'Bowdun' Ground Down or Sluicing Black Hill

Still seeking to see the history in landscape, in this goldfields locality, this work joins my studies of Black Hill, with its mining-made cliffs of raw sandstone.

Here is a fragment of the history that is embedded in this rockface, when industrial might transfigured, and disfigured, the old country of traditional owners. The changed hill was renamed, reshaped and forcibly shifted into a new story.

1858:
‘The Waterloo Company at the Black Hill are now busily engaged in making an addition to their lifting apparatus. Already the company have a string of large hose piping reaching to the top of the face of the hill, a distance of some 300 feet or so, and now they are rigging a stage for the erection of other piping; so as to lift the water up thirty or forty feet higher, and by this means be enabled to sluice from the very hill top as it were. The engine is a splendid one, of large power, and has been behaving itself very well hitherto. As to the yield of the ground...there is gold in the stuff’.

(From Federation University’s 'Chronology of Black Hill')