Chapter XV: Gold-Digging

Meanwhile the work of putting up the mill got on very slowly. The A.S.N. Co.,[1] whose idea of handling machinery is to raise it to as great a height as possible, and then suddenly drop it, contrived to smash some of my heaviest castings in landing them on the wharf at Mackay. I had to send to Melbourne to get them replaced, and this caused a delay of several months.

[1] The Australasian Steam Navigation Company, always known throughout the colonies as the A.S.N.

Water was so scarce in the creek on which the diggings lay that I was obliged to put up the mill a mile and a half below the reef, at the junction of another creek. Even here there was so little water that I thought it was advisable to throw a dam across the creek.

Damming a Queensland mountain-creek is no joke. The violent storms which occur, and the heavy freshes that they cause in the creeks, make it necessary that any sort of dam should be remarkably solid.

The creek here was about 120 feet wide, and there was about ten feet of drift in the bottom. Of course it was necessary to cut a trench through this, right down to the bed rock, and fill it with clay, for the puddle-wall. The trench was three feet wide, and in it I sunk a double row of piles a foot thick, to support the frame of the dam above. Horizontal logs were laid against these and in between them, and this formed the centre wall of the dam. The amount of labour connected with this work was very great.

We used to keep three shifts going, night and day, at the pumps, to keep the work in the trench clear of water, and the clay for the puddle-wall had to be carted from a considerable distance. Several small freshes came down while the work was going on, and did a good deal of damage; but we managed to repair it, and at last the dam looked like being finished. I faced the front wall entirely with stone, and gave it a very big batter, to allow for the heavy floods that I knew the creek was subject to.

Had twenty-four hours more been given me to finish the work, I believe the dam would have been there to-day, and for twenty years to come. The by-wash was almost finished, and there were only a few feet more of the stone facing to be done. Those few feet, however, settled the fate of the dam. There came one of the most brilliant storms I ever saw. Queensland, at all times, can be relied upon to crowd more thunder and lightning into a minute than most countries can into an hour, and no better place for a display of the kind can be imagined than the valley of Mount Britten. It is a perfect funnel for collecting rain, about five miles across the centre, narrowing down to a few hundred yards at the mouth, where the dam across the creek was situated.

The row that a storm makes there is appalling. When once a clap of thunder is loosed off into the valley it can never get out. It slams round, cannoning up against the cliffs that surround the place, till its echoes are drowned in a fresh discharge, and so it goes on, till anyone who happens to be out in it feels as if the thunder was being manufactured in his own hat.

In ordinary countries, forked lightning descends from a storm one flash at a time, and its home invariably seems to be the earth. In Queensland lightning is slathered about as if it was of no value at all. Two or three flashes set off at the same time, and, after hunting each other about the firmament for some time, either part company and go off opposite ways, or twist themselves into a tangled knot, and discharge smaller flashes in every direction. In the background a perfectly incessant supply of sheet-lightning is kept up, which is constantly changing colour; sometimes it is white, sometimes a golden yellow, and sometimes a beautiful pale lilac, and the effect is most lovely.

The rain that accompanies these storms is sometimes terrific. I have seen as much as five inches fall in an hour. When this particular storm broke over the valley I was up at the reefs, a mile and a half above the mill.

It was about ten o’clock at night, and deadly dark; but I started off down the track at once to see how the dam would stand. Fortunately, I knew every inch of the road, for a more disagreeable place for a stranger to find his way along in the dark it would be difficult to imagine. Besides the natural pitfalls in the way of rocks, logs, and gullies all down the track, the whole place was a perfect warren of old shafts that had been sunk in prospecting for gold. The mouths of them were quite open, and several of them were sunk right in the middle of the old track; so that anyone who did not know them, and remember them, was certain to come to grief.

The track crossed the creek twice between the reefs and the mill, and when I started up in the afternoon the creek was not running at all. At the first crossing on my way back it was only ankle-deep. The next crossing was half a mile lower down; and, though I ran all the way, by the time that I got there there was ten feet of water in the creek, running like a mill-race.

The lightning made the whole place as light as day now, and, as the crossing seemed to be clear, I soused in and got out all right at the other side. As soon as I got down to the dam, I saw at once that it was doomed. The by-wash was of no use at all to take the overflow. It had never been intended to do more than relieve the pressure, as the dam was an overshot one. But it was the few feet where the stone facing was still incomplete that ruined it. The water got a start there, and gradually ate away the whole concern like cheese; and in six hours there was nothing left but a few piles sticking up to mark where the puddle-wall had been.

