Braidwood owes its existence largely to mankind’s lust for easy and unreasonably abundant wealth. As previously mentioned, gold was discovered around these parts in 1851, leading to an influx of adventurers with dollar signs in their eyes, fixated on scoring big and setting themselves up for a life of leisure and luxury.

The contrast between the dreams of avarice and the lifestyle of the gold hunter couldn’t be more marked. They lived in tents or bark huts, and, having left their families behind, didn’t go in for much ceremony when it came to meals, ablutions and the like. I would speculate that it was probably quite stinky.

The initial find was alluvial gold, so people started off panning in the Shoalhaven River and its tributaries – backbreaking work, not to mention cold and damp in winter.

Later, they began dredging the riverbed or digging in the valleys and using the water for open sluicing. For supplies, a night on the booze, or to pick up mail, they came into Braidwood.

I’m not sure if anyone got really rich from the gold they found – it’s said that the only way to make a fortune during a gold rush is to sell shovels (and, obviously, food, boots, tents, etc.), and the towns of Braidwood and Majors Creek did well out of the needs of the 10,000 or so people who crowded into the area. The rush also brought Chinese workers whose descendants remain to this day – a fascinating story of its own (watch this space).  

It also brought bushrangers who preferred to nick the gold than dig for it – the notorious Clarke Brothers gang had a bit of a career in the area until they shot four special constables near Jinden Station (their graves are in Braidwood Cemetery) – and were subsequently tracked down, tried and hanged.

Legend has it that a fleeing group of bushrangers flung a satchel of gold into the branches of a tree somewhere along Flood Creek, and it remains there to this day, waiting to be found.

Then, in 1870, the Dargues Reef deposit was discovered near Majors Creek and mined until 1891, and again between 1914 and 1916. And again, in 2011, the mine was slated to reopen, with a predicted output of 50,000 ounces a year . . . and funded with a loan from my old employer, Deutsche Bank. The world, my friends, is a whirling web of crazy coincidences.

This was great news for Braidwood – mining folk in town again! A shortage of accommodation meant cottages like ours could be rented out, as could the seven rooms of the Doncaster – a great help in paying the mortgage. We had three geologists in Corner Cottage – its first occupants after its renovation.

Sometimes it seems like a good idea to maybe visit one of the old river sites and fossick for an ingot or two. I say ‘fossick’ advisedly, for this, believe it or not, is the technical term. I never knew – it was a word that was particularly satisfying to use when talking about rummaging about, but it comes from prospecting – especially in an informal way.

So a spot of fossicking in one of the streams hereabouts might prove to be profitable. As with any time of global economic stress, the gold price has risen 25% since the beginning of the year as investors get rid of riskier assets.

This ‘flight to quality’ has driven the price to just over $1,800 per ounce – that’s $58k for a kilo. If you consider that the biggest nugget ever found, understandably dubbed the Welcome Stranger, weighed a whopping 78kg. That’s a tidy sum which would do quite nicely right now, thank you. Plus, if you hit paydirt, you can do the Prospector’s Dance:

So overall, we’ve been lucky that successive periods of gold-driven prosperity have buoyed our town, bequeathing it a large proportion of its heritage buildings and its status as a regional centre of sorts. But the deposits weren’t so huge or bountiful that they drove the growth of a sprawling Witwatersrand-style megalopolis.

A genteel amount of gold, then – an elegant sufficiency, enough but not enough to conjure up any vulgarity; no skyscrapers, casinos, malls or multi-storey car parks.

Come to think of it, that’s how we like it.