Mining-

Mining equals dirt and work, this is what women sees in mining these days. Men sees labour, risks and, well, dirt. But today it is considered easy to find gold , unfortunately they do not know that back then, that was one of the most common work around. Mining was where ordinary people became non-ordinary millionaires.

In the 1850's people mainly mined for specks or nuggets of gold in the shallow alluvial of Victoria, particularly near Bendigo and Ballarat. The very earliest equipment to find gold used by diggers where cradles and gold pans, these worked by using a rock action to separate the gold from the mixture of dirt and water.

As diggers began to settle in to the gold fields, they started working out other ways in what they could find some gold. Groups of men formed a company to make use of the mining methods such as puddling, quartz reef mining, deep lead mining and many forms of sluicing. You may wonder, how does these methods work? Well, sit back, relax because I will be giving you the answers.

PUDDLING - Basically panning but with horses for more speed and to cover more land. This method did work effectively although it had an enormous impact on the landscape. It choked watercourses and covered roads.
QUARTZ REEF MINING - Quartz reefs were the primary source of gold in most goldfields. They dipped steeply, and were mined in sections leaving large slots in the ground where the reef had been. The reefs were first open-cut to reap the benefit of their surface. Then shafts were sunk, or tunnels were driven into the sides of the hills, to trace the gold concealed at greater depths. Once extracted, the quartz had to be crushed to a fine sand to remove the gold.
DEEP LEAD MINING - Deep Lead Mining was actually underground shafts, which first was 100 feet tall. In 1860's now it was more than 300 feet under ground level. This was another successful method which was used to find the 2nd most largest nugget in the world, the "Welcome Stranger Nugget" which was found in Ballarat.
SLUICING - Sluicing involved the use of running water to break down gold-bearing earth, and a sluice box, which was used to recover the gold.When the earth and gravel was washed through the box, the heavier gold stuck in the matting, or behind the riffles.

Now a days, we use the Deep Lead Mining to search for more than gold although we are still discovering new things.