In a letter to the Truro newspaper, Karl recounted a question he heard repeatedly while visiting Rockhampton: "Have you seen the Mount?" He admitted he hadn't, but once he asked around, he learned the locals meant Mount Morgan—“a mountain of gold” located 35 miles away, and discovered just 15 years prior.
Intrigued by the reputation, Karl set off with a small party for what turned out to be quite an adventure—complete with English-style trains, dinner bells, screaming cockatoos, and a mining town carved into a mountainside.
I followed in Karl’s footsteps—though with fewer cockatoos and a stop at a fascinating museum.
Karl writes:
“A small party of us decided to go and see the works one day, and after making preparations we started for the railway station. After fifteen minutes wait, the train pulled into the station. It was an old fashioned English style of train (or a narrow gauge railway), with its guard and porter instead of conductor and baggage-master as on American roads. We got into a compartment of the carriage, where there was just room enough for six, and after another quarter of an hour of waiting the guard came along and asked ‘to see our tickets.’ After being satisfied we were not trying to get a free ride, he locked the door, and did likewise to all the different compartments of the train. All was ready at last, and at a signal from the station master, the stoker on the little old-fashioned locomotive got a dinner bell out the toolbox and rang it hard, and we were off.”
“About a mile brought us to the bush (after we had passed a few orange groves and gardens), where cattle, sheep and goats were feeding in the long grass. Occasionally, as the train continued on its way, we would come to a lagoon on which were floating all kinds of tropical water lilies. Among the reeds and rushes were cranes, black swans, ibis, pelicans and other kinds of waterfowl that set up as we passed. Among the trees were plenty of parrots and cockatoos, which also started a screaming.”
“We arrived at the end of two hours and a half at Mount Morgan station (the last five miles was over a cogwheel track, with two engines on the train of three carriages, so steep was the grade to the summit).”
Karl wasn’t kidding when he said the route was steep. I drove up winding roads that overlooked the Fitzroy River valley and stopped at several lookouts to take it all in. While I didn’t see cranes or black swans like Karl did, I did catch sight of a few emus trotting through the brush.
Karl’s description of the mine is vivid:
“We secured a bus and started for the mine, and after paying half a crown each to the guide of the works, we started into a tunnel in the side of the mount, which we followed for 400 yards, then we were put into some sort of a rat trap conveyance and hoisted up through the centre of the mount for about 200 feet onto another level. The guide led us around, and at last we came out of the depths of the earth into the open again on the opposite side from where we entered.”
“The mine is honeycombed with tunnels, chutes, etc., and the owners, seeing it was the same kind of crumbling rock right through, decided to shovel away the whole mountain. So chutes were put in from the top leading down into the tunnels below. The dirt is thrown down these chutes and wheeled out to the cruiser from the tunnel in the trucks.”
“They have already taken over 300 feet off the top of the mountain, which was once a mountain of rock, but now it is composed of a crumbling, half-burned and rotten dirt, with streaks of red, brown, yellow, white and different other colours running through it. Any part can be broken with the fingers quite easily.”
“All this dirt and rubbish is run through ponderous crushers, which turn it out in the form of a pink dust. This is burned and afterwards put in vats, mixed with water, and then forced through filters in some way and treated with different kinds of acids, etc., and then run through a charcoal filter, with the result the gold is separated and the refuse is dumped into the river Dee and carried into the Fitzroy and then into the sea.”
“The guide and others said it was the richest mine in the world, and the only one of the kind ever discovered. It is a rich mine, no doubt, employing 1,500 men and keeping a town of 6,000 people going.”
What made Karl’s visit to the “mountain of gold” possible? A feat of engineering that snaked through the Razorback Range and powered a boomtown. Join me in the next post—Steel and Steam—with a guest “Chronicler” who brings the railway’s legacy to life.
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