The Rush That Never Ended

A History of Australian Mining

Geoffrey Blainey

• Publisher: Melbourne University Press Digital
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780522863673
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Australian & Oceanian History
• Index: History

Forget about Ned Kelly and the bushrangers: for my money if you want a really romantic and exciting saga of Australia, take a look at our mining history. It's a turbulent, dramatic story with enough material for a bookshelf full of best-sellers... a saga of tough men, iron-nerved gamblers, violence, death and glittering riches set against the backdrop of some of the most awful country on earth. And never has the story been better told than by Geoffrey Blainey. —Trevor Sykes
Australia is one of the world's great sources of mineral treasure. Out of the ground, on land and at sea, has come wealth to create a host of lucrative industries. Our landscape is littered with mines bearing evocative names like Rum Jungle, Noble's Nob, Broad Arrow and Siberia, and stories abound of fortunes won and lost.
The Rush That Never Ended tells the story of these mineral discoveries, describes the giants of Australia's mining history and records the tremendous influence that mining has had on Australia's attitudes to unionism, religion, law and politics.
The first edition of The Rush That Never Ended was a publishing sensation. It stayed on the best-seller lists for several months, and won the Gold Medal of the Australian Literature Society. Reviewers described it as 'a compelling book', 'readable and exciting history', 'full of anecdotes and unforgettable characters'.
This classic history of Australian mining now appears in its fifth edition, updated to bring the story up to the twenty-first century.

Resurgence

15 Indian Ocean Gold Trail

THE LONG SLOW decline of goldmining ceased about 1886, and that year the lodestars shone in northern Australia. Charters Towers gold was exhibited to thousands in London, and Englishmen invested heavily in its mines. Three hundred miles north-west of Charters Towers, in the heat of January 1886, Croydon was proclaimed a goldfield by the government and by thousands who rode or walked overland from the east or from the wharves of Normanton on the Gulf of Carpentaria. Far west on the goldfields of the Northern Territory the Chinese coolies were building the railway from Darwin, which all the optimists of 1886 swore would transform old gashes in the earth into a rich goldfield. Further west the amazing rush to the Kimberley district began in 1886. Such was the glamour of this first Western Australian goldfield that hundreds left Charters Towers at the peak of its share boom and followed the sun for nearly 1,800 miles.

The late birth of goldmining in Western Australia puzzled many men but not those who knew the land and its vastness. The gold regions lay in some of the hottest and driest parts of the continent, and so pastoralists long ignored the grasses that grew above the gold. Without sheep and cattle stations to supply lifelines for prospecting, few men ventured into the hot inland in search of gold. Those explorers and land-seekers who did venture sometimes saw gold but signs were few. There were few waterholes where they could wash the soils for gold, and even if there had been more water most of the colony’s auriferous areas lacked the splendour of Victoria’s surface alluvial gold. Moreover, long, undulating plains of soil and stones concealed like a blanket most of the solid rock that was host to the gold. This was Australia’s Pre-Cambrian shield, formed long before the golden lands of eastern Australia, and the ancient rocks that did outcrop were unfamiliar to many travellers.

The northern part of Western Australia was known as the Kimberley district. Its tumbled mountains rose in the path of the monsoons, and sand dunes and desert isolated it from the pastures of the south. Alexander Forrest, the surveyor, crossed this north-west corner of Australia in 1879 and vowed that the valleys of the Ord and Fitzroy would each nourish a million sheep, and a few pastoralists came from east and south to call him liar. Forrest and his geologist Fenton also saw gold in the desolate ranges, and when the weary party reached the overland telegraph line in the Northern Territory and rode north to Pine Creek and spread their news in that waning goldfield there was excitement. Adam Johns, a mine manager at Pine Creek, and his mate Phil Saunders had had poor luck and they decided to risk their savings in the expensive search for gold in the Kimberleys. Few ships sailed from Darwin so they hired a cutter in August 1881 to take them to the small pearling port of Cossack, seventeen days’ sailing to the south-west. After prospecting 250 miles of the Ashburton River without finding gold they rode far north to Yeeda station on the Fitzroy River and waited two months for their provisions to arrive by sea. They had already been a year away from Pine Creek when they left the Fitzroy River to prospect in the ranges to the east, and the expenses of their trip, the chartering of ships, the buying of horses and stores, were so high that one can understand why the desolate parts of Western Australia defied for so long the skilled prospectors. Only rich miners, skilled with horses and used to rough terrain, could even attempt the search for gold. With few ships trading the coast and few sheep stations inland, their task was herculean.

