THE PALMER RIVER GOLDFIELDS, Nth Qld.


Shove your head under water

The Palmer River goldfield was first gazetted on 27 November 1873. The main mining centers were in Maytown, Palmerville and Jessops Hill with the goldfield totalling an area close on 9000km square.
The Palmer and all of its tributaries were worked from the junction of Campbell creek (65km north of Maytown) to Strathleven. The most productive region was between Byerstown and Fish Creek Junction.
Some of the creeks and gullies worked were Jessop's, Sandy, Cradle and Oakey Creek. Locations such as Revolver Point, Milkmans flat, McGann's and White Horse all yielded plentiful gold.

With a large population of Chinese diggers it was hard to tell what the total gold removed was, as the Chinese often sent their winnings home in burial jars. At the time, gold prices in Australia were around 3p 17s an ounce and the same gold in Hong Kong went for around 5 pound per ounce. The total estimated return was somewhere around about 1,333,893 ozs. of gold.

A good place to start looking would be in Maytown as every creek and gully for a radius of 10km yielded gold . Overall the soil cover averages a depth of 30cm which means that most detectors could easily find any nuggets left behind by the old timers.

For more details on how to get the gold from the creeks and rivers around the place take a look at Where to Look on the Aussie Gold Page.

There's supposed to be a big gold nugget here

Click on the nugget to go back to The Aussie Prospectors Page