the surface, if worked in a proper manner, could not but pay handsomely, since by the present lame method it gives good wages. Besides, latterly, in the sinkings on Sydney Flat, they have washed the headings of the holes as well as the bottom stuff, and by the use of puddling machines and the improved means employed on the older diggings, a very much larger return might be obtained at, a very much cheaper rate. This, however, is a question that would be more properly considered when dealing with the general management of the gold-fields of the Northern district, and till then is would perhaps be better that I should leave it.