Johns, Saunders, a white man and a Darwin Aborigine left the new sheep stations on the Fitzroy River with twenty horses and eight months’ provisions. A forlorn band, they rode into the ranges early in August 1882. They tried for days to cross sheer sandstone cliffs of the King Leopold Range. The Aborigines menaced them. The horses found little grass and lacerated their feet in the stony country. Johns rode in pain, barely able to see or walk, ailing with a paralysis he thought was rheumatism. In tributaries of the Ord they found gold in many places but, being the dry season, they had no water to wash the soil thoroughly. With Johns still in pain they rode into the Northern Territory, reached the overland telegraph at Katherine, and got to the gold diggings at Yam Creek in time for a welcome banquet on 28 October 1882. No men more deserved their welcome. They were the first experienced prospectors to find gold in the west, and, but for the expense of working poor gold in wild country that had no line of supply or communication, they would have returned after resting. They did return four years later, when the spread of the pastoralists had eased the opening of the goldfield. Saunders in time followed far south the chain reaction of rushes which the Kimberley gold exploded. He was a gold man to the last, dying at the age of ninety-three after falling into his campfire at the gold town of Menzies.

In the steps of the Pine Creek men came the geologist, E. T. Hardman, leading an official party well supplied with men, stores, horses, and medicinal rum. They could stay in the ranges longer than Johns and Saunders and they found more gold. Often Hardman counted nearly thirty quartz reefs in a mile. Hammering quartz to powder with an axehead, he observed specks of gold. At night in his tent with rum bottle and monocle, he wrote glowing reports of two thousand square miles of auriferous country. How payable the gold would be he could not tell, but when late in 1884 he returned to the civilized south and brandy and soda he spoke of grains of gold in most dishes he had washed. A visit to Bendigo and a study of its reefs and quartz convinced him that the Kimberleys were rich.

Hardman had failed to find the heavy nugget or the dazzling reef which alone could make men run to the Kimberleys. But his report inspired Charles Hall, a frugal bushman who saved money from sinking wells and making fences near Roebourne, to gather a party and search for gold. Hall and John Slattery led a team of six to Derby, the new port for the Kimberleys, where they borrowed ten horses and pack saddles from the government. On their first trip east they found ten ounces of gold. On a second trip they got eighty-one ounces including a nineteen-ounce nugget. Within months Hall’s Creek was the magnet of the longest overland gold trail Australia had seen.

The Kimberleys were so isolated by land or sea that diggers spent hundreds of pounds reaching the field. Some rode up the coast from the pearling port of Cossack, crossing scorched desert. Some hired pearling luggers and landed at Derby, a tiny town on King Sound where the spring tide rose over thirty feet and receding left the town encircled by mud. Into the mud came a steamer from Sydney and a schooner from Darwin, loaded with horses and diggers. On 17 May 1886 Perth got a message sent by ships to Cossack and then by telegraph, ‘The rush to the fields has already commenced.’ A fortnight earlier a cable had reached Perth from Auckland announcing that a large party was about to sail and wanting to know where the Kimberleys were. ‘Great excitement’ were the last two words in the cable and they echoed through Australia.

Some ships jettisoned the diggers at Wyndham, where not even a jetty stood in the mud, and some passengers looked south and saw the bastion of mountains like the wall of China and went no further. A few drove horse and cart into the mountains and realized that only packhorses could reach Hall’s Creek. Most diggers, however, landed at Derby and followed the easier trek three hundred miles east. At the nightly camps along the track, waggons, barrows and handcarts lay by muddy waterholes with baggage strewn beside them. Horse teams were overloaded, and as the horses had eaten hay on the sea trip and now ate coarse grass they could not pull the loads. Along the way goods were unloaded and concealed in marked graves. No water lay on one stage of thirty-seven miles between the Margaret River and Soda Springs, and the rotting carcases of horses and the tinned foods tossed from heavy swags became mileposts on the track. Tough men with fit horses who set out at four in the morning did not usually complete the waterless stretch until midnight.

