THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD'S WEALTH.

Oamaru Mail, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 10451, 10 May 1910, Page 1

THE CRADLE OF THE WORLD'S WEALTH.

AN -AUSTRALIAN MINING TOWN TO-DAY.

(By Archibald Marshall.)

Whatever ideas you may have'formedof a grea.t mining camp, drawn from Bret Harte or the tales of early Australian gold digging, will be upset on your first introduction, to Kalgoorlie. You have travelled 370 miles from Perth', dined, slept, and breakfasted in the train in. as much comfort- as if yon had been travelling in England 'or France, and you find yourself in a prosperous, but apparently not over busy, provincial town, with broad streets, tramways, churches, good hotels, shops, and the usual well-appointed, hospitalile Australian club house, where you may read most of the London papers within a. month of their publication, or look on from a corafortabie chair at a game of bowls played on a perfect green under rows of electric lights in the cool of the evening.

The streets of Ka'lgoorlie are not paved- with gold, although it is one of the richest goldiields in the "world. They are covered with a fine, red dust, which, blows about very unpleasantly in the hot weather. But yet you may see, as I -saw, within actual touch of the pavements, some enterprising adventurer shaking the red soil in a cradle and extracting from it enough precious grains to make the labor worth his while; and there are shafts sunk in the very middle of some of the streets, though not the most frequented. But the town has for the most part settled down to an ordinary, well-orga-nised industry. A. great tide of civilisation, respectability, steady, responsible work, has washed away the rough make-shifts of the early days, the adventure and. the wickedness, the fierce ardor and reckless profusion. The mine managers draw large salaries and settle disputes with the trade unions to which their men belong; the Stock Exchange keeps business hours in a handsome building, and no longer buys or sells from eight o'clock to past midnight in the open-air; the gold escort no longer clatters off with horses and rifles on its long journey through the waterless bush, but watches a safe in a railway van; the women and children no longer sleep in tents or live in a constant, laborious, dreary picnic, but in trim villas with pretty gardens, go to school, and to church on Sundays, show their smart hats and dresses at the pretty racecourse, where the grass is kept green all the year round, and flowers bloom in profusion round the lawns and about the sands.

But if you climb up to some point of vantage and look over the town you see that it is not like other Australian country towns. It spreads itself widely over the fiat, red plain. There are no tall buildings, but- iron chimneys, well stayed, rise high above the roofs, gigantic, timbered p ,ppet-heads stand over the mine-shafts, huge mounds of "tailings," still retaining some of their gold, some of them with truck lines laid on them, are heaped us as high as if Nature had helped them there. The houses thin out towards the outskirts and seem to have been dumped down anywhere on the red soil, little white shanties with no sign of green about them, and a few better ones here and there with pepper trees and little gardens. The eye takes in the Jong lines of stacked firewood for the furnaces—no coal is used at Kalgoorlie—the iron skips loaded with ore drawn along the overhead wires, and the empty ones going back to the mines alongside them. The low, blue-grey scrub closes in on every side a limitless level of monotony, broken only by a few low hills, holding out no promise, no refreshments to eye or spirit. It is as if Nature had tried to cover up her buried treasure with, the shabbiest of carpets, so that covetous mail should never suspect that in this dreary spot- out of all the beautiful places in the world he could find anything worth the finding. Vv'e put on old, stained suits of khaki, took our stand in the narrow cage, and dropped 1300 feet clown the hoarded shaft, the higher tunnels of the mine, now jet black caves, now flashing past us. \Ye lit candles and

'.vent alonji the roufjh-hewn passagesthere are many miles of them in tho different levels —from which the ore «a<l hdfen extracted. Tiiey were roughly roofed sulci held up by huge timbers here arid then.', and the narrow tramway line van along their rooky. floors. At the end of one nil- hydraulic drill was pounding and thundering at the hard rock, making holes'in which the hlnsiiiig powder would presently explode and loosen the ore. Muffled reverberation? from distant galleries tokl that the dark mine was full of workers. Dut there Trss nothing to show the inexperienced visitor that the rich gold was all about him —only rough lumps of grey stone with sometimes a dllll. lead-like glimmer where the rich telluride conceals its 30 or -10 per cent, of precious metal. Bid", sometimes the ore is so rich that it is brought up and lodged in safes just as it is, and I held little pieces in the hollow of my palm that contained each seven or eight pounds worth of gold. Tie went into the crushing and roasting mills afterwards. They are full of fine grey dust from the crushed ore, the grinding and clanguor of the mills and the heat of the furnaces. The ore goes through a score of processes before the gold is extracted from it. It -is ground and re-ground, roasted in slow furnaces that never go out night or day, mixed with cyanide solutions, passed in a dirty brown solution through boiling and agitated vats, put through filter presses, and then passed into the locked and guarded precipitation houses.

Here are rows of locked lead vats, filled with tangles of hair-like zinc fibre, on which tlie gold is gradually precipitated. The vats are cleaned up once a month, and a black, pulpy slime, nowvery near to pure gold, is left. It is further filtered and pressed, and becomes a flat, black cake, put through the roasting oven and taken out a fine dry powder, put into a pear-shaped receptacle of plumbago in the tilting furnace, and tipped out again in buttons of gold. Then it is refined in a smaller furnace and poured into bar moulds. So at last one after the other the precautions that Nature has taken to disguise and safeguard her chief treasure have been attacked and conquered, and the tortured rock has, yielded up the wealth deposited there at the beginning of the world. She has been loeaten by man's ingenuity and slow progress of knowledge. There is no way in which she can hide up her gold but man will have it. In the early days of the Western Australian goldfields water was more precious even than gold. There was very little to drink and none to wash in. But the whole field lies on a salty soakage, and very soon "after the first rush vast condensers were working to produce distilled water. Biit this was at best a miserable makeshift, and at last a great enterprise was set in hand to give the now large population of the- field a satisfactory water supply. It is a scheme that any country might be proud of having put through. • A practically limitless supply of -water is conserved by a weir twenty-three miles from Perth, and thence to the goldfields, a distance of 250 miles, it is carried in steel pipes, five million gallons of it a day, and distributed everywhere it is wanted. You see the great--30-inch distributing pipe running along r side the railway on your way up to Kalgoorlie. and every now and then pass a pumping station, with a little' settlement round it, in the heart of the bush. This was the last great attack on Nature's defence of her treasure, and now. she has capitulated and is yielding up gold at the rate of millions a year.