The Forgotten Beach Gold Rush in New South Wales

Beach gold in Australia is so rare that most prospectors don’t even realise it exists. In Alaska you get whole towns built on storm-washed pay streaks and offshore dredges chewing through auriferous sands; here, the coastline feels too young, too energetic, too clean to hide real placer gold. And yet, tucked behind the dunes between Evans Head and Iluka, there was once a beach-gold field every bit as strange and improbable as Nome — a narrow, almost invisible strip of black sand that supported hundreds of miners, kept families afloat through drought and depression, and then slipped almost completely out of public memory. Today it looks like just another quiet piece of coastal heath. But a century ago, it was one of the unlikeliest goldfields in the country. This article will dive into why gold existed here, what attempts were made to exploit it, and how the rush and bust unfolded.

The wild part about this story is how small and strange the ore body actually was. McAulay’s Lead, the main Jerusalem Creek field, wasn’t a quartz reef or a river channel; it was a buried strip of cemented black sand, only about four to nine metres wide, snaking for a bit over three kilometres behind the beach. On top sat up to five metres of clean white sand. Somewhere down in that “black rock”, about a metre or so below its top, there was a paper-thin wash layer loaded with ultra-fine gold. Miss that horizon by a few tens of centimetres and you were just shovelling useless sand. Hit it, and you could pull a solid week’s wages out of ground that looked like nothing at all.

By the mid-1890s a few beach miners had already realised the real money wasn’t always on the active shoreline. Storms would strip the modern beach and expose “sniggers” – dark seams of heavy mineral sand that might pay for a week or two – but those patches came and went with each gale. The smarter prospectors started poking behind the dunes, chasing the idea that old shorelines might be preserved as fossil beaches further inland. That hunch paid off in 1895 when Alexander and Angus McAulay, farmers who prospected in the off-season, found colours almost everywhere with their sand “sludger”, then finally struck a proper run of payable wash on the east face of a narrow dune south of Jerusalem Creek. They kept quiet for a while, working with their brothers, until the volume of gold walking out to the storekeepers made secrecy impossible.

Once word got out, the beach filled fast. Within months there were a couple of hundred men at Jerusalem Creek; by the peak, four hundred miners and five to six hundred people in total were living in tents and rough huts strung along the lead. It wasn’t some lawless frontier out on the edge of nowhere either. They had a school with fifteen kids, a general store, two restaurants, an oyster saloon, pop-up beer shacks, athletics meets, even a cricket club grandly named the Pacific Club. The Halfway House Hotel on the track in from the highway towns became the social funnel, and mail was delivered right to the claims twice a week by an overachieving postie. For something that started with a seam of black sand under a dune, it briefly became a full-blown community.

On paper the field shouldn’t have worked as well as it did. This wasn’t chunky alluvial gold you could pick out with tweezers; it was mostly flour – super fine particles mixed in with a heavy-mineral soup of rutile, zircon, ilmenite, monazite, cassiterite, a trace of platinum and garnet. The miners began the way beach workers at Ballina and New Zealand Beach had done in the 1870s, using portable sluice boxes with carpet or corduroy and mercury-coated copper plates. But assays showed they were losing a depressing amount of their gold because the grains were coated in a brown organic iron-oxide film. In classic field-tinkerer fashion they turned the place into a giant backyard chemistry lab. First came washing soda, then a one-percent caustic soda wash in boiling solution – mixed in 200-gallon ship’s tanks and run down long iron-lined troughs – to “clean” the gold before it met the mercury. Once they nailed that, they could skip the carpet pre-concentration entirely and process the cleaned wash straight over plates, even going back and re-working their own old tailings for another shot at the metal. One party took a pile of tailings that had already given up 200 ounces and squeezed another hundred ounces out of it just by re-treating with the improved method.

Even with all that effort, this was never a Bendigo-scale bonanza. Official Mines Department numbers for 1895–96 across the Ballina and Maclean divisions add to 5,237 ounces, and detailed reconstruction from newspapers and Malcolm McAulay’s diary suggests Jerusalem Creek itself produced at least 3,080 ounces during the main rush. When you convert the recorded value of the gold – somewhere between fourteen and twenty thousand pounds – to metal, you land in the range of three and a half to five thousand ounces for the main rush, and maybe around five thousand ounces total for the whole life of the field. That’s real money for farmers and “beach combers” scratching through a depression and drought, but on the scale of Australian gold history it’s a modest, tightly focused blip.

