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Some ItaUan speakers also formed minor companies trying all three of the mining
methods. Michele BedoUa, who later ovmed the hotel in Spring Creek, became one of
the first to cmsh the quartz to extract gold from his mine at Doctors GuUy.^* It was
from tunneUing, however, that large numbers of Italian speakers reaped the greatest
rewards.
The volcanic nature of Daylesford's terrain made it ideal for extensive tunnel
mining. Thousands of years previously, gold-bearing creeks around the district had
been covered by lava flows from Wombat Hill and, by following along these buried
creek beds, miners were able to bring rich gold deposits to the surface. Skilled at this
form of mining were Italian speakers (Antonio?) Togni, with his Mundic Tunnel at
Boots Gully, and Giuseppe Guglielmoni, who worked with a team of six Ticinese
co-nationals in the mid 1850s at Deep Creek, both making sizeable profits.^' Long
tunnels, worked at many levels hundreds of feet under the basalt layer at Deep Creek,
gave the ItaUan speakers a reputation as expert tunnellers. When, for example,
Guglielmoni's party once came up against a huge basalt plug while following a buried
lead, they reportedly dug around it and continued the lead on the other side.^* Another
Italian speaker who tunnelled successfully in the area was Albino Paganetti, the friend
and business associate of Stefano Pozzi. Two years after his arrival from San Nazzaro
in Ticino in 1855 at age nineteen, Paganetti and Pozzi sluiced the alluvial sands down
to bedrock at ItaUan HiU, driving through a tunnel about two and a half kilometres
long.^'
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