Eldorado

You know how it is. Your hanging out in a cheap motel room in Wangaratta, questioning your life choices. The TV is crap, and your reduced to scrolling through google maps to see what there is to look at. And lo and behold you discover that Eldorado, the legendary city of gold, is just up the 21 kilometres up the road.

Well lets go! Hmmm Less impenetrable jungle and more burn outs than I was expecting.

No city of made gold, but at least there is a dredge

Turns out this is not that Eldorado. Its just a little Victorian country town.

However their is something interesting to look at. This the Eldorado dredge. It was built in 1936 and was operated till 1954. Despite best intentions it fell into disrepair and sunk.

Weighing 2000 tons, it dredged 30 million cubic meters from the from the river flats of the Eldorado Plain. So it could dig up soil, process it and dump the tailings behind it. It floated on the pond it made as it carved its way through the country-side.

Caused a bit of a mess at the time apparently. All that to produce 70,000 ounces of gold.

Its got 118 buckets on a conveyor belt. Each bucket weighs 1.4 tonnes and carried a third of a cubic meter of earth.

The buckets dug down about 30 metres. The dirt was carried up and tipped into a revolving tumbler containing thousands of small holes to separate the larger stones from the sand and clay that contained the gold. The sand and clay were then tipped into vibrating jigs to get the heavier material to sink. This sediment was taken to shore where the gold was extracted through amalgamation with mercury.

The dredge required 900 horsepower to operate, using 14 motors of varying capacity. It ran on electricity and power cables were floated out to the dredge. When it first started the top 3 consumers of electricity in Victoria were Melbourne, Geelong and the Eldorado Dredge.

The sound could be heard for more than 20 kilometres. "It was that noisy," says Jack Milne, a local resident who worked on the dredge in the 1930s, "you didn't realise until it stopped. Then the silence was deafening."

The dredge operated 24 hours a day, six days a week, on a shift basis by teams of five or six men.

Maldon

Today we are in Maldon. Another cute historic town, this one near Bendigo. I've seen this old gold mining dredge on google maps, regular posted on historic facebook groups etc. and I've been been to visit for ages.

When I finally got to checking out I was surprised to find its right next to a highway rather than down a gravel road through the forest.

Bonus Crane

Oh there is this awesome crane as well. Would have been a bit ackward to look it all over if I didn't have a drone.