What makes Jerusalem Creek important isn’t just the ounces; it’s what the place did to people’s thinking. You had local farmers, oyster-men and small-time miners proving you could treat a beach as an ore body, then pushing the tech from simple cradles and hand pumps into chemical pre-treatment, systematic prospecting and, eventually, early attempts at dredging. The government took notice. Inspectors like Joseph Carne came up to sketch cross-sections of the leads and describe the “black rock” and its cemented bottom. The Minister for Mines sent a huge prospecting party to put down thousands of sludger holes along east–west lines behind the dunes, paying the men out of the Prospecting Vote so unemployed workers could have a shot at new finds. The scheme drilled over 2,800 boreholes, mapped the system in detail, and even pushed as far as Evans Head and places like Chinaman’s Beach in the hunt for more buried leads. In economic terms the program flopped – only a small, low-grade extension lead turned up – but it forced everyone to think of the entire coastal belt as a three-dimensional placer system rather than just a strip of sand at the water’s edge.

Behind that mapping was a bigger geological question: where on earth did all this heavy mineral soup actually come from? Carne’s conclusion, which still holds up pretty well, was that the black sands were built from material delivered by rivers draining granite and Palaeozoic basement rocks in the New England region. Those catchments carried gold, rutile, zircon, cassiterite and monazite to the coast, where wave action did the fine-scale sorting. The local Clarence–Moreton Basin sandstones – especially the Gatton Sandstone – inherited those earlier heavy-mineral loads in river channels and shoreline deposits; eroding them again in the Quaternary just recycled already-concentrated grains back into the modern beach system. Basalts from the Tweed Volcano may have chipped in some magnetite and ilmenite, but they weren’t the source of the gold-bearing components. One much-publicised “gold-bearing basalt” at Black Head turned out to be basically a lava that had slurped up pre-existing beach gold as it erupted. Even some of the miners’ wilder ideas are telling: a few were convinced the gold came straight out of seawater and built an entire plant at Broken Head to strip it from the ocean, only to watch it literally get washed away. Underneath those schemes is the same instinct you’ve had poking around Evans Head – that the coastline itself is more than scenery; it’s a big, dynamic, concentrating machine.

*Image depicts the source of the gold and heavy mineral sands (red)

*Image depicts the source of the gold and heavy mineral sands (red) the sandstone that re-shed the gold and heavy mineral sands in the quaternary (yellow) and the tweed volcanic range that may have contributed ilmenite and magnetite (white).

The really strange twist is what happened after the gold rush died. By late 1896 McAulay’s Lead was mostly worked out, the McAulays themselves had moved on to new inland fields, and what little mining continued was basically re-treatment of tailings, small cyanide experiments and half-baked syndicate plays chasing platinum, tin, monazite or even diamonds. Through the early 1900s dredging companies came and went – often faster than the ink could dry on their prospectuses – tripping over the same problem: too many different heavy minerals in very fine grain sizes, and no good way to separate them at high throughput. Investors lost a lot more than they made. But the underlying idea refused to die. By the 1920s and ’30s, people like Cecil Cumberland were back on the beaches, this time caring less about the gold and more about rutile and zircon for paint pigment and refractories. New processing ideas like selective flotation, and later spiral concentrators and electromagnetic separators, finally cracked the mineral separation problem. Once that tech clicked, the same style of black sand that had kept poor beach miners alive for a couple of winters turned into the backbone of a world-class heavy mineral sands industry.

By the 1950s and ’60s dredges were chewing through the old Jerusalem Creek deposits on an industrial scale, feeding plants that produced rutile, ilmenite and zircon for paint, welding rods, ceramics and more. In the mid-1970s Australia was supplying the overwhelming majority of the world’s rutile and a huge slice of its zircon, and a decent chunk of that story runs straight through those quiet dunes behind Evans Head. The sand miners even recovered some gold as a by-product of processing, although nobody seems to have bothered recording how much – a ghost echo of the original rush, trapped in the circuitry of a plant designed for titanium instead of treasure.

And now? If you camp at Black Rock and wander up the fire trail, you’ll walk straight over McAulay’s Lead without knowing it. The benches have been levelled, the old trenches back-filled, the big later dredge ponds reshaped and revegetated. Apart from the odd cemented “black rock” ledge at the beach and a few photos in local museums, almost nothing on the ground hints that five thousand ounces of gold once came out of this scrub. In a way that’s the perfect summary of the whole story: a modest little goldfield, largely forgotten, that quietly rewired how people thought about beaches, placers and heavy minerals, and accidentally lit the fuse on a multi-billion-dollar sand-mining industry. Geologists now wrap that whole saga up under one deceptively simple title – “The golden sands of Jerusalem Creek” – but the next time you’re out around Evans Head, it’s hard not to feel that the name understates just how weirdly influential those anonymous dunes turned out to be.

Here's the video we made on this on the OzGeology YouTube Channel:

Study Used To Construct This Article:

The golden sands of Jerusalem Creek: Early beach placer mining on the north coast of New South Wales