Extracting gold with Cyanide

This image is one of a series of gold mining and processing at Mount Boppy Gold Mine in 1905.

The original caption for this image says ‘Interior of the Extractor House’. Some gold escaped the mercury extraction process of the dressing tables. These tailings were processed further by dissolving the gold in a cyanide solution. The gold bearing solution could be separated from the tailings by filter presses and the gold precipitated using zinc dust. The process of cyanidation yielded 60 percent of the total gold from the raw ore.

Mount Boppy mine contained high quality ore but it required a heavy industrial plant and a series of physical and chemical processes to obtain gold. Mount Boppy Gold Mine was the leading gold mine in New South Wales from 1902 until 1937. It is an early example of a professional mining operation in Australia.

Ref: Ken McQueen, ‘The Mount Boppy Gold Mine, NSW: A leader in its Day and More to Come’ Journal of Australasian Mining History, Vol 3 September 2005.

Previous posts about Mount Boppy
Mining history – Mount Boppy Gold Mine
Gold mining – working for the ‘man’ in 1905
Gold mining in 1905 – rats down the hole
Moving 50,000 tons of ore
Gold mining in 1905-the scientific method
Pounding out gold with sixty metal ‘boots’
Extracting gold with Mercury
Settling the slimes – Mount Boppy Gold Mine

Tags: Canbelego, Cobar, Gold, Gold extraction, Gold mining, Gold processing, mine work, mining history