The following story was told by Jack Drayton, well know in the early Goldfields days as a journalist and a prospector.
From the day he arrived in Coolgardie in 1894 Joe Hogan was a “loner”, who never had a mate and never told anyone where he was going, although he always came back to town with gold and gave other miners directions that enabled them to try the area out.
In 1895 he brought in a remarkable slug, shaped like a Bologna sausage, whose weight and a ‘nick with a knife’ proved its gold content beyond question. He said little about the find during his two weeks stay in town, side-stepping inquiries with the stereo typed “I’m sayin’ nothin’, and it’s no use yer campin on me tracks, cause when I start out I ain’t goin back there.”
The slug, when melted down contained 260 pounds worth of gold and with a bank draft in his pocket he made for Perth, thence to Dimbola in Victoria.
Twenty years later Jack Drayton (Editor of the Coolgardie Miner and The Sun Newspaper in Kalgoorlie), who had known Joe, was told the story of the “Golden Bologna”. Joe recalled being told by a Yarri boy at Granite Rocks the story of two white men ‘who sit down longa hill and find old man gold’ and with the boy as a guide they reached a spot in the Edjudina country where there were signs of prospecting.
Circling the hill the boy shouted ‘Old man gold sit down longa this one’ and it was here Hogan picked up the slug. A few yards away almost buried in the sand were the bodies of two men Hogan knew – Bob Hanley and George Walsh. Hanley appeared to have died of thirst and Walsh had a pick protruding from his skull.
Moya Sharp
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