Of course the depth of the shafts varies considerably; some are sixty
or even eighty, and some are only ten feet deep.
Sometimes after heavy
rains, when the surface soil has been washed from the sides of the
hills, the mica layer is similarly washed down to the valleys and lies
on the original surface-soil. This constitutes the true washing stuff
of the diggings. Often when a man has - to use a digger's
phrase - "bottomed his hole," (that is, cut through the rocky strata, and
arrived at the gold layer), he will find stray indications, but nothing
remunerative, and perchance the very next hole may be the most
profitable on the diggings. Whether there is any geological
rule to be guided by has yet to be proved, at present no old digger
will ever sink below the mica soil, or leave his hole until be arrives
at it, even if he sinks to forty feet. So, therefore, it may be taken
as a general rule, wherever the diggings may be, either in Victoria,
New South Wales, or South Australia, that gold in "working" quantities
lies only where there is found quartz or mica.
Ballarat has had the honour of producing the largest masses of gold yet
discovered. These masses were all excavated from one part of the diggings,
known as Canadian Gully, and were taken out of a bed of quartz, at the
depths of from fifty to sixty-five feet below the surface.
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