At Warratta is the ruin of a very complex combination of eight-head stamper battery, Tangye pump, and winding gear. All was driven by just one steam engine.. Over the hundred and twenty-five years since 1896 it has suffered considerable damage from souvenir hunters and people who just like to do things. The steam engine is long gone and bits of other components are scattered around the site. However, when we first saw the battery there was enough left for someone to see what it might have looked like in it’s original conglomeration of iron and steel. As with most of these sites the machinery was largely made of iron, which is a pity – because people do like to melt iron down for their blacksmith’s forge and other things. At Milparinka in 1985 there was a mine skip that probably came this site – or from Mount Browne which is where the battery was first installed.
The battery and associated bits and pieces was originally the property of the Mount Browne Company. When that company folded the equipment was acquired by The Warratta Public Battery Company and transferred to it’s present home. There is quite a story behind the joys of transferring and reassembling this piece of nineteenth century industrial art. Thomas House, who removed the battery from Mount Browne and re-erected it at Warratta had considerable difficulty working out how it went back together, and things kept breaking off … Just look at the teeth on the winding-gears…
The images below all date from 1986 when Bluey Adams took us there by way of Albert Town. Albert Town is also in the Warratta Hills, and, although associated with the battery, it was a community of gold seekers who had been seeking their fortunes in shallow workings for a number of years before the battery arrived.
Only at Warratta was there a proper gold reef – that is, gold found in a parent rock, in this case quartz. The slider that follows contains images of the battery (including the winding gears mentioned above) and one of the Warratta Company’s shafts, taken that day in 1986. The first image is of the shaft just mentioned. As can be seen, the country rock is shale, in which the quartz reef was confined.
The diggings in the Warratta Hills were quite different to those at Mount Browne. The country was much more rugged and the workings other than those of the Warratta Company were largely confined to acquiring pay-dirt from crevices between the layers of slate that tectonic activity had distorted from their original level plane, or from the dry watercourses that drained the area into Evelyn Creek when rain did fall.
The story of Warratta is one that needs to be told – so, unless someone has already done so, it will eventually appear here.