Item 04: Memoirs of a Colonial Boy by Robert Joseph Stewart, ca. 1971 - Page 3
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[Page 3]
1
I happened to be born one early April morn (11th April 1894) in the last few years of the 19th Century. The setting was my parents' modest wooden house, one of the few real houses in the recently arisen mining township of Peak Hill, near the middle of the then colony of New South Wales. Childbirth was still a very hazardous crisis for mother and child, in many parts of the Central West. In the absence of a Doctor, my Mother and I at least had the help of a very competent midwife, though quite often women were accouched by their husbands, only, for some, or all, of their children; sometimes with fatal results.
About forty years earlier, the site of Peak Hill was just a gentle hill-slope in a back paddock of the big Genanagie Station where a lucky, but observant, boundary rider discovered small gold nuggets in the surface. A frantic gold-rush ensued and people of all ages, nationalities and stations in life, came crowding to the scene from far and wide, staking their claims and making temporary homes in tents and bark huts.
The cream of the rich gold deposits near the surface was soon skimmed off by the digging of many shallow shafts and drives. But the "mother" reefs of gold-bearing quartz veins, and gold-impregnated shales, were soon located and syndicates and companies were formed to finance the systematic long-term exploitation of them with the best machinery then available: much London capital was forthcoming for this purpose. Deep shafts and long tunnels were excavated in the rock by the old-time primitive hammer and drill method, but the new nitro explosive Dynamite, recently invented by Nobel of Sweden had replaced gunpowder.
One abysmal "open-cut" was excavated in the underlying shale of the hill from which the little town got its name. For many years a large number of resident miners were employed there in three continuous shifts up to the time of World War 1.
And so Peak Hill settled down to grow rapidly into a rather scattered and tattered pastoral and gold mining centre.