i8 



THE AUSTRALIAN MUSEUM MAGAZINE. 



THE "MAITLAND BAR" NUGGET 



which is still in existence. 



disagreeable, especially to men who had 

 no previous experience of mining or any 

 other kind of manual work. The surface 

 deposits, particularly in Victoria, were ex- 

 ceedingly rich and in the early 'fifties of 

 last century, a stream of goldseekers 

 poured like a tide towards this El Dorado. 

 The Argus of October 3, 1851, makes in- 

 teresting reading : — 



"The police force are handing in resig- 

 nations daily ; even the sergeants are de 

 serting. The custom house hands are off 

 to the diggings ; seamen are deserting 

 their vessels ; tradesmen and apprentices 

 are gone; the masters are following tjiem ; 

 contractors' men have bolted and left large 

 expensive jobs on their hands unfinished. 

 What are the contractors to do ? Why, 

 follow their men, and off they go. Pa- 

 tients, on becoming convalescent, forget the 

 attention of their doctor, and his kindness 

 in bringing thetn round, and depart without 

 even wishing him good-bye ; the doctor 

 must, of course, follow ; and the lawyer, 

 on the same principle, follows his clients." 



The diggers siiffered severely for want 

 of provisions, which were both scarce and 

 dear (a bag of flour cost £5), and an even 

 more terrible menace haunted them. Mas- 

 terlcss men and adventurers from all the 

 colonies and from aliroad hastened to Vic- 

 toria in search of easy money. Ticket-of- 

 Icave men from Tasmania, then a penal 

 colony, crossed the strait, determined to 

 get their share of pkmder, and many deeds 

 of violence stain the annals of gold-mming 

 in .\ustralia. The digger who had accu- 

 mulated a store of gold never went to 



sleep without the fear that he might be 

 assailed by some savage robber before 

 morning. Men went armed in the daytime 

 and fortified themselves at night. One 

 particularly brutal affair may be men- 

 tioned. Two miners were attacked and 

 robbed, one being shot in the leg. As the 

 marauders were tying the wounded man 

 to a tree, one of them felt the bullet, which 

 was embedded in the muscles of his thigh, 

 and callously cut it out with his knife, 

 saying he might want to use it again. 

 Saving men, these bushrangers ! 



Xew South Wales has not produced so 

 many large nuggets as Victoria, the largest 

 being that found at Burrandong, near 

 Orange, November i, 1858. It weighed 

 r,.?86 ozs., valued at ;£4,389. It was melted 

 at the Sydney mint, but no model of it 

 seems to have been made. The "Maitland 

 Bar," a nugget weighing 345 ozs., worth 

 about £1,236, was found at Maitland Bar, 

 in the Mudgee District, in 1887; it is one 

 of the few large nuggets still extant, and 

 is the property of the New South Wale.> 

 Government. 



Much discussion has taken place con- 

 cerning the origin of gold nuggets. Mr. 

 Evan Hopkins, in a pamphlet published in 

 1853. advanced the curious hypothesis that 

 the roots of trees have the power of at- 

 tracting gold from the earth and storing 

 it in masses near the surface. Another 

 view, which has been supported by such 

 well-known .Australian geologists as Sel- 

 wyn, Daintree, Wilkinson, and Newbery, is 

 that nuggets have been formed in the drifts 

 by successive depositions of metallic gold 

 from circulating waters carrying gold in 

 solution. No doubt under favourable cir- 

 cumstances gold may have been deposited 

 from solution by organic matter or metallic 

 sulphides, and some nuggets may have been 

 enlarged in this way, but the theory now 

 geiicrally accepted is that they come from 

 gold-bearing quartz reefs which have been 

 destroyed liy denudation, and the gold 

 masses thus set free have been carried 

 perhaps many miles from the parent reef 

 by the agency of running water. In the 

 course of ages the adhering, brittle quartz 

 would he largely removed, and the base 

 metals originally alloyed with the gold 

 would lie leached out. which would ac- 

 count for the observed fact that nuggety 

 and alluvial gold generally is purer than 

 reef gold. 



It has been argued by the upholders of 

 the growth hypothesis that, if nuggets are 

 derived from lodes, we should find large 

 masses of gold in quartz reefs much more 

 frequently than is the case; but it must be 

 remembered that the reefs exploited by 

 man are probably much smaller in extent, 

 and perhaps poorer in gold content, than 

 the long-vanished reefs from which came 

 our alluvial gold deposits. 



