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The Gold Diggers
Introduction
Diggers' life at
the goldfields was continual hard labour: dust, mud and backbreaking toil.
Many miners had been manual labourers who were chasing dreams
of independence from the drudgery of waged work. Most were itinerant,
moving between gold diggings, following rumours of riches further afield.
Mining claims were small (eight by eight feet or twelve by twelve feet)
and the typical digger might work as many as ten different claims in four
years. Therefore mining methods needed to be cheap and portable.
The early years
of the Victorian goldrushes, from 1851 until the end of the decade,
was the era of small, unmechanised alluvial mines that relied on muscle-power
and physical endurance. Diggers arrived at the goldfields with little
mining experience. By watching other miners and veterans from the Californian
rushes they learnt the techniques of panning, ground sluicing, cradling,
puddling and digging shafts. All these methods involved human labour
and water to free gold from clay and soil. They relied on the principle
that gold particles were heavier than sand and gravel.
Alluvial mining
techniques were destructive to the environment, leaving topsoil stripped,
 ground
pockmarked with mullock heaps and shafts, river banks and beds destroyed
and timber clear-felled.
A diggers' toolkit
included a wide tin pan, pick axes, spades, shovels, a wheelbarrow, felling
axes, trowels, iron wedges, crowbars, metal buckets and a cradle. Miners
purchased these tools from store keepers or exhausted diggers leaving
the goldfields.
Miners worked in
informal bands of three to six people. They pooled equipment and profits
and shared domestic tasks such as cooking. Diggers lived in tents pitched
on their claim or on nearby spare land. Large tent settlements arose near
the goldfields. Hotels and stores advertised their locations with banners
or flags.
Crowded into settlements
of 20 000 people, without sanitation and with tents only a few feet
apart, disease spread quickly. Fleas, bed bugs and dysentery were regular
visitors to the goldfields. Typhoid occasionally made deadly ravages.
During summer, there was a chronic shortage of water for both working
and drinking.
Goldfields were
largely male communities although a few women worked mining claims, either
in their own right or with
male partners. Other women worked as storekeepers, publicans and prostitutes.
By the end of the
1850s many of the alluvial claims were exhausted and were replaced by
larger, mechanised enterprises. The early mining techniques persisted
into the twentieth century on the fringes of the larger mines, in old
mining areas that were reworked and in the remote goldfields of Gippsland
and the High Country.
Additional
Resources
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