Bendigo

In 1851, two women were washing clothes in Bendigo Creek, about 150km north of Melbourne. The story has it that they came across a lump of gold-bearing quartz big enough to fill a sock. Very quietly, they slipped down to Castlemaine and had their find assayed. When they found out what they had, they spent the rest of the day celebrating in the local hostelries.

Now, I'm not one to make any sweeping generalisations about women and gossiping, but the fact remains that when they returned to Bendigo the next day, there were 400 people panning for gold along the creek. Within weeks, there were thousands of people trying their luck at panning or mining.

The Bendigo gold field was/is one of the most productive in Australia. In terms of all-time production, it is still in the top ten in the world and little active mining has gone on for the last 50 years. Only recently was it passed by the superpit in Kalgoorlie in terms of Australian production. It remains the most productive gold field in Eastern Australia.

So, Bendigo very rapidly became one of the richest towns in Australia. And it shows. The main thoroughfare in the town is called Pall Mall, with its main cross roads being Charing Cross. The people were keen to emphasise just how British they were, even though they were almost as far from Britain as it's possible to get. They put up some very nice buildings:


These are the Post Office and the Shamrock Hotel respectively.

In 1890, a tram service was begun using the ground-breaking technology of battery-operated trams. Unfortunately, the trams were hopelessly unreliable – mostly to do with the batteries – and the trams often had to be rescued by horses. After only 13 weeks, the company gave up and brought in steam engines to pull the trams – the original battery-operated cars were converted to be simple trailers.

By 1972, the tram network was losing more money than could be sustained and the decision was made to close the system. The town turned out en masse to watch the last tram running down Pall Mall. Within weeks, public pressure had saved one of the lines which is now operated for tourists with a commentary describing some of the significant buildings along the way.

One of the stops is the tram museum – the tourist tram company has 'rescued' several trams, not just from Bendigo but from elsewhere in Australia as well. These are restored at the tram depot and many are then used for the talking tram tourist route.

One that I quite liked was this one, which I travelled on as part of the tourist route:

If you look closely, it only has one set of wheels in the middle, rather than a set at each end. Apparently, school boys were apt to jump up and down at one end with the aim of bouncing the wheels out of the track. It worked too! The problem was that this was in the days when everyone knew everyone and when the tram driver had a word with the parents later, the boys in question were likely to come a painful end...

The trams are restored to their original condition – using the original materials wherever possible:

At one end of the Tourist Tram route, lies the Central Deborah Gold Mine. This was operating for twelve years between 1942 and 1954 but is now operated as a visitor attraction. The above-ground buildings are still there, for the most part:

Including the changing rooms. At first, I thought it considerate that the management had provided two changing rooms – one 'dirty' and one 'clean'. In the dirty room, the overalls from the mine would be stripped off and left to dry on steam-heated boxes. The miners would then shower and go through to the clean room. In fact, there was no altruism involved. By making the miners walk through between the two rooms naked, the mine owners could ensure that they weren't carrying anything with them – specifically, they weren't carrying any gold-bearing quartz.

If they did want to take anything across the 'border' it could be passed via a trusted employee called the 'rag picker' who would go through any clothing, tobacco pouches, etc. to make sure that there wasn't any stolen gold.

The mine-buildings are interesting enough, but the real attraction at the Central Deborah is the underground tour. Our guide was excellent – never stopping telling us interesting stories and facts from the moment he gathered us together at the top of the access shaft to well after he was supposed to have finished.

After fitting us out with hard hats and miners' lights, we took the lift down to level 2 – about 61m or 210' below the surface. Although the original miners' lifts are still in operating condition, we actually took a much larger lift. Just after leaving the lift, though, we came to the bottom of the original lifts:

The miners would not be paid until after they stepped out of the lift. In the corner of the picture you can just see a wagon – the lift is big enough to take 4 miners or one wagon. As one lift is going up, the other is coming down. You might also see water drops falling from the ceiling. It was more or less continuously raining at this point of the mine. And it's not pure water either. It contains significant quantities of dissovled arsenic, so probably not a good idea to drink it. Actually, it was the problems of keeping the shafts dry that ultimately closed most of the mines in Bendigo.

If the lift breaks down, there's always the emergency exit:

From here, it might have taken us around 15 to 30 minutes to climb back up this ladder. From the deepest level of the mine, it would have taken over 3 hours – and that after an 8 hour shift in the mine itself. Oh, and, of course, once you've stepped over the line at the lift shaft, you stop getting paid, so you climb out on your own time.

As I said, we were given miners' lamps for our hard hats. This was the only illumination in the mine – all adding to the experience.

We learned about the life of a miner – basically “short” seems to sum it up the best. The quartz dust created by the earliest drills was spread throughout the whole mine. Quartz forms very sharp crystals and these tend to tear up your lungs. Now, I'm not a doctor, but I can well imagine that having your lungs torn up on a regular basis isn't a good thing. A miner in the 19th century would be lucky to see his 30th birthday.

It was not until well after the first world war that the innovation of using water to control the dust from drilling was introduced – virtually eliminating the lung problems.

During its 12 years of operation, the Central Deborah mine produced just under 1 tonne of gold. This is about enough to fill a couple of shoe boxes. At today's prices, it would be worth around €30 million (£25 million).

I asked about the name, Deborah. It seems that it's an Islamic name meaning something like “busy bees”. It comes up in the Apocrypha as well, I think.

Incidentally, for those sports historians, the town is named indirectly after the British bare-knuckle boxer William Abednego Thompson who was known as Bendigo Thompson. Indirectly, because there was a local fighter who was called Bendigo after the English guy – the creek was named after the fighter and the gold field and town were named after the creek. Simple, really.