QHA_March 2018_Electronic_s

COMPASS
GOLD AND ITS GHOSTS
NOWHERE ELSE DOES GOLD MINING’S PAST MEET ITS PRESENT LIKE
RAVENSWOOD 90 KM SOUTH OF TOWNSVILLE.
QHA REVIEW | 48
Just a couple of hundred metres behind the town of
around 200, an open cut mine yawns wider than a
racecourse as trucks and excavators rumble in its
throat loading ores bound for adjacent processing
facilities. Successful extraction of the mine’s Sarsfield,
Nolans East and Buck Reef deposits has fluctuated
since opening in 1987 and almost came to a standstill
in 2016 when owners Resolute Mining Limited cast
doubts over its future feasibility. But as so often
happens in the industry, the use of increasingly
sophisticated detection techniques indicated more
minerals lay deeper down, extending the mine’s life
expectancy by 13 years.
To say the town has had uneven mining fortunes
over the decades would be an understatement.
Gold was discovered in the area by pastoralists in
1868. Alluvial deposits uncovered near the present
site of Ravenswood sparked a rush of prospectors
and fossickers a year later. Keen to get in on the act,
the government even graced the town with an ore
crushing mill in 1870.
But by 1872, with all the easy pickings extracted,
most mining interests left town having been lured by
more lucrative prospects in Charters Towers. A few
persistent diggers stayed on and were buoyed briefly
by the additional discovery of silver which prompted