Charters Towers, Kennedy Division, North Queensland, Australia

Notes:
The town was founded after a the discovery of gold in a stream by an Aboriginal boy, Jupiter Mosman, in 1871, and the population of Charters Towers reached a peak of 30,000 during the ensuing gold rush of the 1870s and '80s. It was gazetted a municipality in 1878 and became a city in 1909.



Charters Towers mine shafts are a heritage-listed group of mine shafts and ruins at Charters Towers, Charters Towers Region, Queensland, Australia. It was built from 1883 to 1916. It was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 29 April 2003.



These eight vertical mine shafts are to be found amongst the suburban streets of Charters Towers and were developed during the period of intense gold mining that occurred on the Charters Towers Goldfield from 1872 to 1917. During this forty-five-year period, Charters Towers became one of the most important goldfields in Queensland, and in Australia, attracting heavy investment interest from overseas companies. At its peak it accounted for more than a third of Queensland's entire gold production. The success of the goldfield led to the permanent establishment of the town of Charters Towers and had a major impact on the continued settlement of North Queensland and the economy of Queensland as a whole.



Gold was discovered at the foot of Towers Hill in late 1871 and in August 1872 the Charters Towers Goldfield was officially proclaimed. There was little alluvial gold at Charters Towers, the major payable gold to be found in downward sloping reefs of gold-bearing ore. Gold mining in Charters Towers was characterised by deep underlie shafts with levels striking the various reefs that ran through the field. Vertical shafts were also a feature of the goldfield however not as common as the underlie shafts. (There are approximately 200 kilometres (120 mi) of mine shafts under Charter Towers.



Because Charters Towers Goldfield was a reefing field it required capital and equipment for its development. Underground mining of this nature led to the development of more stable settlements as opposed to some of the fleeting settlements that developed and then disappeared around short-lived alluvial gold fields.



The gold mining leases (GMLs) that were taken up during the late 19th and early 20th centuries covered the entire area of Charters Towers in a patchwork fashion. Mining companies who held the leases would often sink several shafts on their land to cut the reefs, with unsuccessful prospecting being a common aspect of mining as well as the spectacular successes.



A heightened phase of prosperity was entered when the great wealth of the Day Dawn Reef was discovered in 1878. It was to become one of the highest producers of gold on the Charters Towers field. Charters Towers boomed throughout the 1880s, overshadowing all other mining centres in North Queensland. Increased speculation was triggered by the floating of companies on the London stock market from 1886 following a display of Charters Towers Gold at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London in 1885 and changes to investment law. British investors poured wealth into Charters Towers during this period providing the capital which gave rise to the substantial nature of the city and the continued large scale mining.\



By 1886, thirty-three shafts had been sunk to below the 152-metre (499 ft) level and gold production had doubled since 1883. In 1889 the famous Brilliant Reef, the richest on the field, was discovered and Charters Towers continued to prosper throughout the depressed economy of the 1890s with its peak production of 319,572 ounces (9,059,700 g) of gold in 1899, and the population peaking to approximately 27,000 in 1900. The great numbers of wage-earning miners employed by the mining companies in Charters Towers also created an environment conducive to the growth of an industrial union which made a vital contribution to the Queensland labour movement.



Charters Towers was so full of confidence during its peak that its inhabitants referred to it as "The World". No other mining town in North Queensland came close to its prosperity and diversity.



The early 20th century was marked by a steady decline in gold production. Menghetti suggests that "... already an unhealthy amount of the return was coming from the re-treatment of the residues with the cyanide process which had arrived in Charters Towers in 1892". In the three years after 1910 the number of employed miners on the field fell from 2,631 to 985. Government subsidies were granted to some mines for further exploration, however this yielded little and the population of Charters Towers began to drift away.



Most mines had been abandoned by 1916 with the last of the big mines, the Brilliant Extended, closing down in 1917. By the end of this peak gold mining period, Charters Towers Goldfield had produced about 7 million ounces of gold.



Throughout World War I, most of the infrastructure around the mines (e.g. headframes, poppet heads and machinery) was dismantled for recycling purposes during the war effort. In many cases the infrastructure was simply moved to new mines.



During the 1960s the Charters Towers City Council constructed fences around the remaining mine shafts. In recent years a program of capping many old mine shafts has been in place. The Department of Natural Resources and Mines currently maintain the mineshafts.

Latitude: -20.1, Longitude: 146.266667

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