The Albert Goldfield (or Albert mining district) is an area of 1300 square kilometres (500 square miles) in the outback of New South Wales where gold was discovered in 1880.
The Outback is the vast, remote interior of Australia. "The Outback" is more remote than those areas named "the bush", which include any location outside the main urban areas.
New South Wales is a state on the east coast of Australia. It borders Queensland to the north, Victoria to the south, and South Australia to the west. Its coast borders the Tasman Sea to the east. The Australian Capital Territory is an enclave within the state. New South Wales' state capital is Sydney, which is also Australia's most populous city. In March 2019, the population of New South Wales was over 8 million, making it Australia's most populous state. Just under two-thirds of the state's population, 5.1 million, live in the Greater Sydney area. Inhabitants of New South Wales are referred to as New South Welshmen.
Gold is a chemical element with the symbol Au and atomic number 79, making it one of the higher atomic number elements that occur naturally. In its purest form, it is a bright, slightly reddish yellow, dense, soft, malleable, and ductile metal. Chemically, gold is a transition metal and a group 11 element. It is one of the least reactive chemical elements and is solid under standard conditions. Gold often occurs in free elemental (native) form, as nuggets or grains, in rocks, in veins, and in alluvial deposits. It occurs in a solid solution series with the native element silver and also naturally alloyed with copper and palladium. Less commonly, it occurs in minerals as gold compounds, often with tellurium.
Gold was found at Mount Browne, which is 53 km (33 mi ) south west of Tibooburra. There were other finds at Good Friday, Easter Monday, Nuggerty, Pioneer Reef and Warratta Creek. [1]
The kilometre or kilometer is a unit of length in the metric system, equal to one thousand metres. It is now the measurement unit used officially for expressing distances between geographical places on land in most of the world; notable exceptions are the United States and the road network of the United Kingdom where the statute mile is the official unit used.
The mile is an English unit of length of linear measure equal to 5,280 feet, or 1,760 yards, and standardised as exactly 1,609.344 metres by international agreement in 1959.
Tibooburra is a town in the far northwest of New South Wales, Australia, located 1,187 kilometres (738 mi) from the state capital, Sydney. It is most frequently visited by tourists on their way to national parks in the area. At the 2016 census, Tibooburra had a population of 134. Although facilities in Tibooburra are quite limited, fuel, meals, and a range of accommodation options are available. All significant support services are based in Broken Hill.
The Albert Goldfield region is very hot and dry. Summer temperatures on the Gold field can reach 50°C. Because of the shortage of water, towns were started at Milparinka and Tibooburra where there was water available. Towns at Albert and Mount Browne did not last for long because of the lack of water. By 1881 there were more than 2000 people living on the gold diggings or in the towns. [1] Geologist W.H.J. Slee was appointed resident Goldfield Warden. There was no water in the mine area to use in separating the placer gold. Miners either took their dirt to one of the towns to use water to pan for the gold, or used a method called dry blowing, [2] which is an adaptation of the agricultural technique of winnowing.
Milparinka is a small settlement in north-west New South Wales, Australia about 250 kilometres (155 mi) north of Broken Hill on the Silver City Highway. At the time of the 2016 census, Milparinka had a population of 77 people. Milparinka is on Evelyn Creek.
William Henry John Slee, FGS (1836–1907), was an Australian geologist, mines inspector, and mining warden.
In geology, a placer deposit or placer is an accumulation of valuable minerals formed by gravity separation from a specific source rock during sedimentary processes. The name is from the Spanish word placer, meaning "alluvial sand". Placer mining is an important source of gold, and was the main technique used in the early years of many gold rushes, including the California Gold Rush. Types of placer deposits include alluvium, eluvium, beach placers, and paleoplacers.
A contemporary description of the dry blowing process used at Mount Browne in 1881 states that miners there went to work with "a small broom made of twigs and a tin dish". A miner would use his broom to sweep dust and rock fragments from surface exposures of slate and collect it in the tin dish. Once his dish was "about half full of dirt", the miner would stand "with his back or side to the wind ... and begin throwing the stuff up and catching it, or sometimes slowly pouring it from one dish to another", allowing the wind to carry away the less dense particles, leaving the gold behind in the dish. This process required "very dry surface dirt." When "good sized nuggets" were found, they were removed from the dish before the remaining material was processed. If he saw smaller pieces of gold in the dish, the miner might use his own breath to blow the sand and dust away. The observer found the dry blowing process to be "both tedious and unhealthy." [3]
Slate is a fine-grained, foliated, homogeneous metamorphic rock derived from an original shale-type sedimentary rock composed of clay or volcanic ash through low-grade regional metamorphism. It is the finest grained foliated metamorphic rock. Foliation may not correspond to the original sedimentary layering, but instead is in planes perpendicular to the direction of metamorphic compression.
Life on the goldfields was hard, water was scarce, fresh fruit and vegetables were unavailable, and basic commodities, such as flour, were very expensive. Disease, including cholera and typhoid, was common. [4]
Cholera is an infection of the small intestine by some strains of the bacterium Vibrio cholerae. Symptoms may range from none, to mild, to severe. The classic symptom is large amounts of watery diarrhea that lasts a few days. Vomiting and muscle cramps may also occur. Diarrhea can be so severe that it leads within hours to severe dehydration and electrolyte imbalance. This may result in sunken eyes, cold skin, decreased skin elasticity, and wrinkling of the hands and feet. Dehydration can cause the skin to turn bluish. Symptoms start two hours to five days after exposure.
The village of Albert itself at its height had a population of 900. [5] In June 1902 a large meteorite landed at nearby Mt Brown. [6]
By 1893 the gold rush had ended and most people had left the goldfields. [2]
An area of surviving ruins from the goldfield are listed on the New South Wales Heritage Register. [7]
