There's gold in them there mills!


G'day everybody! Today I'm going to tell you all about my trip to Venus Battery. 

Here I am sitting in front of the building. As you know, I've only got a little brain so I took a photograph of some information about the mill. Here it is:

Basically, what would happen was that miners would feed in the ore they had dug up from the mine at one end of the mill and gold would come out at the other end. 


This diagram will give you an idea of what happened: 

Here's a picture of the machinery inside: 

The squarish section in the middle of the photograph is where the ground up bits of rock were washed with water. The lighter dust would be washed away leaving the heavier gold. In the background is the battering machinery that crushed up the rocks and made so much noise they could be heard all over Charters Towers.   

This machine looks a bit like a food mixer, doesn't it? It was used to crush up the bits of stone that had been washed away from the gold to make sure that any tiny bits of gold still left inside were extracted. Even though they went to all this trouble to get all the gold out, Citigold, the mining company in Charters Towers, were able to use modern methods to squeeze even more gold out of the spoil heaps that once surrounded the Venus Battery like huge mountains. 

  
Here I am sittin in front of the cyanide plant at the mill. Cyanide is a deadly poison and it is used to extract gold from ore. 

Here I am in front of one of the cyanide vats. 


These next photographs were taken inside the assayer's office. The assayer would test the gold to see how pure it was and decide how many carats it had. 

Here I am sitting beside the crucible that the assayer would use to heat up the gold dust in order to test it. Can you see where the crucible was made? 

And here I am sitting amongst the end products: gold ingots. Behind me is the furnace where the crucible would be heated up. No wonder gold is so expensive. It takes a lot of hard work to dig it up from the ground and extract it from the rock. The other reason why it is so valuable is that, unlike other metals it never rusts or corrodes so it always looks shiny and new. 


I know that some of you are learning some Australian words so I'll just finish off my post with an explanation of a very important Australian tradition which is "smoko". "Smoko" is what Australians call their mid-morning tea break , which we sometimes call "elevenses". It's called "smoko'" because the early settlers would have to brew up their tea on a camp fire, which would be very smoky. Along with their tea, they would eat a "damper', which is bread dough wrapped round a stick and cooked over the fire. 


Well, I'm off for my "Smoko" now! Hooroo!


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