Heritage Inventory History of Site: The alluvial workings surviving on Humbug Hill are mainly associated with the mining of high terrace Tertiary gravels which were deposited up to 40 million years ago. The hill, along with others in the vicinity, was rushed in 1854 and proved to be extremely good for sluicing, being covered by 30ft of rich gold-bearing gravels. Water to work the deposits was brought in an open channel (called a race) from a reservoir, now known as Russells Reservoir. The race from this reservoir wound its way for considerable distance round the heads of intervening gullies before reaching the hill.
The Humbug Sluicing Company used a patent bitumentized pipe to cross Slaty Creek: the pipe had a diameter of 8 inches, was a half mile long, and had a maximum thickness of 7/8th of an inch.Due to the dryness of the environment, sluicing was extremely seasonal, and when a good stream of water came through, work was carried on day and night. This was the case on Humbug Hill in the winter of 1859, where a sluicing party worked shifts (6 hours on, 12 hours of) washing 1,500 cubic yards of soil before the water run out. For their efforts they obtained 245 ounces of gold.
The Humbug Hill operation, which involved cutting faces, turning the water along the base of the face and collapsing blocks of ground from 20 to 50 tons, appears to be the principal sluicing technique used at Creswick. The main work on the Tertiary gravels at Creswick had ended by the mid 1860s. By the end of the 1865/66 drought only the Chinese were still preserving with shallow alluvial mining at Creswick, particularly sluicing.
[Source: Victorian Heritage Register.]