Holliman was standing watching the destruction of the work, looking the image of despair. The rain was coming down in sheets, but nothing could get him away. He looked so utterly miserable, standing on the edge of a foaming creek, with the water running in streams down his back and out of his boots, lit up every now and then by a purple streak of lightning, that I went into shrieks of laughter at him.

After a time a melancholy sort of smile stole over his face, and he allowed himself to be taken away. The water came down while some of the men were at work, and so suddenly that two of them, who attempted to save their tools, uncommonly nearly got drowned. They managed to hold on to some trees that had been left growing in the face of the dam, and stayed there till Holliman helped them out with a rope.

This settled the Mount Britten dam. It cost over £350, and would never have been any use, as from some subsequent working we found that there was an old underground course of the creek in one of the banks, through which all the water would have escaped. At the end of about eight months’ patient toil, and after innumerable breakdowns and delays, the mill looked like being completed; so I called for tenders for carting the quartz down from the reefs ready for a start. Plenty of carriers were willing to contract for the “Wanderer” stone, as there was no difficulty about the road, except in wet weather, when it was very greasy. But the “Erratic Star” was a different matter altogether.

The quartz-paddock was on the side of a mountain, and the last 300 feet up to it was a “pinch” so steep that no one who did not know what a team of bullocks can do would ever imagine it was possible to get to it with a waggon. At last a man called George Tucker, well known as one of the best drivers in the district, offered to try. His team of fourteen bullocks were a perfect picture. He was always very quiet with them, and very seldom used his whip, but his bullocks were marvellously obedient to the least word, and would follow him about like children. I believe they would have gone up two pair of stairs and down again without getting mixed up.

There is something wonderfully impressive about a good team of bullocks. In all their movements there is a solemn deliberation that it is most entertaining to watch. Nothing can hurry them. If you were going for the doctor you could not get three miles an hour out of a bullock-team.

When the waggon gets stuck, they never plunge about, and snort, and struggle, as a team of horses do when they are called upon to do some extra pulling. They just lay themselves quietly down to their work, looking back occasionally at their driver out of their great, wise, patient eyes, as much as to say, “We’re hitting out all we can, and if you swear till you burst, you can’t make us pull any harder.”

Each bullock has a name, which it knows perfectly. The driver gives his directions to each one separately, keeping up a running commentary of blasphemy the whole time; and according to the amount of bad language that accompanies the use of its name, each animal knows the exact amount of exertion that is required of it. It is a beautiful sight to see a good driver straighten out a team of eighteen bullocks to fetch a waggon and five ton of a load out of a bad place. Apparently without the slightest effort, his animals just lean gently forward on the yoke; but when once they get the pressure on, it is perfectly irresistible, and something is certain to happen. Either the waggon will shift or the chains must break.

The bullock-whip with which the driver is armed is a terrible weapon in the hands of a man who knows how to use it. The lash is made of plaited greenhide about nine feet long, and is hung square on the end of a six-foot stick by way of a handle. A good driver very seldom touches his bullocks with the whip at all, the crack of it, which is as loud as a pistol-shot, being quite sufficient to induce a well-broken team to pull their hardest.

Occasionally, however, the best driver finds it necessary to let a bullock feel the whip, and then he will do it in a way that the animal will never forget. A well-laid-on cut of the whip from the hand of a workman will lay six inches of a bullock’s ribs open as clean as if it had been done with a knife. I have seen a bullock lie down and begin to bellow with terror when it got to the exact spot in a road where, months before, it had been flogged for not pulling.

Many drivers are brutally cruel to their bullocks, and are continually laying the whip into them merely to vent their own savage temper. But a good driver will always be known by the hides of his team. The marks of the whip will be scarce, but what there are will be deep and laid on in the right place. From constantly associating with his team, a bullock-driver imbibes a great deal of the lethargic nature of the animals themselves.

After crawling along the road for years beside his bullocks at the rate of a mile and a half an hour, anything approaching to hurry becomes eliminated from his nature.

There is an incurable dilatory dawdle about every movement of a man who has been a few years on the road that will always proclaim his profession, and will stick to him ever after, whatever other line he may take up.

If you speak to a bullock-driver he will take as long to turn his head round to look at you as a horse-driver would to answer you, and nothing will ever induce him to get his bullocks yoked up before about ten o’clock in the day. When on the road, if he knocks eight or nine miles a day out of his team, he reckons that is very fair travelling.

