Mining activity at Cells Creek (a tributary of Cells River) began in earnest in 1887. The area became known as The Cells due to remains of cell wagons which housed convict road gangs who built the road between New England and Port Macquarie in the early 1840s.

The actual site of the diggings was in wild impenetrable scrub country just off the main Port Macquarie-Walcha road, some fifty miles from Wingham.

The living conditions for the miners were primitive, consisting of huts built with slabs and shingled roofs while others were built of bark. A number of people made do with tents.

The Cells mining area produced its most profitable gold in the 1890s, but by 1899 most of the mining leases were surrendered as most of the payable gold had been mined out.

Mummel River, to the west of Cells Creek, also saw mining activity. Gold was first reported in the area in 1873 but the most profitable mining commenced in 1907 in what became known as the Sandon Goldfields.

Possibly 1000 tons of ore was produced prior to 1914 but there was little activity after that period until 1930, when the Martin family came to the Mummel River to work the mines during the Great Depression years.

Stanley Martin wrote the following account of his years working with his family and others at the Mummel Mines in the 1930s.

It was first published in the Manning Valley Historical Society Journal in 1997. Additional research was provided by Sandra Williams and Jim Speight, and revised by Maurie Garland & Glenda Smith.

It was the height of the Great Depression. My father had lost his business, home and car in the city and there was no work. Because he had a Mine Manager's Certificate, he was offered employment by the partnership of Cooper & Oertel at the princely wage (for that time) of eight pounds per week. He jumped at the chance and taking two men as initial employees, Harry Winton and Arthur Hall, eventually got the existing machinery into working condition and commenced mining ore and treating it. He also employed three local men: Arthur Holden and Jim Bugg, to help mine and work the battery; and Hugh Duff, with horse and slide, to cut and deliver wood for the boiler.

Already existing was a shaft 70 feet deep with a staging at 40 feet. I was never able to find out much about this earlier work. Some years later Bert Wratten told me (he was an old man) that the initial find of gold was on the surface where a thin seam of pure gold had been extruded from below "and they picked it out by hand". That is where they sunk the shaft at the junction between a very hard quartzite to the north and a massive serpentine extrusion southwards for over a mile.

I did find a notebook where there was a name James Landrigan O'Keefe. It had a lot of figuring in it which I could not interpret. Later I talked to a man named Muffet who said he had worked on the earlier mining when he was a young man. This would put the original mining of rock, and apparently the crushing of it at least pre 1920, probably a lot earlier. In this era, they must have produced enough gold to make a profit to give them the incentive to do as much work as they did.

Considering that every item at the site had to be brought either by pack horse from Glamis or by Bob Wilson's massive slide and half a bullock team from Cooplacurripa, up Home Creek and on to the top near 'Observation' then down into Two Bulls Creek and over another top into the Mummel River and across it, the treating plant at the mine when my father went there in 1930, though small, was effective. The amount of effort given to getting it there must have been no less than phenomenal.

It consisted of a vertical boiler, a five head stamp battery driven by a Tangye steam engine, about eight feet of amalgam plates, a curvelinniar concentrating table, also driven by the Tangye, plus a second steam engine to drive a jaw cracker, a compressor, a saw-bench and various other items.

My family and I moved into a bark hut with mostly a dirt floor. Though we improved it here and there, it was still very basic as a home for about three years until we moved to the junction of the Mummel and Cooplacurripa Rivers about 600 yards downstream from Todd and Mary Scrivener's 'Wildwood' and within sight of Duff's 'Glamis'. There was no school at 'Glamis' then. Both my brothers received all their primary school education from the Correspondence School, Blackfriars.

So much for Cooper & Oertal. My father never received a penny in wages from them. They were crooks. They had a company, named Mount Kiandi Gold Ridges, which they gave to the mine and issued a glossy prospectus. They asked my father to buy some gold to display and tried to sell shares to make a shady profit. My father could see through this plan and refused to buy the gold saying that he was not silly enough to get himself involved in a conspiracy case in the Courts. They withheld all moneys due to him and left him not only boke but deeply in debt. He could not finance any legal action against them.

