Central Deborah Mine, Bendigo – underground

Central Deborah Gold Mine operated from 1939-1954 and extracted 929kg of gold, which would be worth about $50 million today.
From website

Above ground.

First

Tour starts here.


So we travel down in the cage to level 2, and then down ladders to level 3, which is 85.3 m below ground (just belong the horizontal line there). That doesn't sound very far. You can see it goes down a long way beyond that, although I'm told these days levels 15-17 are under water.

Cage - 2

There's two gates there, a cage goes down on one side while another goes up on the other.

"Stand up against the side and face in."

There were four people in there when we went down. Very squishy. They told me these things are suppose to hold 6, or was it 8?, people. All I can say is they must have really liked each other.

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