George Tucker was a model specimen of his class. He was wonderfully patient with his bullocks, but he could get more work out of them than almost anyone I ever saw, and, I believe, was as fond of them as if they had been his own children. The first day that he started up to the reefs to bring the quartz down, I went with him, to see how he got on.

He got up to the “Star” paddock all right, having hitched his team on to the back of the waggon, and drawn it up backwards, as there was no room to turn at the top. Having loaded up, he prepared to start down the steep pinch again, and, in order to save the necks of his “polers,” he tried to get the waggon as near the edge of the paddock as possible before locking the wheels. Relying upon the handiness and obedience of his team, he made a strange mistake for so old a hand, and had not even the brake on. In drawing on to the edge he just went a yard too far, and away went the waggon down the hill, with four ton and a half of quartz on it.

Tucker rushed after it, trying in vain to get the brake on, while the “off-sider,” who was helping him, made futile attempts to keep the team straight out in front of the waggon. It was no use. For a few yards it went slowly enough, and it looked as if it might get safely to the bottom. But gradually the pace increased, the leading bullocks stumbled and fell, bringing the others down on top of them, and the waggon went with irresistible force right over the struggling mass of bullocks, forging its way down the hill, till their carcases blocked it from going any farther.

When we got down there the team was a most heart-rending sight. Horns, hair, and blood were strewed about in all directions, and at first it looked as if every bullock was dead. They were all jammed up in a dense mass, with chains wound round them in such confusion it was difficult to know where to begin taking them out of winding.

By degrees we got them all clear, and found that three were killed outright, another had its back broken, and the two others were terribly knocked about. Nearly every one had lost a horn, and some of them both. The waggon, strange to say, had never even upset, and, of course, was quite uninjured. Fortunately, Tucker had only taken six of his bullocks up the hill, and left the rest down below.

He took it quite quietly. The occasion was far too solemn for any swearing; so he helped us to light a funeral pyre over the carcases of his dead favourites, and, climbing on to his horse, he turned the rest of his team out into the Bush, and went off to Grosvenor Downs, some sixty miles away, to hunt up some fresh bullocks. In a week he had his team in working order again, and finished the job of drawing down the quartz without any further misfortune.

Anyone would have thought that such an event as the sudden death of four of his best bullocks would have called forth a paroxysm of fury from such a habitual blasphemer as a bullock-driver, and made him exhaust every possible combination of oaths in his vocabulary. But in reality a great deal of the bad language which he is in the habit of using is what may be called professional swearing, and does not in the least imply loss of temper. A bullock-driver knows that his bullocks are so accustomed to hearing disgraceful language that certain words and a certain tone of voice are absolutely necessary to make them pull, and when they get in a fix he has to work himself up to a pitch of simulated fury, and use most awful expressions to induce them to exert themselves.

But while the rocks around are still resounding with oaths that make one shiver to hear, he will turn round with a cheery smile on his face to greet anyone who happens to be passing, and wipe the foam from his mouth to answer a question with the utmost good humour. It is astonishing how a man who is apparently in the habit of getting into a violent passion upon the slightest provocation will sometimes command his temper when one would think it was impossible.

I remember perfectly well the disappointment of a large audience at finding that like causes do not always produce like results in matters pertaining to temper. A carrier was drawing sand up a very long steep hill, at the top of which there were a lot of men at work. He was a most notorious blasphemer, and his power of language was so extraordinary that everyone used to put down their tools and listen when he had a bad attack. Upon one occasion, as he was coming up the hill, the tail-board of his dray fell out without his knowing it, and, of course, all the sand ran out.

One of the men who was working near the top saw what had happened, and instantly attracted the attention of his mates to the impending scene. As the dray drew near the top all the men knocked off work and gradually collected around, in sure and certain hope of a more than usually lively display of profanity from the carrier.

When he got to the top he stopped and looked round. A breathless silence prevailed whilst it gradually soaked into him what had happened. He looked at the empty dray, and at the weary long pull up the hill which he had just accomplished. Then he looked sadly and half apologetically at the expectant crowd around him, and in a tone of deep feeling observed, “Boys, I ain’t equal to the occasion,” and went straight off for another load.

While I was putting up the mill I had a bullock-team of my own to draw in the logs for sawing and do the work about the place. Whenever there was a slack time I used to send it down to Port Mackay for a load, but it was a horrid fraud. The bullocks were good enough, but it was impossible to get a decent man to drive them.

