Quest for Dusi gold
Hillcrest history enthusiast on mission to find mines and tunnels
DUSI participants would have paddled past a forgotten gold mine on day one of their race to the sea this week.
Situated on a steep slope above the Msundusi River, before the confluence with the uMngeni, it is a treasure that took Hillcrest history enthusiast Donald Davies seven years to find.
“When you go inside, you can clearly see the places where the candles were put,” he said. “Lighting must have been a challenge.”
A vein of white quartz at the abit, as mining tunnels are called, has been mineralised to a rusty colour.
“Geologists tell us the more rusty coloured the quartz is, the more likely the chance of finding gold in the quartz and up against it,” Davies said.
His quest to find this mine started after he read in an issue of the history publication, Natalia, of people from KwaZulu-Natal heading to the Witwatersrand gold rush, giving names to places like Natalspruit, where a major Gauteng hospital is now situated.
“(The article) referred to a person called Eksteen who became a mining magnate, driving an adit into the mountain halfway between Table Mountain and Pietermaritzburg. I thought, ‘that’s just up the road’.”
Davies spent seven years visiting the area, picking up clues of its whereabouts from former farm owners who had heard of it. One family even recalled that bat guano (excrement of bats) had been harvested from it.
“On August 23, 2013, I nearly gave up after getting quite tired.
“I pushed through and as I came across a platform, for some reason, I just knew that I had found it.
“I looked down and there was the adit into the mountain.”
Davies still has the old Bellair mine in Durban to find. He believes it was blocked up as the area became developed.
Davies heard about it from a geologist, the late Rodney Ward, who said that in his youth he was once lowered down the shaft of the old Bellair gold mine, in Blairmont Avenue.
Since then, Davies has heard that a pet of a family who lived in the road had fallen down the shaft and its rescue was reported by the Natal Mercury in 1959.
“Hopefully, one of these days I’ll find it.”
According to Davies, the province had about 400 gold workings, but by the 1930s only two were still functioning – one at Dumisa, near Umzinto, and the other at Itala Game Reserve.
Another of Davies’s interests relates to underground passages below forts.
According to urban legend, one runs between Pietermaritzburg’s Fort Napier and the Old Prison (now a museum, which featured in last week’s Independent on Saturday), passing the old bishop’s house and the old officers’ quarters.
“I think that after the British were defeated at Isandlwana, there was panic in the colony, so they began to barricade parts of Pietermaritzburg with the intention of having the jail as the last stand.”
While not exploring tunnels, Davies, an engineer, researches family histories. Two gems he has discovered are the Transnet Heritage Library in Johannesburg, and the military archives at Irene, near Pretoria.
“Many people have military and railway histories,” he said.
At 2pm today, Davies will give a talk on these to the Durban and Coastal branch of the Genealogical Society of SA, at the Family History Centre, Church of the Latter Day Saints, at the corner of Silverton and Vause roads, Berea.
Geologists tell us the more rusty coloured the quartz is, the more likely the chance of finding gold (in it) Donald Davies Hillcrest history enthusiast