Volume 01: Production and resources of the northern and western districts of New South Wales, 1854 [ca. 1850-1857] - Page 573
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ridges to four, ten or twenty feet sinking in the gullies. Capitalists sunk shafts to 80 feet. Bendigo for a considerable period sustained a population of 100,000 people. At the Red Hill on Eagle Hawk a pound weight of gold to the tub of eight buckets was repeatedly obtained.
At Balaarat [Ballarat] the miner in surfacing on some of the ridges frequently left places because their average yield of gold did not exceed half an ounce to the pan.-
DISCOVERING OF GOLD AT BENDIGO.
The gold minings connected with this great goldfield and that of Mount Alexander are. The White Hills, Golden Gully, Kangaroo Flats, Kangaroo Gully, Golden point, Commissioners Gully, Robinson Crusoe Gully, Milkmaids Flat, Sandhurst, White Horse Gully, Eagle Hawk, Fryers Creek, Forest Creek, Uncle Billies Gully, Campbells Creek, Mt McIvor, Golden Hill, Tarrengower,
The working of the gold mines at Bendigo and Mt Alexander answers miners of small capital or those who have arrived in the Country without experience, a considerable portion of these diggings is confined to surfacing & to sinking shafts at from ten to twenty & fifty
feet. Large nuggets are obtained at these mines. Yet a considerable amount heretofore produced has been fine and rough gold with light nuggets.
DESCRIPTION OF SHAFT SINKING AT THE WHITE HILLS
During the early workings of these mines a party had arrived and found all the bed claims on the creek had
been taken up. They found a party of Californians on the hill side who had sunk a shaft and had passed through in sinking the shaft a quartz vein on their passage to the washing stuff below which was situated
between the quartz vein and the bed rock. This process had been new at these diggings although at this time pretty well known and understood every where in the Victorian & New South Wales mines.
The Californians who have the credit to introduce this system of shaft sinking to the level of the bed workings in the rivers and the creeks of these colonies, had opened a shaft six feet one way, by twelve feet another and forty seven feet deep. Here they came upon the bed rock, they had encountered a bed of quartz of nine
feet in thickness then they blasted with gunpowder, passing through this they came upon a white soil through which they sunk the shaft until they came upon the bed rock. The white soil varies in depth in some tunnels from three to five feet which is brought to the mouth of the shaft and then raised in a tub by a windlass. The party having consulted upon their future prospects immediately decided upon securing a claim in the dry diggings and adopted the Californian system.
They sunk a shaft as above described and were fortunate enough to find sixteen ounces of gold in the first tub full of earth which they took from the washing stuff. The party took large quantities of gold from their claim & tunnelled eighty feet one way to a height of say six feet & Could see the gold in the working [washing?] stuff above them.
When the men came from their work they looked more
like millers than gold diggers. This was caused by the white soil they were working in. While in the mine they used Sperm Candles.
A splendid nugget was obtained at the new rush weighing two hundred & twenty four ounces of pure gold in an old hole 12 feet deep. This splendid lump is of a
triangular shape measuring about ten inches in its greatest length.