Ballarat gold rush: new generation extract gold from the ground

BALLARAT is undergoing a second gold rush as advances in mining techniques allow a new generation of miners to extract gold from the ground.

New and old: Kurtis Noyce from Castlemaine Gold and Sovereign Hill mine guide Andrew Mitchell explore the golden depths of Ballarat. Picture: Nathan Dyer

BALLARAT is undergoing a second gold rush as advances in mining techniques allow a new generation of miners to extract gold from the ground.

With gold first discovered in the regional Victorian city in 1851, miners from all over the world rushed to Ballarat to seek their fortune.

With 10 million ounces of gold found through alluvial deposits (deposited by water movement), and two million ounces found in hard rock underground, gold made Ballarat the richest city in the world during the 1850s.

Mining at Ballarat in the 1800s.

However, the city’s golden days ended in 1918 when the last goldmine at Black Hill closed.

Mining had become unprofitable due to the high cost of pumping groundwater from deep mines and due to labour shortages caused by World War 1.

Castlemaine Goldfields started producing gold in Ballarat in September 2011, and is currently pulling out about 50,000 ounces a year of the precious metal from the ground.

With gold trading at about $1500 an ounce, it’s earning the company, a subsidiary of LionGold Corp, about $75 million a year.

Gold prospectors were still trying their luck near Ballarat in 1938. Image: HWT Argus collection.

In 2014/15 the Ballarat gold mine achieved 3.3 kilometres of underground development, carried out 48 kilometres of diamond drilling and mined 257,000 tonnes of ore.

Castlemaine Goldfield’s senior sustainability officer Kurtis Noyce said the company mined just over 46,000 ounces of gold in Ballarat last year and “with continued drilling success we hope to be here for many more years to come”.

“There are a lot of similarities to what happened in the olden days but obviously the technological advances in identifying prospective ore bodies, together with metallurgical developments to improve gold recovery, lower grade ores are now economic,” Mr Noyce said.

“One of the reasons that many mines closed was water.

“They had very inefficient steam powered pumps, we’re now using large pumps that can pump out water at 20 to 30 litres per second.”

A computer image shows where gold deposits lie beneath Ballarat's main street.

Mr Noyce said today’s miners are also able to go deeper underground than in the past.

“The old timers pulled up at about 300m, for the last five years we’ve been mining at about 700m below the surface,” he said.

“We also have to have a very good understanding of the geology to know where the gold is.

“Many of the advances in technology also make mining today much safer than it was in the past.

“We’ve got a comfortable working environment today of five metre by five metre tunnels compared to the old timers who worked in very tight, cramped conditions.

“We do it easy today compared to the old timers.”

The Museum of Australian Democracy at Eureka (M.A.D.E) is celebrating a $10,000 deal with Castlemaine Goldfields to create a fresh new learning resource for Australian schools.

The digital resource consists of two fully-animated video clips and accompanying worksheets telling the story of Victoria’s gold mining history by comparing modern-day mining techniques with those from the past.

It is available to schools nationally on the M.A.D.E website.

@AndyJeffo