Item 04: Memoirs of a Colonial Boy by Robert Joseph Stewart, ca. 1971 - Page 99
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[Page 99]
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in the big Huntington Dam at the lower end of this valley. It had been excavated and banked-up by the Mines Department to enable miners to pan the gold-bearing quartz gravel of the ancient buried stream, to which they dug their shafts down though an average of twenty feet of overlying alluvium. This field was worked-out and abandoned except for a few hopeful old "fossikers" winding up their rawhide "buckets" of gravel on crude windlasses. In their haste to pan only the rich "pay-dirt" the original miners had left small heaps of poorer gravel lying on the surface. One day when Ikey was digging out a rabbit burrow under one of these heaps, he sensed that one piece of quartz seemed unusually heavy as he scraped it away with his mattock; closer examination revealed a small lump of gold on the side of it. Ikey smelted the gold off the side of the stone in a forge of the Bushmans Mine, and took it to the nearest Bank; it weighed nearly one and a half ounces, and he got about £4-10-0d for it.
Sometimes, holding guttering candles in one hand, and hanging on to the rungs with the other, we dared to go down the ricketty ladderways of the several shafts of the old Bushmans Mine, and walk along the roughly blasted-out tunnels connecting these shafts at different levels. "Oft in the stilly night" years afterwards, as I lay in bed, I thought of these dangerous indiscretions, and shuddered to think of the risks we took.
Occasionally Ikey was able to sneak his father's big bunch of keys and gain access to the explosives store, and the interesting chemicals in the assay laboratory; a few sticks of dynamite and some detonators and fuse were filched, and never missed. Ikey loved to show a stick of dynamite to a group of uninitiated boys and impress them with its latent destructive powers; then to their horror he would calmly strike a match, light the stick at one end, and drop it down an old shaft, where, burning fiercely, it gave out a lovely purplish glow as it vanished into the depths. Some of the youngsters were transfixed and others didn't stop running until they were home.
On the nights of Empire Day, and sometimes of Guy Fawkes Day,