Into the gold mine

[xenith]

The Central Deborah Mine in Bendigo.

Central Deborah Gold Mine is a quartz-reef gold mine located on the Bendigo Flat near the Bendigo Creek. The mine operated from 1939 to 1954 and was the last commercial mine to operate in the wealthy Bendigo goldfields.

During this time miners extracted almost one tonne of gold (929kg) from the ground, which would be worth around $37 million in today's prices! From


Tour starts here.

The tour group consisted of the tour guide, an extra body from the archive room(?) because they need to send an extra person if there's just one person in tour group-- Hang on. One person in the tour group = me. By myself. OK....

So the whole group of one is taken over to the change rooms and outfitted with overalls (which were not going to go around me, unless they were too big elsewhere, obviously I'm not miner shape), boots, hard hat and a lamp (which is on the hat, but attached to battery thing at the waist).



So we travel down in the cage to level 2, and then down ladders to level 3, which is 85.3 m below ground (just belong the horizontal line there). That doesn't sound very far. You can see it goes down a long way beyond that, although I'm told these days levels 15-17 are under water.


There's two gates there, a cage goes down on one side while another goes up on the other.

"Stand up against the side and face in."

There were four people in there when we went down. Very squishy. They told me these things are suppose to hold 6, or was it 8?, people. All I can say is they must have really liked each other.


That's the alternative way up/down when the cages aren't available. Much fun if you're half a kilometre down.

I have to use the flash down here.


Otherwise it will all look like this, which would get a bit boring.


We have lamps on the hats. The miners had carbide lights:

Calcium carbide + water = acetylene gas

Gas comes out the nozzle. Light the gas. Light!

And a fairly reliable, robust light source too, it seems. It could also work as indicator of the amount of oxygen present, they tell me, because the flame changed colour when the O2 level dropped off.


This is a part of the mine that hasn't been widened to accommodate tour groups. Not unlike the convict-built tunnel from the old abandoned water scheme, although dug out with better equipment and less deaths.


The basic process is the same. Drill holes into the rock


stick explosives into the holes. Hide.


That's old-style familiar style of reinforcing "bad rock".



The replacment method is to shove metal "spikes" in, which then IIRC expand. There's one above the quartz vein.

Of course gold mining is all about the quartz, because that is where the gold is.


Right, down to the next level. There were two-three ladders to climb down


Then a sort of sub-level.


Then another two-three ladders to climb down.




Another seam of quartz.


Quartz vein in more normal light (i.e. no flash.)


Bringing air into the tunnels.


Now this thing had a name, but of course I've forgotten it. The loose rock was dropped down here into the cart, rather than having to take the cart to the site of mining/lug the rock down to the cart.


This is a very noisy, vibrating machine that I have forgotten the name of. This annoys me muchly.


That's the entrance to the cage for level 3. See it looks wet there. It was like that underfoot a lot, even though the photos look dry, and in other places it was uneven. So it "Watch underfoot" all the time, and "Watch your head" at the same time. Yay for boots and hard hats.

We don't go up that way though. Instead, we climbed back up all the ladders to level 2 and had lunch in the underground function room there. Cornish pastry, of course. The story they tell is the sticking-out crust enabled miners to eat the pasty and leave the part they touched, so they could eat with dirty hands.

And that's it, except for the stuff on the surface. That's for next time.