THE GOLD-FIELDS OF NEW SOUTH WALES.
THE HANGING ROCK
FROM OUR SPECIAL COMMISSIONER
No. 9.
Under this head I propose to class, not only the diggings on the Rock itself, but also those on its two creeks, Oakenville and Happy Valley, and those on the Peel River, regarding them all as parts of the one diggings. The diggers themselves make a distinction between each of these several places, but more particularly with regard to the Peel river, as contradistinguished from the Rock. These diggings then, extend over a length of about seven miles of country, worked, however, only at intervals in that length. The course of the river at the workings is very nearly from south to north, the township of Nundle being placed at their south-western extremity. Immediately on the northern boundary of the town, the Government camp is situated. The official residence is but a rude slab hut, but has been made to look picturesque by the taste of the present commissioner, who has surrounded it with a garden, blooming with flowers, and has covered the rude bush verandah with beautiful, creepers of various kinds. To the right of the camp the road to Oakenville Creek branches off from that which leads to Happy Valley, both being gullies running down from the Rock, the first from its southern, the second from its northern side. Within half a mile of the camp, the valley is entered. At first it is a long flat about half a mile wide, with steep and lofty ranges coming down abruptly upon the level land and with here and there a short low ridge jutting down into it. The whole of this flat has been worked in every direction, and holes have also been sunk in some of the lower ridges. Snug bark huts are scattered here and there through the valley, or are occasionally grouped together for companionship by their occupants. As we ascend, the valley gradually becomes contracted into a rough and stony gully, and the path or track gets steeper and steeper, until the poor horse labours hard in the ascent The signs of digging also cease, for here there is nothing but the bare rock, denuded of all soil by the waters that wash its sides in rainy weather. Toiling up this road for about a mile, I reach the top of the rock, and find myself on a beautiful table-land, somewhat wet and springy, but having its hills and valleys, its mountains, and gullies, precisely the same as the country below, and as though no ascent whatever had been made. Immediately on the crest of the hill first surmounted, a large party of miners were busily at work, whilst all around gave evidence of long-continued labour. Holes sunk in every direction, hillsides cut don, gullies completely washed away to a depth of twenty feet down to the bare rock, and the whole appearance of the country changed from the beautiful green of the native bush to the red gravelly hue of the gold mine. Throughout the whole of the hills and gullies on this table land, which stretches away for miles along the crown of the rnage, round to the sources of the Macdonald, gold has been found on a prospect, though hitherto only the spots nearest ot the rocks have been fully worked. Several very comfortable huts and buildings have been erected, though I remarked that the majority of those working here preferred tents, set up near the spots on which thye were employed.
Descending the rock by Oakenville Creek, I soon found myself involved in a complete labyrinth of difficultires. The head of the creek is a deep gully, upon which the hills descend at an exceedingly steep angle. All this has been much worked by holes in the ordinary method, by cutting away and washing eh whole stuff between the ranges to a depth of twenty or twenty-five feel, down to the bed rock, and by piercing into the side of the hills. The vast gaps thus formed, and the heaps of refuse stuff lying about, give a still more wild appearance to the scene, looking almost, so great has been the amount of labour bestowed, as if some minor natural convulsion had occurred, and turned every thing upside down. Some ten or a dozen men were at work at this spot as I passed, whilst here and there, at long intervals of my descent of this rugged path, wherever a favourable spot presented itself, a bark hut was erected, out of which, in most cases, a female head was protruded at the unwonted sight of a traveller in those breakneck regions. With considerable difficulties, and not without the exercise of some judgment and coolness, for which, with my usual modesty, I give myself all credit, I managed to steer clear of all the holes and pitfalls that beset my path on every side, and scrambled my horse up hill, and slid him down hill, without anything in the shape of an accident or an adventure, until, after rather less than a mile of such work, I cmae into a regular, though still a steep and rocky track. This track wound round the range on the opposite side of the creek to the Rock, passing immediately uner it, so as to give a full and fair view of its gigantic proportions. the Hanging Rock is an enormous perpendicular wall of granite, fully three hundred feet in height at the very least, showing a smooth unbroken face to the south-west, without so much as gooting for a goat being perceptible on it. the breadth of the superficies thus exposed, is about double that of its height. To one looking at it as I did, nearly from its base, this towering mass is a grand and imposing sight, impressing forcibly upon the mind the utter littleness of man. None can look upon that vast pile of nature's rearing, that for ages has breasted the violence of the drenching rain and the howling wind, without sinking in idea to a very pigmy. whilst the giants of the forest that grow around, and rocks that rise on every side shrink by comparison with that huge block, the one into shrubs, the other into pebbles. The whole mountain out of which the Rock starts, is singular precipitous, yet, here and there the handiwork of the digger was visible, in the masses of rubbish that had streamed down its side, in places where the miner had sought to penetrate the very bosom of the hill in his search for gold.
