IT WAS December 9, 1984.
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Everyone who was anyone was at the brand spanking new sporting complex in Uralla, watching on as a chinook helicopter landed to the applause of Member for New England Bill McCarthy.
Everyone except Arnold Goode.
Climbing through a tiny hole in the New England Highway, he is one of only three people who know the location of the entrance to the last relic of the Uralla gold rush – the ‘Tunnel to Nowhere’.
It’s the last large scale gold miner’s tunnel, carried out by Dr F Woods under Mt Beef in 1895, and if you’ve been to Uralla, chances are you’ve driven over it.
“I knew approximately where it would be, it was just a hole in the ground,” Mr Goode, now 86, said.
“I just let myself down there, you had to crawl down and I went through the hole the tyre left.”
The tunnel was uncovered in 1984, when a grader building the New England Highway had one of it’s tyres fall through the Earth.
University of New England archaeologist Graham Connah was called to study the old tunnel, and told the Tablelands Times he thought it was built by the Chinese.
But he was 40 years too early, as Mr Goode promptly corrected him.
“I went up to his door, sat down and said, “There’s some discrepancies in this,”” Mr Goode said.
“The Kriptner boys built it for Dr Wood, they were from New Zealand.”
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A man of money, Dr Wood believed the tunnel would lead to a bonanza, a huge discovery of gold.
After driving through weathered granite for more than 70 metres, the search for a deep lead between basalt and granite was fruitless.
Once they struck basalt, the miner’s tried to dig beneath it at a 45 degree angle.
“But you can’t get big lumps of stone out at 45 degrees and put it in a bucket,” Mr Goode said.
“Dr Woods had the good grace to erect an iron gate at the entrance and joke about his ‘Tunnel to Nowhere’.
“There should be gold underneath it, because the other 30 tunnels in the area found gold beneath the basalt.”
Shovel and pick marks remain in the tunnel, but the tools are long removed.
The Northern Tablelands gold rush wasn’t for the faint of heart, those hoping to strike gold came from across the globe to towns like Uralla, Rocky River and Nundle.
The work was day and night, with hands running through water at the threat of arthritis.
And it was all done under the watchful eye of the gold commissioner, Mr Goode said.
“He had to determine where the claims were, if the claims washed out of a night time down in the river where you had a stake – he would have to come and survey it all again,” he said.
Now, the tunnel has been sealed forever.
“Only one or two people know where it is,” Mr Goode said.
“I’m one of them, and you.”