Nearly 200 metres beneath the ground, the beam of a miner's lamp picks out a glittering yellow shard embedded in a freshly blasted band of white quartz. 'That's a little ripper,' said engineer Mark Shannon, as colleagues, working in ankle-high grey sludge, prepared to set more explosives. 'That's exactly what we're looking for.'
More than 150 years after thousands of Chinese and European miners flocked to the Australian state of Victoria in search of gold, prospectors are once again striking it rich. Better equipment and sophisticated geological mapping are enabling modern mining companies to find gold deposits that were beyond the reach of their 19th-century forbears.
Backbreaking work with picks and shovels has been replaced by huge drilling machines, powerful bulldozers known as 'boggers' and monster trucks capable of hauling to the surface 40-tonne loads of ore.
Victoria once produced 40 per cent of the world's gold, and eight companies have recently returned to the 'Golden Triangle' bounded by the towns of Ballarat and Bendigo. Wide avenues, elegant buildings with wrought iron balconies, and imperial statues are testament to the extraordinary wealth which was dug out of the ground.
Around GBP2.4 billion (HK$32.5 billion) worth of gold was mined in Victoria between the 1850s and the first world war, when a lack of manpower and coal made it impossible to keep the mines pumped free of water. Mining leases had also become so fragmented that they no longer justified the capital investment, and have only recently been bought up and consolidated into much larger parcels.
The new generation of mining companies believe that as much gold remains beneath the surface as was extracted during the first gold rush. Victoria still boasts one of the richest gold-bearing regions in the world, and it is expected that A$710 million (HK$4.06 billion) worth of the metal will be extracted each year.
