GOLDMINING
venetian ripples akin to venetian blinds or louvres, on false-bottoms, and by other contraptions that entrapped the gold while allowing the valueless dirt to pass over them with the stream. Around Charleston the gold was fine, “flour gold,” to be caught only on fabric-cloths or on copper plates coated with mercury—“cured,” to use the mining term. Some was “float gold,” being in minute scales.
A parliamentary return of 1877 refers to “the ruby sand of Charleston” and states “this sand is found in granite, and the gold it contains is heavier and of better quality than that of cement.” It also refers to the “goldbearing black sand of the Back Lead.” Most of the flats around Charleston were of a brown “cement,” an oxidised iron-sand, which lay in seams or strata of varying thickness, hardness, and richness. Some was barren. Too hard to be disintegrated by hydraulic sluicing, it was crushed by batteries with varying numbers of stampers, according to the power available. All streams are natural sluices and their channels natural tail-races; some of these after working unceasingly for centuries, left large deposits of gold behind their rocks and other natural ripplebars. In many places great finds were made in dead watercourses where, thousands of years before, waterfalls had “rolled down their golden sands” while eddies caught and retained them.
A goldfield is not, as the uninitiated might assume, an area of so many square miles over which a golden rain has fallen in past ages, leaving the whole equally gilded. Some parts are barren, some rich; but even the latter are not just spots here and there without trace of order; the gold runs in lines or belts, called “leads.”
There were at Charleston several main leads, besides lesser ones:—The Back Lead, from Nile River along the plateau of Darkie’s Terrace to a point a little south of Candlelight. The Town Lead, parallel with the coastline southward from Second Bay for about two miles. It was only a few hundred yards in width. This was the richest of the leads, but was soon worked out. The Flat Lead, on Charleston Flat. The Deep Lead, adjacent to the old Buller Road on Nile Hill. Other leads ran along Sardine Creek, Butcher’s Gully, Argyle
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