Notes on the occurrence of gold at Port Cygnet

Abstract

A visit recently paid to Port Cygnet has resulted in a discovery which is not without interest from a scientific point of view, if nothing more. Having had to traverse the Huon district in all directions for several years past, in the discharge of official duties, I had become tolerably familiar with its principal geological features, which present few variations from those that prevail in the neighbourhood of Hobart Town, and the greater part of the Derwent basin. If a line be drawn from the East Coast through Campbell Town to the Great Lake, and thence southwards to Recherche Bay in a direction nearly corresponding with the course of the 147th meridian, the area included between this and the coastline is the only large section of Tasmania in which there is no ground for expecting discoveries of gold or other valuable metals. The sedimentary rocks of the whole of this area may be described in general terms as Upper Palaeozoic. They comprise the carboniferous series, and probably pass upwards into the counterparts of rocks now established in Victoria as Mesozoic, and they are here and there overlaid by Tertiary and Post-tertiary deposits. The whole series, to the Tertiary inclusive, has been penetrated and intersected to an extraordinary extent by trappean and basaltic rocks, which frequently hide the sedimentary strata altogether from view over extensive tracts of country.