Argus (Melbourne, Vic. : 1848 - 1957), Thursday 29 April 1852, page 4


MOUNT ALEXANDER.

(FROM OUR SPECIAL COMMISSIONER.

No IX.

Nearly the whole of the ranges about Bendigo have been proved to be highly auriferous, and numerous surface diggings have been discovered within a mile or two of the creek. None of these will be available until the rains have fairly set in, and started the creek running. Never have I been more startled with instances of success than I have been at Bendigo. It is by no means rare there, to see a man setting off to work in his hole, the only tool or implement he carries with him being a large and pointed knife, known in diggers parlance as a "fossicking knife." The mode of proceeding is by no means uninteresting. Arrived at the hole, which, by the way, may have taken him and his

mates a week or more to sink, he descends, and lighting a candle and his pipe, he lays himself out at full length on the rock which forms the bottom of his hole, and whilst he blows out the fragrant wreaths from his dudeen, he quietly amuses himself, at the same time, by digging out with the point of his knife, such nuggets of the precious metal as may offer themselves to his view. Of course, in this operation, the small specks of gold are not collected, as this would be too troublesome a process; but the earth containing them is gathered up in a pocket handkerchief, and I have more than once seen two ounces washed out from a handkerchief full of stuff, whence the large pieces had been previously picked. By this "fossicking," as it is termed, men have been known to obtain three and four pounds weight of gold in a day; though such cases are not, as a matter of course, nume-rous. This species of dry digging is now much resorted to, not only on the Bendigo, but on the Forest and other Creeks, the scarcity of water preventing the possibility of washing all the earth that would, were this element plentiful, amply repay the labour. Thus it happens that very much of the earth, now lying at the bottom or around the mouth of many of the holes, having been cast aside as useless during the drought, contains a per centage of gold sufficient to make the washing of it in the wet season highly remunerative. In fact, to prove this, after the recent showers up here, for they were no more than showers, many people were out prospecting amongst the refuse stuff thrown out of the holes, and I have met with persons who have thus collected two and three ounces in a few hours. I myself, not be-ing too proud to dismount and become their possessor, picked up three pretty little nuggets that very handsomely offered themselves to my attention, as I rode along past a number of deserted holes. It has often struck me that in many instances where a heavy find of gold has been made, very nearly as much of the precious metal is shovelled out with the earth as is gathered by the diggers ; for with two and three ounce nug-gets glittering in their sight, they have no eyes for the fine grains, which in a rich hole, so thickly stud the earth that surrounds the larger nuggets. Besides which, let the digger search as carefully as he will, unless the whole of his good earth be washed, he will almost in-variably throw out as much gold as he

collects.

About north-west from Black's store, at Gol-den Point, and it a distance of about a mile, is the specimen hill of Bendigo, and a trip there would not be regretted by the tourist, even though he should be unsuccessful in quartz smashing, and obtain no specimens being anxious to see all I could, I determined to visit the spot, and having vague and indis-

tinct notions that half a hundred weight of gold were lying shut up in masses of white quartz, in the same as the Genii were accustomed to be shut up in yellow copper vases, &c., in the times referred to in the Arabian Nights, I armed myself with a huge mason's sledgeham-mer, and proceeded to the ground. Al-though not over successful in my gold search, I managed, however, to secure a few small specimens. I was yet highly delighted with the scenery of the spot; and I rather suspect now that much of my ill success was owing to my attention being more taken up by the beauties of nature, than by the glitter of gold; and that whilst my eyes wandered over the heavy ranges around, my blows fell but lightly on the quartz below me—besides which the sledge got most confoundedly heavy after the first few blows. I nevertheless witnessed that good luck in another which Dame Fortune seemed inclined to deny to me, for I saw one man pocket about four ounces of pure gold in specimens, all ob-tained from one boulder of quartz of about eighteen inches in diameter. The ranges here, as you may readily imagine, are exceedingly broken and precipitous, being tumbled about in such glorious confusion as to make any attempt at description impossible. Being covered only with rough wiry grass and now prickly shrubs, they yet present, with these alone, a most verdant appearance. The soil is mostly a decomposed iron stone, exceedingly stony, a full third being broken quartz pebbles, whilst huge boulders and solid masses of the same rock may be seen, the first profusely scattered about, and the latter cropping out in long un-