A man who drives his own bullocks is lazy enough, but a man who drives someone else’s is simply the incarnation of idleness. I had several drivers one after the other, but it was always the same old game. When they were at home they used to swear they had lost the bullocks, having, of course, “planted” them up some obscure creek, and if they were sent on the road they always got on the spree.

I was very glad when Dick Absolon offered to take the team off my hands, and to contract for the work about the place. I had a lot of trouble in getting sound trees for the bed-logs of my machinery. There was any amount of timber about the place, but it takes a good tree to square twenty-four inches for a length of twenty feet, because most Queensland trees, when they get to a certain size, get a pipe in the middle, and I would not stand anything that was not perfectly solid. In putting up a battery for crushing quartz it is impossible to be too careful about getting the foundations solid. Upon this everything depends. You may have the best mill, and all the most recent appliances and improvements for saving gold, but if your foundations shake you will lose a lot of gold.

Many a promising gold field has been ruined by having bad machinery put up on it. Reefs that would have paid handsomely with good machinery are abandoned as unpayable, and the field is deserted.

In laying the foundations of my stamper-boxes I went right down to the bed rock, with a trench twenty feet long and four feet six inches wide. In the bottom of this I laid three feet of concrete cement for the foundation of the bed-logs. The bed-logs themselves were two splendid sticks of curly red-gum, nineteen feet long, sawn square twenty-four inches by twenty-one, and bolted together with two-inch iron bolts. These were laid horizontally in the trench. Three upright piles, five feet high and twenty-four inches square, standing on the bed-logs, formed the foundation of each stamper-box. These piles were very strongly bolted together, fitted with the utmost nicety, and levelled with the accuracy of a billiard table.

Each stamper-box was a solid casting, weighing nearly a ton, about four feet long, four feet high, and fifteen inches in width.

In each box five stampers work. The stampers are raised about ten inches, and then allowed to fall, by means of a shaft which revolves overhead, which is fitted with “cams” or “wipers,” which give two drops of the stamper for every revolution of the shaft. The weight of each stamper with the shank, head, shoe, and disc complete, is about eight hundredweight. They work close together in the box, and underneath each is placed a die of hematite iron, and between the bottom of this and the floor of the box itself a layer of quartz is always placed, to prevent the shock of the stamper’s fall from breaking the box.

Round the boxes is placed a frame of heavy cross-logs to support the columns upon which the cam-shaft works. These logs are kept quite clear of any contact with the foundation of the boxes, so that the inevitable jar of the constant fall of the stampers may not injure the rest of the machinery. The shaft is worked by belting connected with a stationary engine, which can be instantly disconnected on to a loose pulley-wheel.

At the back of the boxes are the quartz-shoots into which the quartz is tipped out of the drays from the reefs, and broken up into pieces about the size of a man’s fist. The feeder stands here with a long-handled shovel, and slings the quartz into an opening at the back of the box.

There is a good deal of art in feeding the stampers properly, and a good man will run a ton a shift more through the boxes than a duffer, with the same number of revolutions to the minute. If he feeds too slow, of course there is waste of power, and he is liable to break the dies by letting the stampers fall on to them too clean. On the other hand, if he feeds too fast he chokes them, and wastes any amount of time that way. A feeder takes a twelve hours’ shift right on end, and a very monotonous occupation it is.

In the front of the box is an opening about two feet long and a foot high, fitted with gratings. The fineness of the gratings used varies according to the coarseness of the gold in the stone crushed, but from a hundred and eighty to two hundred and forty holes to the square inch are the ordinary ones. A constant stream of water is kept flowing through the boxes while the stampers are at work, and the stone is pounded up inside till it can only escape in the form of fine mud through the gratings.

From time to time a little quicksilver is thrown into the boxes, and all the coarse gold collects in the form of amalgam.

Below the boxes are the tables upon which the fine gold that escapes from the boxes is collected. These tables are sheets of copper on wooden frames, and have a slope of about half an inch to the foot. There are three sets of them, and at the end of each is what is called a quicksilver ripple, which is a solid piece of wood with three troughs cut along it, about two inches deep, each a little lower than the other, and filled nearly full of quicksilver. The copper tables themselves are faced with quicksilver, which is kept constantly bright by the use of nitric acid or cyanide of potass.

Keeping the tables and quicksilver in good order is a science of itself, for, unless the quicksilver is lively, quantities of gold are lost.

