Item 04: Memoirs of a Colonial Boy by Robert Joseph Stewart, ca. 1971 - Page 95
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[Page 95]
47
steam winding-engine, now pathetically idle; the boiler shed with its three fifty-feet-long Lancashire steam boilers; the chemical and assay laboratory with its intricate glassware and peculiar smells and the big smithy.
The long battery of fifty stamps (five in a big cast-iron box) was driven by a huge single-cylinder (24-inch bore) horizontal steam engine with a massive 14-feet diameter fly-wheel and a big polished steel Watt govenor. It was connected directly to a very long heavy shaft, that carried the "S" shaped cams which lifted and dropped the half-ton stamps, as it slowly revolved. The gold-bearing quartz was thus crushed to a fine sand, and a steady flow of water washed this through fine-mesh seives, leaving the coarser gold pieces behind. The fine gold was extracted, first by amalgamation with mercury spread on big sloping copper sheets, down which the slurry flowed, after which any remaining gold was dissolved by a sodium cyanide solution, mixed with the dried slurry in big wooden vats. The gold-containing solution was then subjected to a number of processes that finally yielded a large gold "top" at the bottom of a big crucible. The residue was dumped to form a number of long high sand ridges along the side of the hill; it was a good plasterers' sand, and all of it finally disappeared for building jobs.
"Ikey's" family lived in a wooden cottage near the mine. He was a very intelligent capable boy, a native genius in fact. Like me, he was an only son, but a year older than I was. At the age of about twelve or thirteen, he had, already, a good practical knowledge of mechanical engineering and mining, and was very clever in the use of all tools of trade. But school lessons bored him, and he played the truant as much as he possibly could. Because of his skill and usefulness in doing repairs and odd jobs to the school property, the headmaster tolerated his shortcomings. Ikey would deliberately, and secretly, break a gate off its hinges, just to get the job of repairing it the next day, instead of sitting in class; and it often entailed an errand down to the hardware store to buy bolts, screws, etc,