118 FIRST DISCOVERY OF GOLD IN QUEENSLAND. 
South; and whether it was quartz or gossan, poryphry or lime- 
stone, syenite or slate, that formed the matrix, there lurked 
“El Oro” in all his glory. 
It would unduly prolong this paper were I to follow the subject 
down to the Mount Morgan era, or to tell of the possible glories 
of the Mackinlay Range and other places that now hide—even as 
Mount Morgan once did—their gold so well. Suffice it when I 
say that, great as we think our development in gold and gold- 
extracting machinery in 1887, the time is near when we shall 
consider them as rudimentary as we do the days of Cancona and 
early Gympie. Our yield will astonish the world and make us 
famous, when the over-inflated, London-floated Queensland gold 
mines of 1886-7 have ceased to leave their sting behind them, 
and have been replaced by mines floated and sold for: fair value 
only, and the grand struggle for supremacy that will take place 
during the next twenty years between the vast golden mundic 
beds that lie beneath the surface at Charters Towers and the 
Etheridge country in North Queensland; in the Crocodile, 
Cawarral, Rosewood, and Morinish districts south of the Fitzroy, 
in Central Queensland; and the equally mighty (regarded in 
nature’s grand mineral upheaval) Burnett and Mount Perry 
districts in Southern Queensland, will—whichever of the three 
comes finally to the front—be all the while tending to the fame 
and prosperity of our colony; for the three, though seeming 
rivals, will be always pulling together, and whatever is the out- 
come of their rivalry this will go similarly to the credit side of 
the Queensland ledger. 
At the conclusion of this paper, several members bore testi- 
mony to the interest of the subject, and to the accuracy of the 
leading dates referred to by the author as marking epochs in the 
discovery of gold in the colony. 