The water flows from the boxes along the whole length of the tables, carrying with it the tailings from the boxes and the fine gold. This last is caught by the quicksilver, and hardens on to the plates in amalgam. From time to time this is scraped off as the crushing goes on, and the tables faced again with fresh quicksilver.

The man who attends to the tables, and to the retorting and smelting of the gold, is called the “amalgamator.” Good men at this trade are scarce, and will easily earn from four to six pounds a week on a Queensland diggings. Even with the greatest care, and first-rate tables, a good deal of gold always contrives to get away. The tailings, as they are called, that have passed over the tables and run away into the waste drain, are analysed from time to time to test the waste of gold that is going on.

This process, above described, is the simplest form of crushing quartz, and is only fit for stone which contains gold in a pure form, unmixed with pyrites, galena, and other abominations that drive an amalgamator out of his mind. Where these exist, the tailings have to be separately treated, with more elaborate contrivances.

The tables lie close under the stamper-boxes, but great care is taken to keep them from actually coming into contact, for fear the jar of the stampers should interfere with them.

Holliman certainly did his work to admiration, and the mill is now reckoned to be about the best set up of any in Queensland.

Having got everything ready for a start, we fixed on a day for christening the mill, and my brother’s wife came up from the station, forty miles away, to perform the ceremony. After some consideration I determined to call the mill the “Sabbath Calm.” Anyone who has ever lived near a quartz mill will see at once that the name was not altogether inappropriate. The row made by the stampers is perfectly deafening. They go on, when quartz is available, from six o’clock on Monday morning till six o’clock on Saturday night, and no one who has not been maddened by the incessant din for a whole week can thoroughly appreciate the repose that Sunday’s quiet brings with it.

The christening morning broke fair over the valley of Mount Britten, and, if the sun thought anything about it at all, he must have been startled at the change which a few months had made in the wilderness. The mill itself was a most imposing sight, with its vast expanse of galvanised iron roof and tall brick stack; and anyone who scattered a glance over the tremendously heavy machinery, fitted with all the most recent improvements, and faultlessly erected, would have found it difficult to realise that he was in the heart of the lonely mountains of Queensland, where, eighteen months before, the kangaroos and wallabies had had it all to themselves.

All the men who were working for me had a holiday in honour of the occasion, and all who were not gave themselves one, so that the whole population of the diggings assembled to see the start. They had all treated themselves to a wash in the creek, and everyone who could had fossicked out a clean shirt and a flash-coloured silk handkerchief as a tribute of respect to the important day.

The old doctor was in splendid form. He had been saving himself up for the occasion for ever so long, and, I believe, had drunk nothing for a week on purpose to enjoy himself all the more. In his excitement he had forgotten the wash in the creek, but he had climbed into an old pith helmet and a faded blue coat, which made him look far more disreputable than he did in his working clothes. He drank enough for four without ever turning a hair, and never stopped talking and laughing from sunrise to sundown.

Holliman surveyed his own completed work with perfect satisfaction, and without a particle of anxiety as to the working of the machinery in the approaching trial. He had the confidence of a real artist in his own performance, and, knowing that it had all been done in the best possible way, he had not a doubt about the result. The amalgamating table was turned into a bar, and one of the men told off as barman, with orders to give everyone anything they wanted as long as the liquor held out. He had a couple of buckets full of rum, with a pannikin to ladle it out, and an enormous army of bottles of beer, porter, brandy, and whisky.

A bottle of brandy decorated with streamers of red, white, and blue ribbon was hung from the roof, opposite the fly-wheel. Punctually, at 12 o’clock, my brother’s wife advanced, amid a solemn silence, and grasped the bottle. Holliman looked at me as much as to say, “I’ve done my part of the business, now you can start yours.”

The steam was on, so I jammed down the lever. Slowly and smoothly the vast fly-wheel began to revolve; the bottle, discharged with unerring precision, was dashed to pieces against it; and the “Sabbath Calm” was fairly started, amid wild cheers from the assembled crowd. The old doctor nearly went mad with delight. He flung his old helmet into the air, and, waving his third pannikin of rum round his head, was about to give vent to the discordant bellow by which a German endeavours to imitate a British cheer, when he overbalanced himself and fell backwards into an enormous tailing-tub full of water. Far from discouraging him, this catastrophe seemed to delight him immensely. He was extricated, perfectly good-humoured and cheerful, and, having called for another pannikin of rum, he insisted on making a speech, to which no one listened, all hands being busily engaged in drinking success to the new mill.