broken strata from the earth. On the crown of

the ranges, the rock is but sparsely covered with soil, lying in spots completely naked, and shew-ing the most curious formations. Here, may be seen a mass of ironstone rock, with veins of quartz running through it, and forming occa-sionally the most beautiful mosaic ; there may be found a mass of quartz with a vein of ironstone through it, burnt and wasted by the action, no doubt, of electric heat, into al-

most perfection ; in another place may be discovered the face of the freestone rock though still mingled with quartz the uni-versal pervader in these localities, the veins of which run through it in irregular thicknesses. By the way, I give the name of freestone to the rocks, they being generally known as such by the diggers, but having no pretensions to geo-logical knowledge, I am not prepared to be-come responsible for the proper application of the term. Possibly they may be the "trap" rocks of geologists. On one of the ranges a very magnificent sight is offered by two huge masses of quartz, which stand in close proximity to each other on the very crown of the ridge, elevated some thirty or forty feet above the surrounding objects. These, as they rear their heads, time worn and moss grown, look like two vast tombstones ; and a very small stretch of fancy will lend us to be-lieve them to have been raised to the memory of some pair of Titans, who, in the hurried flight from Jove's thunderbolts, had happened to light upon the terra incognita Australis. It seems, however, that now they have but a small chance of retaining their elevation much longer. Already have the pick and the maul made inroads on their fair proportions ; your digger has no poetry in his composition, and the only harmony to his taste is the pleasing chink that is given out by the gold bag ; thus these giant wrecks have been invaded, and are now facing piecemeal beneath the strokes the hammer and the chisel, The way in which the handsomest specimens are found, is by quarrying in the solid strata of quartz, until a solid cake from eighteen inches to two feet on each face is dislodged. The adventurer then sits himself down, and commences breaking up this mass into pieces of an inch or half an inch square; no light task I assure you, with crys-tal quartz nearly as hard as the iron that is used upon it. ln smashing such a piece as this, it rarely happens that no specimen is found, though much labor and some patience is absolutely necessary for the work.

There is also another specimen hill about three miles from the one I have described, be-tween the Bendigo and Bullock Creeks, but as it would have required some knowledge of lo-calities to have found it, as I could procure no guide, and as, moreover, my overgrown ham-mer would have been rather a weighty com-panion for so long a ramble, I did not attempt

its discovery.

By the way, there is a specimen gulley at the Forest Creek, from which some of the most beautiful samples of gold in quartz that I have seen have been procured. One of them in par-ticular was most unique ; the gold, running in veins through the quartz, formed the perfect semblance of a tree—trunk, branches, leaves, and all, complete. It has been named the Royal Oak, not by any means an inappropríate appellation. The locality in which the au-riferous quartz is here found, is a deep, pre-

cipitous gulley towards the head of Forest Creek, running into that Creek at a spot near where the Porcupine Inn road cross it. Black masses of storm stained rocks overhang it on either side, now standing up a solid impene-trable wall, again scattered about or heaped together in the most grotesque confusion The

proceedings here are different from those at Bendigo, for the richest masses of quartz are those which are dug out from holes sunk in the bed of the gulley, whence they are obtained— not by quarrying, but in isolated boulders. Many of these may be broken up before a so-litary specimen is obtained ; whereas, at Ben-digo, hardly a mass of the same size is to be found that does not contain at least one sample of the precious metal.