The mine which my father was sent to manage in 1930 was within Gold Lease No.1, within the Sandon Gold Field, Parish of Mummel, County of Hawes. The general surrounding area was within a Mining Lease, and therefore Crown Land. This Gold Lease No.1 must have been issued many years before 1929. How it got into the hands of Cooper & Oertel I do not know.

From about April 1931 when their fiasco came to an end, several people, at various intervals of time, obtained the right to occupy and use the site by right of a 'Tribute', a sort of sub-leasing method, such as being issued by the then current holders.

Mostly they did not reach the operative stage but about 1932 or 1933, a man named Courtney obtained the 'Tribute'. He had two very big and strong sons and he brought others to work on the mining and crushing of ore. Courtney very nearly made a success of it. He had an older man with him named McKinnon who proved to be expert at dressing the amalgam plates. The gold was principally in an almost black rock seam of Arsenical Pyrites (Sulpharsenide of Iron). When crushed some the Arsenic was released and coated the free gold and prevented it from amalgamating with the mercury on the plates. McKinnon knew enough to override this problem to a large degree. One day he let me hold a mini-ingot of gold produced. It must have weighted 30 to 50 ounces. At that time gold was worth about £3/8/0 ($7.60) per ounce. Today's prices (in 1997) are about 50 times that much.

For the Martin family, left broke in 1931, the two things which saved us from starving were rabbit trapping in the winters and alluvial mining with a sluice box for the rest of the two years. Also at the site near the stamp battery, doing alluvial digging and recovery of river bank 'wash' areas, were camped Alan Robinson and Joe Penfold Snr., working together. Both had their wives and children with them. Also there were Bill Bostock with his wife and young Billy; Ralph Duret from Manly for a time; Jim Bugg; Bert Wratten and his wife and Arthur Holden working with my father and me. A number of these people stayed even after the mine and battery were worked for about eight or nine years by Robert Duncan McRae from Belbora. It was quite a settlement then. At one time, it boasted a school teacher, not paid by the Department, Dorothy Margery from Nowendoc.

After Courtney and his team had given up there was no real action for quite a length of time although others obtained the 'Tribute', did little or nothing, lost incentive and left the Mummel Mines site without winning any gold.

In about August 1934, William Patrick Costello arrived with title to the Gold Lease No.1. How he obtained it remains a mystery because by his admission, he was on the dole, but he had an Irishman's happy knack of talking people into believing him. He did not do any work with the plant but, after a skirmish at Walcha Court with Bob McRae, which Costello lost, McRae bought the lease from him for 50 pounds. I know because I witnessed the deal and it was the first time that I had seen a £50 banknote.

The period during which Robert McRae operated the plant on the lease, which lasted until 1941 or a bit later, was I believe, the most productive and possibly the most profitable era on the Mummel field. He set up an efficient organisation of men and brought new tools and knowledge from years as a quarry-master, fed the single men employed, gave them time to build huts and, best of all, paid wages regularly at a going rate - not a lot but it was better than being unemployed.

Though not all the following people worked there at any one time there were his two sons, William (Bill) and James (Jumbo); my father Arthur Martin, to take charge of the surface plant and concentrate recovery; Sam Wild, Gordon Elks, George Wuoti, Don Upsell, Fred Rogan, Joe Simpson (the cook), John Dickins and myself. Bill McRae was Blacksmith and became expert at tool sharpening, particularly the drill bits, and tempering them. The rock was so hard that it often took a set of twelve drills with 120 PSI compressed air to penetrate a distance of 15 inches (38 cms). I was variously engaged at cutting and carting boiler wood, firing the boiler, then underground drilling. Sam Wild, Jumbo McRae and I did most of the drilling and blasting. John Dickens was almost full-time trucker. Robert sometimes changed our jobs around to give us more experience.

