Gold Mining History - book finished at last!

[pmccarthy]

I have finally finished my book with the title Hidden Rivers of Gold which covers the origins of Deep Lead Mining, the technology and challenges, and the final years of mining in the Carisbrook-Moolort area of Victoria which led to huge financial losses and very little gold. Characters involved included the State Premier and a future president of the USA. This was all around the turn of the 20th Century.

 

The book can be purchased through online booksellers including Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Fishpond, Booktopia and Angus and Robertson. Prices vary a lot, and some are in US$ so check carefully.

The book is published by Echo Books.

 

 

 

 

Edited 5 hours ago by pmccarthy

[facthunter]

I don't know IF there's Much GOLD in writing Books? .I would keep Digging at Today's Prices.  Nev

[onetrack]

I was part owner of the Fairplay Gold Mine at Higginsville, W.A. from 1972 to 1990, when the mine was sold to a large gold mining company. The brother, his wife and I mined and produced around 600 ozs of gold in that period, utilising the Norseman State Battery (a 10 head stamp mill, owned by the W.A. Govt).

 

Gold was ignored and only worth around $35 oz when we purchased the mine from two old Slav prospectors. But U.S. President Richard Nixon had taken America off the Gold Standard in August 1971, in a staggering display of non-consultative, "executive" Presidential power. It was called the "Nixon shock", and it rattled the worlds financial markets - and led to a rapid rise in the price of gold, now the gold price was no longer controlled by the U.S.

 

We knew this would happen, and purchased the gold mine accordingly. By 1975 the gold price was $160 oz and by 1980, it was over $800 oz, and there was another gold rush on.

 

At that point, our strategy of utilising an under-utilised and cheap source of ore crushing went to hell in a handbasket, as scores of prospectors turned up at the State Battery to crush parcels of ore.

A queueing system for crushing was initiated - but even worse - the Govt imposed a very sharp increase in crushing costs to reduce the State Batteries ever-increasing losses (the State Batteries were always subsidised to encourage local employment, bring in gold revenue, and to assist in prospecting work that might deliver new and profitable mines).

 

At that point, we turned to the large (200,000 tonne) tailings dump on our mine, which still held an average of around 2 grams/tonne of tailings. We took on 3 business partners who had experience in heap leaching and cyanidation of tailings, and between all of us, we developed an improved design of tailings leach vats, which proved very effective and very profitable.

The benefit of treating tailings was the ore was already crushed very fine, it just had to be set up with the correct pH levels, be able to contain a cyanide leach solution, and to have a simple circulatory pumping system.

The addition of activated carbon in stainless steel tanks finished off the treatment process, and it was a very simple job to set up a small, single-cylinder Lister diesel pump to circulate the solution until the activated carbon was full of gold!

Then the tanks would be taken into Kalgoorlie to be stripped of the gold, using a caustic solution, by professional carbon tank strippers.

 

The final product, gold "dore" bars were taken into the Perth Mint, which refined the gold to the Internationally-accepted gold bar standard of 99.999 (%) fine gold. 

After we had re-treated all our gold tailings on the Fairplay lease, we re-treated many more tens of thousands of tonnes of tailings, from numerous other tailings dumps we had pegged. It was a very profitable period for us in the 1980's.

 

Then, after we ran out of tailings dumps of our own to re-treat, we went on to build tailings vats on contract for other operators that needed to re-treat their tailings.

We re-treated tailings and built leach vats for well over 2M tonnes of tailings in the 1980's, from as far East as Ejudina, 150kms E of Kalgoorlie, to Burtville, SE of Laverton, W.A. - right through the W.A. Goldfields, to even Marble Bar!

 

It was a very interesting period, and one that was highly profitable, and not a period I'm likely to see again! The sheer pleasure of holding a large gold bar that you've produced and poured, is something that few people experience.

 

Edited 2 hours ago by onetrack