ARALUEN

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When gold was discovered in the Araluen Valley to the north-west of Moruya in 1851, the landscape changed almost instantaneously.

The word ‘Araluen’ is believed to be a local Walbanga Aboriginal word meaning ‘place of waterlilies’, describing an originally-abundant feature of the billabongs and the waterways of the area. These rapidly disappeared!

The first Europeans explored the area in 1822, and within a few years the valley had been accurately mapped.

By 1835 Henry Clay Burnell had purchased 1,280 acres in the valley for £265 and became the first settler in the area. His farm house and farm buildings were erected with the help of convicts.

The following year Andrew Badgery began grazing cattle in the area. He was later to make his fortune supplying goods to thousands of miners who flocked to the area and by charging them to prospect on his properties.

In 1848 a road was constructed using convict labour from the Valley to Moruya.

In September 1851 two Moruya men, Alexander Waddell and Harry Hicken, discovered alluvial gold in the Araluen Valley after they had noticed that local terrain resembled that in the rich gold-bearing area around Ophir near Bathurst.

Almost overnight, thousands of prospectors had moved to the area. Most usually arrived by ship at Broulee and then walked overland to the goldfields.

Many were to be richly rewarded. One history suggests that in Majors Creek in the early days prospectors were recovering an average of one ounce of gold per man per day.

Within a year, an estimated 100,000 ozs (2,830 kg) of gold had been recovered. And this was just the start!

The Araluen goldfields (which actually extend up on to the tablelands towards Braidwood and are still being worked today – for example at the Dargues Reef Mine near Majors Creek) gained a reputation of being one of the richest goldfields in Australia and the workings extended for many miles along the creeks in the area. Major gold deposits were exploited at Jembaicumbene, Majors Creek and Araluen – with Araluen itself being divided into six districts: Upper Araluen, Bourketown, Newton, Crown Flats, Redbank and Medmelong.

As it turned out, the richness of the Araluen goldfields was to be anything but the proverbial flash in the pan – with the Araulen goldfields ending up having a longer life and being capable of supporting more miners than most other Australian alluvial goldfields.

So, significant infrastructure was built, such as a road that was constructed between 1856 and 1861 up the mountain from Araluen to Majors Creek and Braidwood.

Water races were also installed from as early as 1855 – some to feed water so that gold could be extracted from the gold-bearing sands, some to drain water way from ever-deepening shafts: ‘The great drawback to testing (penetrating) the ground has been the underground leakage. The depth is nothing, in no case exceeding forty feet, but when the fine grey sand has been reached, then comes the water which nothing but powerful pumps and engine-power can subdue. So it stands to reason that the ordinary miner, with his windlass and bucket, has been quite unable to bottom a shaft in this locality. (So) during this last year or so, companies have been formed with a goodly amount of capital to bring up (build) tail races of stout timber and covered over. These…are now beginning to develop the almost inexhaustible bed of auriferous (gold-bearing) dirt composing the bottom layer on the granite.’('Freeman’s Journal', 14th February 1880). (A long article, describing an ambitious plan to build a race along the whole length of the Araluen Valley goldfields to drain the area is included in the 'Sydney Mail and NSW Advertiser' of 7th March 1896, accessible on Trove.)

(Water, in fact, proved to be a major and on-going challenge to the area. Either there was far too much (as described above and below) or there was too little, with significant droughts between 1875 and the 1890s posing considerable challenges to the miners and the mining companies in the area.)

At its peak in the 1860s and 1870s, 30,000 men were working the area. There were around 26 hotels, 20 butchers and numerous general stores, bakers, shoemakers, blacksmiths, churches and banks catering to the needs of residents.

It is believed around 700 Chinese were attracted to the Araluen goldfields at this time. The miners often worked in organized groups of 30 to 100 men, which resulted in their gold-digging efforts being very successful…much to the resentment of local European miners.

(Goldmining by the Chinese was very much a man’s game. In 1880 there were fewer than 100 Chinese women in NSW, compared to a population of 10,000 Chinese men. Not that the gender imbalance was restricted to the Chinese miners: Local ‘hotels nearly all had amusement halls attached to them, and grand dances were frequently advertised, the different houses vying with each other as to which could bring off the best ball – the ‘best’ usually meaning the wildest, for fun in those days was mostly of the furious kind. So that the miners should be afforded some relief from the monotony of dancing with each other, the thoughtful promoters of the dances occasionally went to the trouble and expense of bringing parties of girls up from Sydney and other towns as partners for them. Such enterprises were widely advertised, and, as a rule, no doubt, brought cash as well as kudos to the promoters.’)

It seems race relations on the Araluen goldfields were unusually good – perhaps particularly thanks to the efforts of a Chinese man, Quong Tart.

It is estimated that by 1896 an incredible £11,000,000 worth of gold had been taken from the Araluen Valley goldfields.

On January 1st 1860 the Araluen Valley was hit by a devastating flood. ‘Moruya - The First 150 Years’ reported ‘The loss of life was heavy. In one case a hotel and all its occupants were swept away, and the bodies of several of those in the building at the time were found afterwards on the beach at Moruya. Much later that year the workings were reopened but they never returned to their former glory or excitement.’

The wealth of the area inevitably attracted bushrangers. On 13th March 1865 Ben Hall, Johnny Gilbert and Tom Clarke unsuccessfully attempted to hold up a gold coach headed to Braidwood near the top of the mountain on the Araluen to Majors Creek Road, but were outflanked and forced to flee. One policeman was wounded in the encounter. The coach involved has been restored and is on display at the Braidwood Museum.

In 1869 reef mining (where gold is extracted from seams running through quartz rock, which is crushed by large stamping batteries) commenced in Majors Creek and by 1871 five battery crushers were operating in the area. These were extracting over 100 oz of gold per week.

And from 1870 mechanisation in the form of hydraulic sluicing (the use of high-pressure water cannons) was introduced to the area. This made recovery of the gold very much easier because overburden above the gold-bearing strata was often up to 12 metres in depth.

In 1899 yet another major change to extracting gold in the area occurred when the first dredge started operation. This must have been a profitable undertaking because eventually 11 other dredges were working nearby. (As an indication of the profitability of dredges operating in the valley, the Araluen No. 1 Dredge, constructed in 1900, paid twenty dividends totalling £8,000 and another dredge, the Central No. 2, was able to be constructed at a cost of £4,400 from the profits it generated.)

However, by the late 1930s dredging had stopped and the valley basically returned to become a grazing and farming area – despite specific efforts being made during the 1930s Depression to revive mining to provide employment in the area.

From the early 1900s a Cheese factory operated in the Valley. It was taking milk from 11 suppliers, ‘all of them being well-to-do dairy farmers and graziers of the district’ and produced around 6,000 lb of cheese per month. And from the 1930s orchards and market gardens were established, with peach production ultimately becoming one of the main incoming-producing activities in the area – offering gold of a different form to local residents.

Sources: Wikipedia and Trove; Sydney Morning Herald 8th February 2004; www.majorscreek.org.au; ‘Majors Creek Gold Deposits’, NSW Resources & Geoscience; Sydney Living Museum; ‘Araluen, 1901 – a Town in Transition’ and ‘Moruya – the First 150 Years’, Moruya & District Historical Society; ‘Araluen, N.S.W’, www.aussietowns.com.au.

Illustration: 'Life on the Goldfields: A Ball at Araluen', 1867. nla.obj-138069581-1