This was the track where Russian Jack the digger won a place in Australian folklore. He had left Derby pushing a barrow with shafts seven feet long and a wooden wheel so wide that it did not sink far into the sand, and on the track he overtook two old men who were too tired to carry their swags. He loaded the swags on his barrow and pushed them to the next waterhole with the old men walking beside him. Another day he pushed a sick digger in the barrow to the nearest shade and water. Stumpy in body, grizzled of face, unable to write but able to curse, a gentleman to females and a lout to gentlemen, Russian Jack had loyalty. For years he was to mine gold for himself or for wages, and his loyalty to men he worked with became a proverb. Working years later on a Mount Morgan (W.A.) mine, he fell down a jagged open cut while walking through the bush in the darkness. Three days later they found him seventy feet below, cut and fly-blown, and his one comment was, ‘I’ve missed a shift.’ Russian Jack had reached Hall’s Creek in 1886 with his barrow loaded high with water cask, tools, blankets, and food for months. Hundreds carrying half his load turned back without seeing the goldfield.

Far to the east the excitement was intense. The Government Resident at Darwin saw the ships calling with farmers, labourers, clerks, townsmen, bound for Wyndham and Derby and thought it was the greatest rush since Port Curtis and likely to be as disastrous. Nearly every European miner in the Territory who could afford horses and provisions took a steamer from Darwin or rode into the wilderness, abandoning alluvial claims yielding £12 a week for the lure and uncertainty of the Kimberleys. Even the Chinese would have hurried west but for the new law preventing them from settling on a Western Australian goldfield until five years after it had been proclaimed.

Hundreds of men crossed the continent to join the rush. Saddlers in Charters Towers and blacksmiths in Croydon saw them preparing for the long journey. Towns in Western Queensland saw them ride through. The little port of Borroloola, a few iron buildings on a crocodile river near the Gulf of Carpentaria, provisioned them with potatoes and painkiller. The police magistrate counted hundreds going through the town. He saw one man of seventy pass on foot and a woman ride sidesaddle with a child on her knees. A thousand miles lay ahead of them before they reached those shining hills.

The ragged cavalcade crossed under the telegraph line, calling at Katherine telegraph station for directions or food and water. From there to Kimberley three or four homesteads were the only habitations in 570 miles, and these homesteads lost countless horses and cattle. The manager of Spring Vale reported that ‘great numbers of men from Queensland have passed by, some of them very undesirable characters, who prefer picking their own beef and horseflesh’. They faked the brands on their stolen horses with any piece of iron they could find, and at Kimberley one could see horses from nearly every pastoral run in Northern Australia.

Others rode up the telegraph line from South Australia, then pushed west. One party comprised two famous Moonta miners, George and John Brown (known better as Wonoka Jack), another whose only name was Tommy the Rag, a runaway sailor from Port Augusta named Hugh Campbell, and three others. At Newcastle Waters the seven joined six men who had come overland from Queensland, and ‘The Ragged Thirteen’ rode north to the telegraph station at the Katherine and then out west. On the way they fought bare fists with shanty-keepers, stole horses and cattle, desperadoes living off the land. Near Victoria River Downs their unshod horses bruised their feet; so the leader Tom Nugent, alias Tom Holmes, called at the station and pretended to be a Queensland pastoralist looking for land. He played crib that night with the storekeepers while his mates prised slabs of wood from the store and borrowed flour and sugar and four hundredweight of horseshoes.

Thirteen men riding together could protect themselves, but some went alone or in pairs; and when eight years later the South Australian H. Y. L. Brown, visited Willeroo station on a tributary of the Victoria River he heard of many diggers going or returning who had been killed by natives and he saw the natives using iron instead of stone in spears and tomahawks. The springs of broken drays and discarded strips of wire from the passing rush had brought the iron age to the district.

Near Hall’s Creek the three treks met: the men from Wyndham, from Derby, and from far overland. Culled by endurance, they could still marvel at the feats of those who continued to arrive from the east. One man walked from Queensland with a bag of oatmeal and a small tent fly, eating his gruel by the fire at night with no gun to shoot into the moving shadows. A tattered group of six Afghans arrived with a woman who called herself The Mountain Maid, and she made money from the field though how she won it was never said.

