Sludge: Disaster on Victoria's Goldfields

by Susan Lawrence, Peter Davies

Everyone knows gold made Victoria rich. But did you know gold mining was disastrous for the land, drowning it in floods of sand, gravel and silt that gushed out of the mines? Or that this environmental devastation still affects our rivers and floodplains?

Victorians had a name for this mining waste: ‘sludge’. Sludge submerged Victoria’s best grapevines near Bendigo, filled Laanecoorie Reservoir on the Loddon River and oozed down from Beechworth to cover thousands of hectares of rich agricultural land. Children and animals drowned in the sludge lakes that collected in mining towns. Mining effluent contaminated three-quarters of Victoria’s creeks and rivers.

Sludge is the fascinating story of the forgotten filth that plagued nineteenth-century Victoria. It exposes the dirty big secret of Victoria’s mining history – the way it transformed the state’s water and land; and also how the battle against sludge helped to lay the ground for the modern environmental movement.

Genres: Nonfiction

328 pages, Paperback

Published August 5, 2019

About the author

Susan Lawrence is a professor of archaeology at La Trobe University and has spent thirty years studying the goldfields.

Reviews

[K. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Trigger warnings: environmental destruction, racism.

In the interests of full disclosure, Peter Davies was my thesis supervisor and Susan Lawrence was one of my lecturers. That...doesn't mean a huge amount, but I guess it does tell you that I am solidly in the very niche readership that is this book's intended audience.

Anyway. I found this fascinating. There's a tendency in Australia to...idolise?...the gold rush era to a certain extent. To put it forward as the proper origins of Australia and Australian identity. Lawrence and Davies instead focus on the ways in which the gold rush completely destroyed Australia's river systems and massacred the environment in ways that still haven't entirely been rectified.

Knowing their backgrounds, I did want sliiiiiiiiightly more focus on archaeology than I got, but on the whole this was a compelling read (for me. Probably not for anyone else) and I'm glad I picked it up.

[Christiana · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really interesting book about a forgotten part of Australia's environmental history (and present). Parts could have been better written, and there was some unnecessary repetition of facts through the book. But overall fascinating and worth reading

[Marianne · Rating 4 out of 5]

An important read.
People often think I'm being a mad greenie killjoy when I visit goldfields and cry at the environmental destruction still evident today. Now I can hand them this book as evidence instead of the harping of a raving loonie!

[Lily Mae Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely loved this book, couldn't put it down. A fascinating read about forgotten enviromental history.

[Amanda Witt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very interesting problem that was common in the heyday of the goldrush, except is largely forgotten now, not being openly visible, but it is in some places with the landscape changed forever

[Dwight Walker · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a super interesting book on sludge damage from gold mining in Victoria in 19th century. I grew up in Bendigo and have visited Castlemaine so it was very interesting to find out about Garfield Wheel in Chewton near Castlemaine. It also unravelled the labyrinth of races which I have witnessed round Bendigo and Castlemaine that brought water to mines for sluicing and processing or energy. Sludge is a well kept secret. Mining is often spoken of in terms of economic benefits but this lifted lid on environmental damage to farms and water supplies down stream from the mines when waste was washed away until government regulation forced mines to remediate the land after the mines ended. Many rivers were trashed.

[Moti · Rating 5 out of 5]

Who knew?

[Elliot Condous · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yep its about Sludge. Lots of interesting details about a part of the world I know very well and the events that created Ballarat. A 300 page book about Sludge is going to have its dull moments, but I'm glad that someone has gone to the effort of gathering all of this history and information to show just how much Victoria's waterways were decimated by the gold rush and continued mining to this day. Damage that is still affecting waterways today and will take thousands of years to slowly heal. Those enormous bucket dredges, literally consuming the riverbed as they creep along, sifting through tons of rock and mud for traces of gold is absolutely fucked to think about. And it was happening into the 1950s. Obviously things could be a lot better, but I'm glad we have laws now that prevent that level of environmental vandalism. That being said, just last year, Ballarat gold mine controversially got permission to build a new tailings dam for contaminated water, just up the hill from where people live in Mount Clear. Still a long way to go...