For the next half mile of the leaving the base of the Rock, the road gradually improved, huts one by one started up, then little clusters of dwellings appeared, the gully widening out into flats, all of which had been, or were in course of being worked. Lowever down, the valley of the creek has not been so extensively worked; several holes have been sunk there, but they have not been found to pay. Thus, for two miles from the camp the creek has been scarcely worked.
Starting again from the camp in a northerly direction, a track leads round by the Government fence, out upon the river bank. Following this for half a mile, it comes upon a sheep station of Dr. Jenkins'. now deserted, and then crosses the river. It then mounts some fine, sound, stony ranges, on the property of the Peel River Mining company, along which it travels for nearly two miles. Descending to the river the stream is again crossed, and a close group of huts, tents, and sotres is passed built on the side of a low range that borders the river, whilst all around this spot, right down to the very edge of the stream, are evidences of the diggers' labour. leaving this, the road again crosses the river just at a very extensive slate reef, after passing a lofty aqueduct which the American Water company are erecting for the purpose of supplying the diggers on the western side of the stram with water. A long well-worked point on the Company's ground is traversed, and then re-crossing the river, i came upon the main diggings of the Peel river. The stream at this point is narrowed in by the enormous mountians through which it has forced a passsage. occasional flats, though of smal extent, present themselves, and these, with the less abrupt ridges on which a soil has had an opportunity to deposit itself, and with the gullies running down from the mountains, furnish the spots for the work of the miner. On the western side of the river, the land is all the property of the peel River Gold and Mining Company, who permit parties to work it on the payment of a small monthly sum, I believe 10s. On the eastern side, where digging is more extensively carried on, it is all Government land. Both sides of the stream, hwoever, for a distance of fully two miles, presented a scene of busy labour, as, standing upon a hill on the eastern side, i obtained a view of nearly the whole workings. In the centre of the stream, water-wheels were busily at work, pumping out and keeping dry the holes in its bed, from which the water had been dammed out. In the spots thus freed of water, strong parties on men were labouring. All over the flat land and on the Company's side, the surface was pierced with holes whilst the windlasses or levers, showed were the work was still going on' whilst ont he Government side, the ridge and gully wre dotted with the red, blue, or white shirt of the digger. here and there, on the river bank, men might be seen cradling their stuff, or washing it in long sluices to which the water was brought by ditches from the higher parts of the river. At my feet the main road wound round the base of the ridges, bordered on either side by bark or slab huts, stores, inns, and tents, whilst through the trees to my right were just perceptible, a group of cottages which form the station of the Company. The whole of this picture of active life was closed in by the lofty mountains, whichon every side seemed to tower over the stream, and almost to forbid it a passage.
For so extensive a tract of digging coubntry, the population is exceedingly limited. Mr Commissioner Douglass' estimate of the numbers in April last was -- Diggers, 430; females, 70; storekeepers, tradesmen, pollice, children &c., 130; making a total of 650. From the end of April to the middle of May he was led to believe that there had been an addition of about 30 persons to this number, the greater part of whom were diggers. There had been a very great falling off in the mining population, immediately after the first rush to the Rocky River, these diggings have been all but deserted. Since then, however, the population has gradually increased, until now it stands almost as high as it has ever been since the first great rush to this locality. My own estimate, after visiting each of the localities worked, tallies exactly with that of Mr. Commissioner Douglass, and I distribute the miners as follows: -- At work on and about the Rock, 150; on Oakenville Creek and Happy Valley, 100; on the river, 180; and, in the outlying gullies, 50, making altogether, a total of about 480 differs. It must be apparent that this number, distributed as above, is but barely sufficient to propsect such an amount of country as here lies open to the miner; and the rulst has been that it spots only has it been worked, and anything but thoroughly in many of these, the digger preferring the hill or gully where he knows gold has been found to going to the expense and loss of time of testing new ground.
