The Cradle of the World's Wealth.

Horowhenua Chronicle, 19 May 1910, Page 4

The Cradle of the World's Wealth.

AX AUSTRALIAN >MTNI.nG TOWN TO-DAY.

(By Archibald Marshall)

Whatever ideas you iniay havo formed of a groat -mining cairnp, drawn 'from Bret Halite, or the teles o fearly Australian gold digging, will bo upset on your first introduction to Kalgoorlie. You havo travelled 370 males from Perth, dined, slept, and breaklasted in tho train in as much comas if you had been travelling ill England or France, and you find yourself in a prosperous, 'buffc apparently not over busy, provincial town, with broadi streets, tramways, churches, good hotels, shops, and, the usual well-appointed, hospitable Australian club house, where you may road most of the London papers.

Hut the town lias for the mast port settled down to mi ordinary, well-organised industry. A greatt tide of ciiviiliisa'tiion, respectability, steady, .responsible work, lias washed away tlio rough make-shifts of the early days, the adventure and the wickedness, the fierce ardor and reckless profusion. The mine managers draw large salaries and settlo disputes with the trade unions to which their meJi belong; the Stock Jsxc.ha.nge keeps business hours in a handsome building, and no longer buys or sells from eight o'clock to past midnight in the open-air; the gold escort no longer clatters off with horses and rifles on its journey through the waterless bush) but watches a safe in a railway van; the women and children no longer sleep in tents or live in a. constanft, laborious, dreary picnic, 'but in trim villas with pretty gardens, go to school, and to church on Sundays, show their smart hats and dresses iut tho pretty racecourse, where tlio grass is kept green all the year round, and flowers bloom in profusion round the lawns and about the sands. Hut if you climb up to some point of vantage and look over the to-wn you see that ft is not like other Australian country towns. It spreads itself widely over the flat, red plain. There are no tall buildings, but iron chimneys, well stayed, rise high above tho rofs, giganItiic, timbered poppet-heads stand over the MTXE-SHAFTS huge mounds of "tailing," still retaining some of their gold, some of them wiitli truck linos laid on them, are heaped up as lrigh as if Nature had helped them there. Thk> houses thin ou't towards the outskirts and seem to have been dumped down anywhere on the red soil, little white shanties with no sign of green about them, and a few better ones hero and .there with pepper trees and little gardens. The eye takes in the long lines of stacked: firewood for tho furnaces—no coal is used nt Knlgoorlie—the iron skips loaded with ore drawn along tlio overhead wires, and the empty 0110 going back to the mines alongside them. The low, blue-grey scrub doses irt on every side a limitless level of monotony, broken only by a few low hills, holding out 110 promise, no refreshments to the eye or spirit. it is as if Nature had tried to cover up her buried treasure with the shabbiest of carpets, so that covetous man. should never suspect that in this dreary spot out of all tlio beautiful places in the world he could find anything worth the finding. "We put on old, stained suits of khaki, took our stand in the narrow cage, and dropped 1300 feelt down the boarded shaft, the higher 'tunnels of the mine, now jet black caves, now dimly lighted, flashing past us. "We lit candles and went along the rough-hewn passages — there are many miles of them in tlve different levels—from which tho ore 1 iad been extracted. They wero roughly roofed and held up by huge timbers hero and there, and the narrow tramway lino ran along their rocky floors. At the end of one an hydraulic drill was pounding and thundering at the hard rock, making lud'es in which itlhe blasting powder would presently explode and loosen tho ore. Muffled reverberations from distant galleries told that tho dark mine was full of workers. But there was nothing to show the inexperienced visitor that THE RICH GOLD was all about him—only rough lumps of grey stone with sometimes a dull, lead-like glimmer where the ricli tellurdi'o conceals its 30 or 40 per cent, of precious metal. But sometimes the ore is so rich that it is brought up and lodged in safes just as it is, and I held little pieces in the hollow of my palm that contained each seven or eighffc pounds worth of gold. We went into the crushing and roasting mills afterwards. They are full of fine grey dust from tho eurshed ore, tho grinding and clanguor of the mills and Ithe heat of the furnaces. The ore goes through a score of processes before the gold is extracted from it. It is ground and re-ground, roasted in slow furnaces that never go out night or day, mixed wi'tih cyanide solutions, passed in a dirty brown solution through filter presses, and then passed into tho locked and guarded precipitation houses. Here are rows of locked lead vats, filled with tangles or hair-liko zino fibre,, on which the gold is gradually precipitated. Tfte vats are cleaned up onc'o a month, and a black, pulpy slime, now very near to pure gold, is loft. It is further filtered and pressed, and becomes a flat, black cake, put through the roasting oven and taken ou/t a fine diry powder, pub -into a pearshaped receptacle of plumbago in the tilting furnace, and tipped out again in buttons of gold. Then it is refined in a smalfor furnace 'and poured into 'bar moulds. So aiti last ono after the other the precautions that Nature "has taken to disguise and safeguard her chief treasure have been attacked and conquered, and tho tortured rock has yielded up the wealth deposited there at the beginning of tWe world. She hias 'been beaten by man's ingenuity and slow progress of knowledge. There is no wav in which she can hide up her gold but. man will have it.