And now they were there, men from everywhere and The Mountain Maid. The first warden counted about two thousand in September 1886 and perhaps there were never more than that. But so many came and went and so many did not reach the field that in the first year six thousand people possibly set out for the Kimberleys. The rush was small, but then the vast colony held only 36,000 people.

Some men had spent £500 on fares and equipment and, on the warden’s estimate, the average man spent £100 just to reach the field. Few took that much gold away. The layer of auriferous soil on grassy flats and in the bars of creeks was so thin that large areas were denuded of gold in weeks. New Zealand diggers were dismayed to find no defined runs of alluvium and no shallow leads. Victorian diggers hurried away from ground where the nearest water was miles away. In the dry season the only way of winning the gold was dryblowing, a method used in North Queensland, in western New South Wales, and far back in antiquity. Some diggers had two dishes, filled one with alluvial material, held it above their heads and let the dust and stone fall into the other dish on the ground. The dust blew away in the wind, leaving the pebbles and heavy specks of gold in the dish. Enterprising diggers scavenged amongst wrecked drays and abandoned harness and they improvised shaking boxes which they rocked in the wind on the principle of the winnowing machine. Dryblowing was grimy and inefficient; and there were few rich patches of gold.

Men fled the field in their hundreds, gold diggers became grave diggers. Late in 1886 one digger counted eight graves on the diggings, eight near Wyndham, and three on the road between. Fevers and ague and dysentery were so rife that Warden Price wrote pathetically to the government: ‘Great numbers were stricken down, in a dying condition, helpless, destitute of either money, food, or covering, and without mates or friends, simply lying down to die.’

Those who stayed to dig conquered despair. Cammilleri and Maitland, young seamen, spent Christmas of 1886 by a dray bogged to the axle. Maitland mixed a plum duff in the prospecting dish with a lacing of brandy and tied the duff in a clean shirt and sat till midnight by the boiling pot. On Christmas morning he curried some tinned tongue and produced the duff in a tin dish afire with brandy. They gorged that tongue and duff until they were light in the head, and so Cammilleri wrote, ‘We forgot our troubles, talked of old times at sea and in London, our friends and relatives and the girls we had met in many ports.’ Others anointed their sorrow in the stilling heat of Christmas with whisky bought for a shilling a nobbier, the nobbier being a Holloway’s ointment pot, the shilling being a lot of money. Ernest Giles, a brave explorer who had turned to digging, was one of many on the Mary River who celebrated by drinking a rum so deadly that he exclaimed to his mate Carr-Boyd: ‘Carr, dear boy, it would kill the devil.’

In time the messengers of civilization came, a telegraph line from Perth, and a Catholic priest who was feasted with johnny cakes and honoured with the intent hearing of a packed hotel that drank no liquor while he preached.

The patches of auriferous country spread ninety miles almost parallel to the border of Western Australia and the Territory, but after one year they held only four hundred diggers with perhaps another two hundred teamsters, packers, and miners along the tracks to port. The reefs which Hardman had seen through tinted monocle still lay untouched. William Carr-Boyd, a tall buccaneer and raconteur, believed they were rich and sailed for Melbourne with half a ton of quartz as proof. One trial crushing assayed 162 ounces to the ton, and a delirious report on the mine from two Victorian engineers was enough to float the Jackson’s Reef Gold Mining Company in June 1887. While shares soared, a Melbourne broker sent a man all the way to Derby to report on the mine, but he was not allowed to enter it. The stamp mill shipped around the coast did not reach the mine. The manager did and denounced it as a fraud. More Melbourne money came to work the reefs and erect eight stamp mills. A battery manager was speared by blacks, and the boom companies did not long outlive him. The reefs were patchy, and greedy for capital in that remote region. The warden telegraphed that the future of the field as one of the nation’s richest was assured, but his message faded as finer fields were opened to the south.

Kimberley’s influence was not measured by its meagre output and discredited name. It drew to Western Australia tough and alert prospectors who had learned elsewhere how to survive on scorched earth. They were the men whose petitions and resolutions helped persuade the colony to learn from the experience of Queensland and the Territory and ban Asiatic aliens from new fields. And they were the men who found rich gold in so many places down the coast, for Kimberley began a lightning r...