I witnessed on thse diggings a greater variety of modes of working than I have seen used on any one diggings either in this country or in Victoria. As usual, the larger number of the miners were engaged in shaft sinking, about 300 being employed in this way. The sinking is exceedingly shallow, never exceeding twenty feet, and mostly ranging between twelve feet and sixteen feet, thgouh good hard red gravel and a kind of ironstone compost, which prevents all danger of caving in. The gold is found in a fine sandy drift, which lies immediately on the bed rock, a narrow stratum of yellowish marl or sometimes of fine clay intervening between it and the ironstone.The labour is not bery heavy, since a party of men have been known to sink on and work out a claim in a week. there are one or two parties engaged in deeper sinking; one in particular, employed by Mr. Davies, of the firm Davies and Bradford, storekeepers, on the Peel, has got a distance of nearly forty feet, on the side of a steep hill, immediately opposite the Company's Flat. Mr, Davies, who is an old Californian, holds the opinion that the rock at which the miners have hitherto stopped is not the true bed rock, and that by peircing through this a second alluvial deposit will be found. I pretend to no geological character, and therefore cannot venture anything like an authentic opinion on this point; but the stone they were blasting through was certainly a very fine grained granite, exactly similar to that of the Hanging Rock, and my impression certainly was that his idea was erroneous. he is, however, maintained in his opinion by the fact that, though they have to quarry through this rock, still they are as yet only very large detached boulders, lying closely packed together, their interstices filled with a fine blueish clay, which leads him to hope that they may be penetrated, and that a richer deposit will be found beneath them. Whether successful or not, Mr. Davies certainly deserves great credit for the public spirit he thus displays in individually incurring the expense of deciding so important a point. a novelty in the way of shallow sinking has been introduced by a party of Germans who are working on the Company's flat. The bank of the river is more than ordinarily high at this spot, and in it a tunnel has been opened, running in until the bed rock is struck at a point above the water level. From this, branch funnels are made in every direction, light and air being given, and the washing-stuff brought up through holes cut from below to the surface, of just a sufficient size to admit the passage of a bucket. this has a very singular appearance, and to a person unused to this mode of working it appears marvellous how a man could every make so small a hole and so deep. Of course, working from above this would be impossible, whilst from below it is quite another thing. In this way a very large portion of the flat has been already worked, though the labour has been much increased by the frequent floods of the last few months, every rise in the river filling the whole of the underground workings.
Surfacing has also been very extensively carried on almost every spot that has hitherto been sunk upon, having given a handsome return for the surface washing. The alluvial soil lying on the top of the red clay, the stratum next in succession is that selected for washing. The alluvial soil lying on the top of the red clay, the stratum next in succession is that selected for washing and generally ranges from 10 to 15 inches deep, though on the Company's side some very rich surfacing down to a dept of three feet has been found and worked. Mr. Douglass informed me that tow men who first worked this spot had deposited with him 77 ounces, and 50 ounces in the course of the three weeks they were employed on it. Ground sluicing has also been carried on on an extensive scale, the very complete works of the American Water Company permitting that tot be done here for which there are no means on other diggings. In some instances a large stream of water had ben brought to the head of a gully, and the ditch opened in two or three or more places. The continued mition of this body of water gradually washes away the whole of the surface earth, the heavier particles, gold stones,&c., being arrested at a certainpoint lower down. When the whold surface has been cleared off, the residuum collected belwo is passed thrugh a long tom or sluice, and the gold obtained without the labour of paasing all the earth through the troughs. This is an improvement on the ordinary surfacing that is entirely due to the ingenuity of the Americans resident on these diggings.
The bed of the river is also being worked in three places by dams and water-wheels, on thw same plan as that which I have already described as pursued at Oban. Whilst I was there, a very deep hole, some twenty feet below the level of the bank, and some twelve feet lower than that of the river, had been cleared out by one party of eight, who had alreqady picked out some few nuggets, and were beginning to think of finding the washing stuff; but, alas for human anticipations, on the following day, the rain set in and in the evening the river rose, though not so much as to damage their works. i learned, however, afterwards that on the succeeding day, after a night of continuous heavy rain, the river came down gank high, and I knew that it must have swept away dams, embankments, and water-wheels, giving the poor fellows all their work to do over again. In such reivers as the Pell, that are overhung by lofty precipitous mountains, this kind of work is the most precarious of any that the digger can prusue, as very often a thunder-shower, bursting miles away in the line of the stram, may in an instant flood them out, and undo all the work of weeks.
There are also some very rich quartz veins, both on the Company's and the Government side of the river. None of these have ever been regularly worked, though the diggers occasionally amuse themselves amongst them, and I have seen some very beautiful specimens procured both in gold gold, and in gold mixed with quartz. The gold thus produred has a very singular appearance, looking almmost like a mass of conglomerated golden crystals, of the grightest colour. I myself procured with very little trouble, about a dozen specimens of gold and quartz from a stone about the size of my two fists, which I picked up on the surface of a quartz vein, a lttle above Davies and Bradford's store. A German digger also told me that he had hammered out three ounces of pure gold in a day from a quartz vein on the Company's ground.
