At Mount Brown Goldfield, N.S.W., in 1881, I saw claimholders turning
out to work equipped only with a small broom made of twigs and a tin
dish. With the broom they carefully swept out the crevices of the
decomposed slate as it was exposed on the surface, and putting the
resulting dust and fragments into the tin dish proceeded to dry blow it.

The _modus operandi_ is as follows: The operator takes the dish about
half full of dirt, and standing with his back or side to the wind, if
there be any, begins throwing the stuff up and catching it, or sometimes
slowly pouring it from one dish to another, the wind in either case
carrying away the finer particles. He then proceeds to reduce the
quantity by carefully extracting the larger fragments of rock, till
eventually he has only a handful or so of moderately fine "dirt" which
contains any gold there may be. If in good sized nuggets it is picked
out, if in smaller pieces or fine grains the digger slowly blows the
sand and dust aside with his breath, leaving the gold exposed. This
process is both tedious and unhealthy, and of course can only be carried
out with very dry surface dirt. The stuff in which the gold occurred at
Mount Brown was composed of broken slate with a few angular fragments
of quartz. Yet, strange to say, the gold was invariably waterworn in
appearance.

Dry blowing is now much in vogue on the West Australian fields owing
to the scarcity of water; but the great objection is first, the large
amount of dust the unfortunate dry blower has to carry about his person,
and secondly, that the peck of dirt which is supposed to last most men a
life time has to be made a continuous meal of every day.

For wet alluvial prospecting the appliances, besides pick and shovel,
are puddling tub, tin dish, and cradle; the latter, a man handy with