Gold Discoveries
Now and then the gold also becomes cemented into stiff clay and on other occasions it is enclosed in conglomerate, or loose gravel and sand. When cemented into a conglomerate the material has to be crushed in order to extract the gold.
Due to the quantity of overburden to be dug through, and the usually smaller amounts of gold that were in the deep lead required of great skill to remove every particle of gold with the bare eyes alone. Without a standard water supply however, miners at times had no option but to simply look for the gold with their eyes. There were many occasions in which teensy nuggets were missed, or alluvium was thrown onto the mullock heap and covered by rubbish before it was noticed.
Wedderburn Township is located 225 kilometers northwest of Melbourne. Gold was first discovered by Europeans in this area in August 1852, at the site of the old policy camp in Golden gully. The gold field now encompasses an area of seventeen kilometers by 66.5 km, and coarse gold can be recovered from some gullies, hills and flats inside the field. Within three months from September to December in 1852, around seven thousand hopeful diggers ran to the area. Due to the shortage of rain though in the end only around one hundred men held on and continued working without water.
It was on February in 1869 that Richard Oates and John Deeson made the discovery of the Welcome Stranger nugget. This is the biggest nugget to have ever been recovered in the world. It was just sitting on red clay, rock and quartz, right under the surface on the down hill side of the black Reef. It was supposed at the time that the nugget was exposed in a rut made by a digger's cart. The nugget's gross weight was 2520 ounces. There is now a monument that marks the place of the discovery. A lot of the area surrounding the nugget produced gold and the Black Reef directly above the Welcome Stranger was remarkably rich. Crushing produced as much as 14 ounces per tone of rock.
In 1867 Nicholas McEvoy and a lad went out looking for his horses in the gully that had the Matrix reef, and positioned above the town. They stumbled on nuggets that weighed 810 ounces, 805 ounces and 782 ounces. Fourteen days later they transfer gold parcels under escort from this place and weighed 3324 ounces.
The rush in Possum Hill occurred in 1875. It is said that there were around twenty nine liquor stores along the street of shops built and that three of them were Chinese. In 1876 the rains had stopped and dysentery was a common thing. Water for puddling always hindered the development in the fields, as the coarse gold was cemented into a hard matrix. In that year four thousand miners were at work. Chinese made up approximately half of the population at Possum Hill and opposition towards their greater digging success led to riots against them in May 1876. In October 1877 the Possum Hill gold was decreasing and miners left.
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