The Six Mile is on the Map
We were glad to be away from Coolgardie ……………… The twenty-five-mile stage was heavy going. We were more than fairly loaded with tools, food, rugs and water. We were about tired out on arrival near sundown, our water bags empty and not a pint of water in the camp. There was nothing for it but to go to the Lakeside Condenser, another eight miles away. When we did get there, we met Mick Mahoney, a Queenslander who had once shared with Ted at Noondoo Station. Mike showed us a small nugget he had picked up that day. He had pegged out a 50-by-50 plot and intended to give the locality a week’s trial. Would we care to join him?
The nugget was a small thing, but it was gold nonetheless, and that was what we were looking for!
Next morning we located Mick’s pegs in the scrub. It seemed a most unlikely place to find gold. Birds flew about noisily and Ted suggested a bit of gold had been dropped by one of these birds. Mike had Cornish blood in his makeup and quoted. “Where he be, there I be”. After about twenty minutes, Mike suddenly yelled “here it is mate’. He showed us another bit of gold about the size of a pea. We forgot then that we were tired and became most interested. Mick told Ted to feed the battery while we went on shaking the sieve. As the fourth shovelful was being lifted into the sieve, Ted yelled “hello, there’s something here”. His shovel was emptied into the sieve, and as Mick felt the extra weight, he dropped his load and with one hand, felt under the dirt to lift out a large, flat piece of yellow metal.
Mick and Ted began to talk in whispers, looking about furtively like men disturbed in some serious wrongdoing. I too felt tense and alarmed, we had struck it rich too suddenly. Mick was the first to speak naturally, he told us we had not marked out a claim yet. Excitedly, with our hands shaking, we pegged each side of Mick’s claim.
“What do we do now? What do we do now?, I kept asking Ted”.
“Dig a big bally hole against the fire and bury that nugget”, said Ted at last. “Don’t show anything, keep the find secret!” But things happened, and the next day we heard voices and realised we were the centre of interest. Men were all about us. Rich gold finds cannot be kept secret. The birds communicate the excitement and unusual movement of men. The first prospectors to arrive that morning told us they had heard parrots screaming as they flew overhead, and then later the men saw our campfire. Some of the newcomers who pegged alongside us had alluvial appliances of a crude sort. They began to put some of the topsoil through. Presently we heard a yell, a crowd gathered to see what proved to be a bigger slug than the one we had buried. Strangers came and wanted to borrow Jimmy’s tools. So he sat down and hired out his kit at so much per hour.
More men kept arriving. By nightfall, there were over a hundred ……. Next day, miles of country were pegged. The valley was dotted with tents and camps. The Six Mile was on the map. Closely following came camel teams, horse drawn waggons with water, food, clothing, boots, cases of whiskey, barrels of beer and timber for shakers. Trees and scrubs vanished and within two weeks the valley was transformed into one long dust heap. There were some exciting finds, when a lucky man hit on a lump bigger than usual, he would stand on his tailings heap and beat his miners dish with a stick to call those within hearing to come and handle the nugget and congratulate him. One old fellow on our boundary drove his pic into a yellow slab weighing over 100 ounces.
Strangely, he shook like a leaf and began to cry, sitting down, nursing his prize.
“This will do me, this will do me”, he kept repeating. “I’ll just keep this one”. He found a few more, much smaller, and went down to Perth. Years afterwards I met him again close to the old man’s home, he said to me. “It should have been yours, Sonny. You would have made better use of it than me”.
Ted and I worked out our claim in under three weeks. Mick’s gold bearing dirt, pitched deeper. We left him still on payable ground. Coolgardie was the nearest bank, so those of us who had been lucky formed our own escort and tramped in with our gold. There was one incident before we left the Six Mile, which I was to recall many years later. Some young fellows found a job on a lease called ‘The Ivanhoe’, they had to sink a shaft. They were both new chums!
One afternoon they came to our camp and showed us a billy can half full of red dirt. “Feel the weight of that stuff, do you think there’s gold in it?” Ted let some run through his hands, and then he put a fistful in a dish, poured some water and sluiced it around. “Why” He exclaimed. “The darn stuff is half gold”. It was not quite that rich, but he was not far wrong. The two lads brought more home the next evening. It was the same, one said. “We’re sinking a shaft in that sort of stuff, there’s tonnes of it”.
Next day they came to camp and told us that the shaft had been filled in, a man was camped there, and no one was allowed to come close. The two lads were put to work on another job. That proved to be the first development work done on the richest ore channel the world has ever known. Later I was to be shift boss in the Ivanhoe Mill and watch the millions of tonnes from that load milled in a hundred head battery.
At the ‘Six Mile’, we heard of a lot of leases higher up the Valley, the Great Boulder, the Lakeview, the Golden Horseshoe and others in which shares could be bought for a few pence at the time. We did not bother to look at them. Why should we? Had we not got plenty of gold buried under our beds in the ground?
Moya Sharp
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