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Things being in this posture, there reached Avondale, in the winter of '83, a vague, intangible bruit of somebody expecting to hit it on Mount Brown; and, shortly afterward, Bill, in a vision of the night, found himself paddocking a bit of four-foot ground for a free, lively, six-inch wash, running something like ten ounces to the dish-rough, shotty, water-worn gold.
Gold is found in tolerable quantities, even by the Malay easy-going manner of searching for it, and diamonds and garnets are tolerably abundant. Gold can be washed with little difficulty from most of the river beds, and from various alluvial deposits. The metal thus found is pure, but "rough and shotty." The nearer the mountains the larger the find. It is of a rich, red color.
In the meantime I had bottomed my shaft at eleven feet. It turned out to be a very wet one, so I had to work without my shirt. When I took the first dish down to wash, I noticed a number of men taking great interest in it, especially when the panning-out showed two dwts. of shotty gold in the dish. The men engaged me in conversation.
Spangles and specks are found; but the greater part of the dust is granular, increasing to 'shotty gold. The natives divide the noble ore into 'dust-gold' and 'mountain-gold. The latter would consist of nuggets, 'lobs, or pépites, and of crystals varying in size from a pin's head to a pea. The form is a cube modified to an octahedron and a rhombic dodecahedron.
The biggest mistake we ever made in our lives was not following up the streak of colour you spotted in that gully running down from Bardo Range to Pelican River. If we had stopped, and done a bit of stripping for alluvial, for certain, we should have found heavy, shotty gold, with only a few feet of stripping. But I've done better than that got on the lead dead on the gutter.
We decided to go up on a spinifex ridge, out of sight, to sink, what turned out to be a three-cornered shaft, and so gain experience. This we bottomed at 100 feet, obtaining good specimens of shotty gold. Mr. Robert Christison, owner of Lammermoor Station, and Mr. They camped close to us, and like ourselves, intended trying their luck at gold digging.
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