Some fo the miners have worked in places upon the Californian and South American system of tunnelling in two sides of the hill; but this has never been done to any great extent, except in one spot, a hill at the head of Blackfellow's Gully. Here a tunnel six feel wide and six feet high has been pierced for about 120 feet insto the side of the mountain through a dark iron-stone looking rock, which I take to be a specis of trap. it was originally commenced by a company of some thrity or forty persons on the diggings, who were anxious to five this kind of work a trial, and bound themselves to contribute so much per month, until the experiment should succeed or be declared to have failed. However one by one dropped off in their monthly payments until the whole wieght of the enterprise fell upon some three or four, who ultimately abandoned the work. The idea had been to lay down a tramway in the tunnel upon which trucks bearing the refuse or washing stuff would run out, the way having a slight incline, without any labour. owing to the falling off in the means, and also to the all but desertion of the Peel River on the opening of the Rocky River diggings, this tunnel has been left in its present state, none being found bold enough to resume the enterprise.
One very great advantage that the differs here possess above any other diggings in the country, is the steady and continuous supply of water furnished to them in every part of the ground, by the American Water Company. They have made now somewhere about 42 miles of ditch, supplied by reservoirs erected on every spot where it could be done with advantage, their principal streams being supplied by never-failing springs in the swamp lands at the very highest protion of the Rock. From these ditches, traversing hill sides and carried by shutes over gullies, furnish the digger in every part with this great necessary for his work; small supply shutes of bark or wood bringing a sufficient quantity of water for the purpose of washing, down to the very hole at which the miner is sinking. Thus he is saved the expense of labour of carting his stuff down to the river, a thing that he would have to do for eight months in the year, were it not for the Yankee enterprise and ingenuity that thus supplies him. The charge also is very moderate, being at the rate of 5s. a day for as much water as will pass through an inch pipe, being about the amount usually required for cradle working. By this management, the miner cna work at his sinking during five days in the week, getting a supply of water on the sixth day with which to wash up whatever stuff he may have accumulated, paihg only for the one day on which the water is used.
The gold found here is nearly all coarse and nuggety, very little fine drift gold having been hit upon. Some of the nuggets obtained from the quaartz are, as I have said, exceedingly beautiful in apparance. The generality of the gold is of a fine bright yellow, though it is said to be rather below the standard of Victorian gold. That it is very generally distributed throughout the whole of these massive ranges that border the Peel, and run off in branches to the Moonbies and the head of the Macdonald, is beyond a doubt, as it has been found amongst them at every spot that has been prospected, in more or less quantities. As yet, however, no gold has been found beyond a certain height up the face of the hills, either by surfacing or sinking, the latter never having yet been tried, except in the case of the hole now in course of being put down by Mr. Davies' party. The gold appears to stop at a certain point up the range, the sinking getting shallower and shallower, until the rock appears to lie within a foot or eighteen inches of the surface, covered only by broken stones and rock mixed with a small quantity of earth, barely sufficient to give nutriment to the bush grass that clothes the hill-sides.
For my own part, I look upon the Hanging Rock as the most promising diggings I have yet visited in this country, the whole character of the locality assimilaing very closely to that of the higher parts of Mount Alexander. nearly all those now here have been at work on these diggings from the time of their being first opened, with the exception only of a short spell at the Rocky River, from which nearly all the Hanging Rock men have now returned. Many persons now living on the spot have made good fortunes solely by digging, whilst others have gathered sufficient to start them comfortably in business of one kind or the other. Throughout the whole of my journeyings on this groudn, I never heard a single complaint of ill-luck, the general answer to the question of "How are you doing?"
being, "Oh, middling; I can't complain."
This is about the greatest expression of satisfaction that one ever hears a digger utter, as he is more prone to making things appear worse rather than better than they really are. In the veings of quartz alone which traverse the hills on either side of the river, an immense field for mining operations lies buried, only to be brought into work when the same spirit of energy and enterprise that years back were evinced in Victoria shall be evoked amongst the capitalists of New South Wales, and the clank of the steam-engine and the stamp of the quartz-crusher shall be heard on the gold-fields of this country. It may perhaps be considered some evidence of the richness of the soil when I inform you that I picked up about a pennyweight of gold in an old cart-track, after a shower of rain, in the short space of five minutes. This, for one whose eyesight has not been most materially improved by a nine months' reporting int he Legislative Council, was not so very bad; and I have no doubt that persons with sharper powers of vision than I possess might have gathered even more. In addition to the gold, lead in very considerable quantities exists in some of the hills above the Rock; and in one of these it may be picked up by the hundredweight, actually lying on the surface. In this, more than the usual proportion of silver is supposed to exist, since that metal has veen found, amongst the lead thus scattered about, in a native state; and one man found and showed to Mr.Commissioner Douglass a very beautiful specimen, consisting of a piece of quartz, to which were attached, in seperate places, reasonably large pieces of gold, silver, and lead.