MOUNT MISERY DIGGINGS MINING LANDSCAPE

he site is located within the Enfield State Forest and the landscape extend from the site of a Chinese camp (H7622-0463), approximately 3.5 kilometres along the Mount Misery Creek. 

 

The Mt Misery Gold Rush began in 1853 and attracted 200 miners scattered along gullies in the creek. Mining continued in the area until the twentieth century, however alluvial landscape features remain largely intact. Features include, well preserved water-races, breached dams, small terraces with remnant hearths, a puddling trough, historic surviving pathways. Features across the diggings are distributed as a series of clusters closely associated with the network of water races. While the site contains a predominant alluvial landscape, the alluvial terraces on the site contain a dense collection of potholes and spoil heaps. Extensive sluice pits, abrupt sluice faces, tailings piles and tailraces across the diggings are evidence of hydraulic and ground sluicing operations. Dredging operations in the first decade of the 20th century have left a dredge hole alongside the creek a kilometre above the diggings.  

The site is of regional historical and archaeological significance 

The Mount Misery Diggings presents an intact mining landscape containing a variety of mining technologies from 1853 until the early twentieth century. The landscape presents a different archaeological features and site types relating to domestic, social, civic, and industrial activity and has the potential to contain archaeological information relating to the lives of miners in this goldfield and the sequence of mining activities in the area.