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MCCORMACK'S BATTERY AND CYANIDE WORKS
MCCORMICKS ROAD FOSTERVILLE, GREATER BENDIGO CITY
MCCORMACK'S BATTERY AND CYANIDE WORKS
MCCORMICKS ROAD FOSTERVILLE, GREATER BENDIGO CITY
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Victorian Heritage Inventory
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Statement of Significance
What is significant?
The McCormack’s battery and cyanide works site comprises an excellent example of a late nineteenth-century battery and cyanide treatment facility. The site has the potential to contain historical archaeological features, deposits or artefacts associated with the Fosterville gold field.
How is it significant?
The site is of local historical and scientific significance.
Why is it significant?
Gold mining in Fosterville can be characterised as a landscape of boom and bust. Many of the companies were small scale, made very little money, and the Fosterville area was colloquially referred to as the “Poor Man’s Goldfield” (Snoek 1988). Gold miners had to rely on the resources in their immediate vicinity, and the use of pug and hewn timber logs to create the foundation for the stamp battery and the use of local materials in the cyanide vats lends to this notion.
The stamp batteries were available to the public. Miners would excavate materials, have their ore crushed at the battery, and in some cases, generate wealth from the gold extraction. From these results, over time these parties would develop their own mining sites based on these profits and establish their own machinery and battery sites. Without the McCormack’s battery site, it is possible that many of these private parties would have not expanded and developed as quickly as they did.
The cyanide works is of historical and scientific significance for its association with early 20th century industrial scale gold mining in regional Victoria. The cyanide works allowed for miners to repurpose their tailings and extract as much gold as possible.
Gold mining in Fosterville was not as lucrative as other goldfields (in comparison to places such as Bendigo and Ballarat); however, despite this the miners managed to implement the latest mining techniques through a combination of ingenuity and utilisation of local resources (Snoek 1988, p.10). The cyanide works site is representative of this adaptation of new technology in the Fosterville goldfields and has the potential to yield further information about the resourcefulness of the local goldminers.
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