Morning Star Mine

MCO's Woods Point Gold Project is located 120km northeast of Melbourne, Australia adjacent to the famous gold towns of Woods Point and Gaffney's Creek. The discovery of gold in the 1850s generated great wealth for many Victorian towns. Some of the richest gold fields were discovered in the region surrounding Woods Point. The township was settled soon after the first discovery of gold in Victoria's east in 1861 by William Gooley. Gooley's discovery attracted thousands to this rugged mountain region in search of newly-discovered gold-bearing quartz veins and river gravels. Some of the richest seams of gold were discovered at the Morning Star mine. Significantly the Woods Point - Walhalla goldfield was patronised around 10 years after the gold rushes that had gripped Bendigo, Ballarat and other parts of Victoria and indeed New South Wales where it all began near Bathurst and Hill End. Probably the biggest factor in this was the isolation and topography of the area. Unlike the relatively flat and accessible goldfields north of Melbourne off the Hume Highway, Woods Point was remote and much of the goldfield is located at between 500 to 1,200 metres above sea-level.

By the mid 1860s about 50 large mines and hundreds of smaller claims were producing gold. The old Woods Point gold field, extending from Jamieson to Walhalla, was one of the most productive in Australia’s history. Over a century of mining it yielded between 6 and 7 Million ounces of gold, with an average ore grade exceeding 27g/t. Between 1861 and 1963 the Morning Star mine contributed ~15% of this production.

The mine was managed from the late 1920s by Gold Mines of Australia, a subsidiary of Western Mining Corporation (WMC). WMC worked the mine down to a depth of 250m, extracting a succession of rich quartz reefs to between Levels 7 and 9 of the mine.

The entire above-ground infrastructure of the Morning Star mine together with most of the township of Woods Point was destroyed in the catastrophic 1939 'Black Friday' bushfires. The lack of infrastructure still intact after the fires and the advent of World War II caused WMC to stop mining at and above Level 9 and sink the shaft deeply in search of new rich reefs inferred by two earlier drill holes at and below the 16 Level of the mine. Between levels 16 and 19, WMC discovered the famous 'Achilles' reef, which yielded more than 250,000oz in around 200,000 tonnes of ore. It became one of the richest single reefs ever mined in Australia contributing to Morning Star being, at one point in the early 1940s, Australia's premier gold mine.

GMA (WMC) pulled out amid much controversy in 1959, citing the low price of gold (US$35 per ounce) and exhorbitant power costs to run the mill and pump groundwater, withdrawing much of the below ground infrastructure needed to continue mining at depth. After several well meaning local efforts to continue mining, the Morning Star Goldmine closed in 1962 due to lack of infrastructure and funding. It lay fallow until picked up by MCO in 1993/94. At that point, there was no above ground infrastructure whatsoever, the mine had been plugged at surface by tonnes of concrete and groundwater was spilling out of the 'Creek Adit', meaning the mine was full to the brim of groundwater and most of what lay underneath had long since been consigned to a 'watery grave'.

The Morning Star in the Goldmines of Australia (WMC) days