Curio

State Library of New South Wales
Pullen and Rawsthorne's stamper battery at the southern end of Clarke Street, Hill End -- [the battery which crushed the Holtermann Nugget - Lois Carrington (Oct 2005)]

Pullen and Rawsthorne's stamper battery at the southern end of Clarke Street, Hill End -- [the battery which crushed the Holtermann Nugget - Lois Carrington (Oct 2005)]

1872
Glass photonegative

The monster Holtermann gold specimen was crushed at Pullen and Rawsthorne’s new battery, seen here surrounded by cords of timber to power its steam engine and a pond to supply water to its machinery. Situated on the corner of Clarke and Church streets, it was the most modern in Hill End, operating fifteen heads of stampers, each weighing 4½ cwt [229kg]. A fifteen horsepower engine noisily drove the stampers at seventy blows per minute, 24 hours a day, except Sunday. An old miner, writing of Hawkins Hill in the Barrier Miner, 27 March 1911, said that it was his custom:

… to wait for the hour of midnight on Saturday, when the public batteries ceased working on the striking of the town-clock, and the ravines of the Turon would reverberate with the music of the dollies, which within a few minutes would also stop. For the hour had struck, and then silence would brood over the primeval wilderness.

Stamper battery, Hill End

Machinery, and companies employing it, may, perhaps answer, when the Government is preapred to lease out extensive portions of old gold-fields, where streams of water can be brought so as to make large sluices, and thus wash out immense quantities of stuff in a short time. It will , after a while, be the power of putting a very large quantity of auriferous earth through a sluice, and of puddling the stiff earth by machinery, that will enable companies to finish up the gold-fields, when the ordinary digger has left them.