As to the sojourners on Bendigo, I give them the palm over the diggers on the other creeks ; as Ney was called le plus brave des braves, so I call the Bendigo diggers " the most enterprising of the enterprising.'' The first who broke ground on Bendigo were men who left the Forest Creek in its palmiest times, and who to secure fortune quitted a cer-tainty to brave all the uncertainty as well as the inconvenience, and possibly the loss, of opening up a new field. Well was their en-terprizing spirit rewarded, and well did it de-serve such a reward. Again, those that fol-

lowed them had to leave localities whence hundreds of pounds worth of gold were being extracted by men around them, to try their luck upon a spot of which all that was known was mere rumour. Is it to be wondered at, then, that the diggers on Bendigo should be the hardiest, the most spirited, the most persevering, and withal the most difficult to control, of all the cast of "lucky vagabonds'' in Victoria? There is a kind of bold offhand manner and an inde-pendent swagger about them, that at once and at first sight gives you this notion. " Mister —," I one day heard one of these diggers say to his companion, laying a very strong em-phasis on the Mister, "Mister indeed! Who the d—'s he? We all pays our licenses, and are all men alike here !" This will give you a notion of the kind of spirit of equality that pervades these men. May it not also suggest some doubts as to whether the irresponsible despotism of Downing street will continue much longer? I will show you also that the official screw has not been clapped on here— that these Diggins have not been overrun by fine-hunting Commissioners and gold-hunting Constables—and that no £5 forays have been made. On the contrary, the course that I have in a previous letter pointed out as the best to be pursued, has been here followed. The men have been warned of the consequences of work-ing without a license, instead of being fined first and warned afterwards, and the result has been, that a very large majority the Dig-gers now come forward regularly and volunta-rily to take out their licenses, and thereby but little trouble is given to the Commissioners. I will not say that there are not some schemers who evade payment as long as they can ; but again, the most of those who do not pay, are poor devils who have been unlucky, and are unable to spare the amount required for the fee. As to the remainder, they are in-corrigibles, who, if fined twenty times would still endeavour to avoid the impost, for them let the law have no mercy. I have previously

had occasion to denounce certain acts of cer-tain Commissioners which I did not think added to their fair fame or to the interest of the Government they represented. Having hitherto used censure, let me now give praise where praise is due. Since indeed is the pleasure I have in testifying to the general good feeling expressed by the Bendigo Diggers towards their resident Commissioners—Messrs Cockburn and Gilbert. They are spoken of on all hands in the highest terms, and as it may possibly happen that I may have a word or two to say to one or other of these gentlemen in a different tone to that I now use, I trust that having borne testimony to their merit in one particular, I may not be considered a mere grumbler and fault-finder, even by the fastidious journalist of the Herald.

Apropos of the Herald, I find that my brief allusions to the Herald's office at Forest Creek, has given offense. I am exceedingly sorry for this, and must beg to offer my apologies to the wounded feelings of so respectable a journal. But it never struck the immaculate editor, that if I had been disposed to be satirical

I could have penned a much more amusing, but withal, sarcastic description of his office, than I have done. For instance, I could have described the heterogeneous nature of the wares amidst which the respectable Journal was exposed for public sale. I could have shown how leading articles, lemonade, and other weak, washy trash, —how toadying puffs, Graham's pills, and other nauseous quackeries—how paragraphs, sour ap-ples, dummy advertisements and other rubbish, were all jumbled up together on the board, and served out to the few that could be imposed upon to purchase—with this difference, however, that the sale of the washy lemonade beat that of the washy leaders by long odds ; and that even the quack medicines and sour apples went off two to one before the puffs and paragraphs. All this I might have said, with dome little additions, had need been, but, I did not do so, and surely some little consideration should have been given to my forebearance.

But I have gone off into a very dull and heavy subject, for which your readers will not at all thank me; and in so doing, by that mys-terious sympathy that is inexplicable, my brain has imbibed a considerable portion of the lead that so strongly pervades the columns of the Journal with which I have had the temerity to come into mental contact. As I thus feel my-self utterly incompetent at present to write any thing fit for the Argus, I must at once draw my communication to a close, leaving it to " Time, the restorer," to give me back my usual tone

of mind.