On Horseback You Can Go From The Town To The
Diggings In Six Or Eight Hours.
Ballarat is a barren place, the ground is interspersed with rocky
fragments, the creek is small, and good water is rather scarce.
In
summer it almost amounts to a drought, and what there is then is
generally brackish or stagnatic. It is necessary never to drink
stagnant water, or that found in holes, without boiling, unless there
are frogs in it, then the water is good; but the diggers usually boil
the water, and a drop of brandy, if they can get it. In passing through
the plains you are sure of finding water near the surface (or by
seeking a few inches) wherever the tea tree grows.
The chief object at the Ballarat diggings is the Commissioners' tent,
which includes the Post-office. There are good police quarters now. The
old lock-up was rather of the primitive order, being the stump of an
old tree, to which the the prisoners were attached by sundry chains,
the handcuff being round one wrist and through a link of the chain. I
believe there is a tent for their accommodation. There are
several doctors about, who, as usual, drive a rare trade.
It is almost impossible to describe accurately the geological features
of the gold diggings at Ballarat. Some of the surface-washing is good,
and sometimes it is only requisite to sink a few feet, perhaps only a
few inches, before finding the ochre-coloured earth (impregnated with
mica and mixed with quartzy fragments), which, when washed, pays
exceedingly well. But more frequently a deep shaft has to be sunk.
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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