Precious metals.

Today we are at Cobar, we called in on the way through to the centre but it was pouring with rain and we saw nothing. We gave ourselves two nights so that we would have a full day to check out the place and the weather was kind to us this time around.
Cobar is a town that has grown and evaporated a couple of times thanks to the volatile nature of the demand for copper and gold. At the moment it is a fairly prosperous little town and is riding on the mining boom once again.

Our explorations took us first to a large gold mine that initially looks like an open cut mine but it is a huge hole in the ground with a road that allows an easy gradient for the heavy machinery that drives into the hole at the bottom (Yellow arrow points to the entrance) The seam that contains the gold can be seen where the white arrows indicate where old mines have been exposed, I am assuming that they were hand dug and had buckets that were hauled up through a shaft to take the ore to the surface.

At a park opposite the Information Office is a memorial to the miners who lost their lives in mining accidents in Cobar and this imposing life-size miner working at an ore face shows how work was done in the past. Computerized machinery does the hard work these days.

There must have been plenty of gold in “them thar hills” because an information board had a photograph of one of the gold stampers. I have been to other gold mining towns where they have had ten stampers or fewer so fifty is a huge quantity! The ore was smashed into dust by the stampers and the water would wash the dust over a bed that was filled with mercury. Gold is heavier than crushed rock and sinks into the mercury while the water washes the rock off and into a pit. At the end of the crushing the mercury is scraped off the plates and put into a crucible and evaporated (?) over heat to release the gold. (If I have this wrong, please let me know!)

A visit to a working copper mine was fascinating, we were taken in a small bus around the outside of the working area and could only take our photos from behind the windows of the bus. I couldn't help being amazed at the store of huge tyres in a shed dedicated to this task. We were told that these tyres are hard to come by so when they are available a big order is made so that they are on hand for when they are needed.

Apart from lots of facts and figures giving quantities and and percentages (which went in one ear and out the other) we were shown the complex arrangement of tanks and pipes that are part of the method of separating/refining the copper from the ore. It was all very impressive.

Even more impressive is the number of pubs in Cobar! These miners are obviously a thirsty lot! The smart Great Western Hotel is named after one of the Gold Mines. I couldn't resist taking a photograph of it – it has the longest iron lacework veranda I have seen.

AJ