Gold Rush!! Exploring the Echunga Goldfields with Keith Conlon
Genuine gold rushes overtook several gullies near Echunga in the Adelaide Hills last century, and in a gentle way the rush has never ended. Two Mining Heritage Trails in the area encourage a little gold fever - or a lot, because fossicking and panning are popular ways of adding 'colour' to a day in the scrub.
The Chapel Hill Diggings trail is a few kilometres out of the small hills town of Echunga, about 30 kilometres form the city via the hills freeway and Hahndorf. Under the scoured roots of an old stringbark only a gully away. William Chapman spotted gold. He had been to the Bendigo diggings, and so he'd been keeping his eyes peeled back home on the farm. He applied for the South Australian government reward for finding a deposit, and so up came a horse parade. Fifty riders accompanied the Colonial Secretary as William panned in the creek.
No sign of it. Murmurs of lynching were running through the gathering when, finally, the colour was there in the dish. The first big rush was on.
By the spring of 1852, 600 miners were scattered through the scrub, sinking shallow shafts in search of alluvial gold in buried ancient gravels. On the Chapel Hill walk, there are holes everywhere! Some have collapsed, but others present a real dangerŠ.not much bigger than bathtub at the top, they sometimes drop several metres.
The area saw several instant tent-towns as new finds were made in nearby gullies - Bell's Hill Rush, the Christmas Rush of 1854 and Poor Man's Hill.
A few minutes walk in from the road, we came across the ruins of an old engine house. The National Gold Mining Co. built it in the 1860's to service deeper shafts seeking quartz reefs holding gold. The National Dam is being overtaken by reeds, but it is a pretty sight, and a boon for weekend gold panners.
The Jupiter Creek Goldfields are just a little further down the creeks that head towards Mt Bold Reservoir. A well signposted road takes you in form Echunga, and the Heritage Trail here is very informative, with detailed signs.
You will read, for instance, that today's carpark was yesterday's mining camp shopping centre, with butchers and bakers and grog-shops vying for the trade of up to 1200 miners.
They flocked in after the first big find here in 1868. Amidst all the stringbark and wattles, the signs of their optimistic labours are everywhere. Clay and gravel and mounds of mullock, and hundreds of mine shafts.
The Beatrice Mining Co. formed in 1868, and its Cornish-style round stone chimney is the most significant relic of the golden days. It sits on the side of the hall above the company shaft and Battery Creek. The miners camped in that seasonal waterway must have envied the power of the Battery - a crusher driven by steam engine.
For most of them, the golden days were rare. Only a third of them found enough to make wages, and so the first rush was short lived.
The trial meanders through alluvial diggings and reef mining attempts by syndicates. On the southern side of the diggings, the Crystal Gold Mining Co sunk several shafts after a lad herding sheep through the old fields spotted gold washed out of a mullock heap!!
In 1887, they did well, taking $200,000 worth of gold at today's value out of the first twenty five tonne of ore. The old horse puddles ditch is still there. It was a dough-nut shaped trough full of water into which was poured the clay and ore mix. A horse trudged round and round dragging rakes that broke up the clay, so it could be washed out and down the gully, leaving the gold and rock behind.
On the other side of the field, a big dam pinpoints the first twentieth century surge of gold fever in the goldfields. It was built by the Echunga Hydraulic and Gold Sluicing Co to fuel its water-jets. This new technique was imported from the U.S.A, and the operation established in 1905 involved earth-cover into slurry for sluicing to reveal the gold.
This area, Golden Point, had produced the fields biggest nugget, the Jupiter, weighing 12 oz. But, within three years, the scrub was quiet again. Unfortunately, the dam is behind a high police property fence, and so gold panners wanting to try their back at Golden Point have to wait for a decent rain to bring some puddles.
The dam probably came in handy in the 1930's though, because the Depression which hit Australia along with the rest of the world saw another generation of gold miners at Jupiter Creek. If you mined here, you gained rations, equipment and explosives - and with a quarter of adult men out of work, it was a rural getaway. My Uncle Bill camped somewhere in the Jupiter Creek fields for a couple of years trying his luck.
The depression miners left a remarkable legacy, the New Phoenix Shaft...a tunnel cut horizontally into the side of the hill towards the old Phoenix mine. A group of Hamilton Secondary College students took the crew through the eighty metre drive, flashing torches at the rough-hewn sides as they walked hunched and single file.
They emerged up a ladder and out onto the Heysen Trail which runs through the Jupiter Creek diggings.
The Jupiter Creek diggings historical trail is a bit of a maze, but fairly easy going, heading down a few hundred metres towards long Gully Creek and then hopping across the small scrubby gullies that promised the alluvial gold last century. You can see some of it in a couple of hours, but why not take a picnic and spend a day in the bush?
There is an excellent brochure with background history, details on trial points and a map available from the Information Counter at the Department of Primary Industries and Resources, SA. It is on the ground floor at 101 Grenfell St, Adelaide, SA, 5000.
They also have a general booklet on South Australia's mining heritage trails. The web site is www.mines.sa.gov.au
