BARRY KAY:
Hello, my name's Barry Kay. And I'm the interpretive programs manager at Sovereign Hill. Now, when we think of the gold rush, we really need to think of three distinct yet overlapping eras. The first era, perhaps the most exciting era was when gold was first discovered and men rushed here, literally rushed here to the gold fields from all over the world. And the gold was being found in the rivers and the streams, and very close to the surface. It was a really exciting era of men living cheek by jowl, living tents, and it was wild and crazy. And how do places like Sovereign Hill know what this era might've looked like, what the gold fields would've looked like in this time? Well, we have letters and diaries from the people who are actually here. And we also have wonderful paintings and drawings by people like artists, such as S. T. Gill who was actually a gold digger on the goldfields, and did these wonderful paintings and drawings of what life was like here, what it looked like on the goldfields and how exciting it was.
So this is the Red Hill mine. This is where the second biggest nugget ever found was found, the Welcome Nugget. It was worth millions of dollars in today's terms. Now, this was a deep lead mine, and this represents the second era of mining, Deep Lead mining. Now, this is when the diggers were going much, much deeper. They were looking for the buried rivers and streams underneath the surface, sometimes 50 meters or so below the surface. And this is where lots of big nuggets were found, like the Welcome Nugget. It was a really challenging and dangerous form of mining, because buried rivers and streams are very unstable. They've still got plenty of water in them. There's a risk of flooding. There's a risk of collapse because buried rivers and streams are not very stable. The smell would've been appalling from the rotting vegetation and so on. But the risks were great, but the rewards could be even greater in this era.
Now, during the second stage of mining, the Deep Lead era, after the Eureka rebellion in 1854, there were some changes, some reforms and the diggers were allowed to have larger claims, larger mines, and that meant they could be more permanent. And that meant Ballarat too could become more permanent. So we have now no more tents or not as many, we've got more buildings of wood and stone and brick, and permanent businesses coming to sell their wares to these diggers who've got money to spend, and Ballarat becomes a much more established township.
The third stage of mining is quartz mining. Now this is when they're going even deeper into the ground to find these buried reefs of quartz and inside that quartz is gold, locked away inside. So they need to bring the quartz to the surface in big trucks full of the quartz, they crush it down into a fine powder or slurry and release the gold, and hopefully make lots of money.
So it's really important that we find paintings and drawings from artists of our time period. And we draw upon letters and diaries and documents from our time period as well, to make sure that we tell a story that is as exciting and as true as it possibly can be.