We dried and bagged the concentrates. They were then taken to 'Wildwood' by packhorse from where Bob McRae took them to Gloucester in his ute and they then went by rail to the Electrolitic Refining Works at Port Kembla. Bob used to go down to Port Kembla to see it smelted or whatever. He did this several times. I saw one of his cheques from EA&S. It was for over £700 ($1000).

The ore which we were extracting from the mine was hand winched up about 40 feet from the face to a landing at the old 40 feet shaft level, then trucking it through an adit to die surface and thence to the jaw cracker. The mineralised vein of Sulpharsenide was very rich. Some samples assayed over 1000 ounces to the ton. When it was two inches wide, it became very payable ore if a four foot wide stoppage was being crushed.

[Note: Gold, as we know it, was not readily visible in the mine's primary deposits as the gold was entrapped in veins of arsenical pyrites which was black in colour.]

This seam was continuous and followed the quartzite serpentine junction faithfully but it was always within the quartzite about a foot (30 cms) away from the junction of the two rock types. In this it differed from the Lucknow (near Orange) Mine which worked for many years. At Lucknow the gold was enfolded in micro width flakes within the serpentine.

[Note: Extracting for gold meant digging (picks and shovels) down to 15 feet to 20 feet by 4 feet wide to what was known as a windze. A charge of gelignite then blasted the material and it was removed by buckets from the hole using a windlass on the top. From there it was transported by truck down to a jaw crusher for breaking up the larger pieces then with a battery box where the extracted material was mixed with fine sand and slime. It was next taken to a concentrating table - a table which was designed to vibrate in such a way that the heavier particles, including gold which is heavier metal, were thrown to one side.]

When I stopped working for Robert McRae this vein had "pinched" to about a quarter of an inch (six millimetres) wide. My father, who had studied geology and who had a lot of mining experience, always considered that as this vein had been extruded from below it would never become entirely eliminated and there would be a good prospect that there would be a much greater width of it at still lower depths. Naturally it would take extensive and expensive diamond drilling to prove or disprove.

We worked with the serpentine as a "hanging wall". One morning we discovered that there had been a rock fall of about two tonnes. If we had been in the stope we would probably have been killed.

[Note: Another issue that was raised had to do with safeguards employed in mining in those days, particularly as regards shoring up the tunnels with timber against possible collapse. According to Mr Martin, there was little done in the way of shoring as that would have cost money and there wasn't a lot of that around.]

Everything had to be brought in, or taken out, either being carried on one's back or by pack horse. At least once a week it was pack day for either Sam Wild, Gordon Elks or me. Whoever it was would muster up enough horses for the pack saddles available, plus a saddle horse of course. The trip was not long but the several sets of sliprails were a nuisance. After unloading the concentrates we would load up the saddle bags with allsorts; groceries, candles for underground, tools and construction gear of many types, horse feed, explosives, shopping parcels, fruit, eggs (they were a problem) and other things too numerous to mention. I even packed 8 ft. long galvanised corrugated iron, battery shoes each weighing over 50 kgs. or more and drill steel in 9 ft. lengths. However, the oddest 24 pack load I have ever seen was brought in by Don Upsall with a bag of spuds dangling almost to the ground on one side of the horse and a wire mattress on the other side.

I left the Mummel River area on New Year's Day, 1938. I do not think there was much serious mining done at the Mummel after Robert McRae stopped mining there. In fairly recent conversation with Bruce Scrivener I got the impression that he agrees. I also believe that some of the plant has been removed, perhaps "stolen" is the right word.

Of all the people who ever worked for Robert McRae at the mine, some of them my junior, only two of us are now left alive at the date of this writing. The other one besides myself is not particularly well. However, he did not do any rock winning underground, usually busy on the windlass or doing the trucking.

[Note: After the Kandai mine folded Stan Martin, his father and Arthur Holden worked on alluvial mining (the western side of the Mummel River) for about two years but Stan admits that they made more money out of rabbit skins, as many of our older generation would remember, as the rabbits were in plague proportions in the Upper Manning in the 1930s. Stan Martin and his family spent Easter 1997 camping at Mummel River.]