ABANDONED MINES

IT’S A SCENE THAT IS SO AUSTRALIAN.

Deep in the bush amid towering eucalypts, the only noise is the screech of cockatoos and a ground-dweller rustling in the undergrowth. Large kangaroos appear suddenly out of the scrub, bounding across the dirt road. Surely no force other than nature could ever have been at work here.

And then, on the other side of a gully, something catches the eye. It’s a decrepit structure, with one word daubed large in black across its wall: POISON. It’s an old cyanide tank, a reminder that, even though this ageless bush has reclaimed nearly all the surrounding area, it can’t completely eradicate the mad days of the gold rush at Eureka Reef, a seam of quartz mined for more than a century from the 1850s. The reef is a few kilometres south of Chewton, a village outside Castlemaine in central Victoria. What’s left – shafts, tunnels, tailings dumps, dry dams and the foundations of buildings – constitutes just several of the 80,000-plus abandoned mines around Australia.

According to Mohan Yellishetty, associate professor in resources engineering at the Department of Civil Engineering at Monash University in Melbourne, abandoned mines fall under many classifications and definitions. Mining legacies are the umbrella term for previously mined, abandoned (where the owner is unable or unwilling to take remedial action), orphan (the legal owner cannot be traced), derelict