Golden Gate did not announce itself. The reef on the Croydon goldfield north-west of town was first worked in 1886, in the first frantic months of the rush, then abandoned the very next year as the early claims came up meagre. For four years it sat idle while the rest of the field churned. Then, in 1891, work recommenced - and that second attempt found what the first had missed. A rich ore chute was discovered in Rogers' No. 1 Golden Gate mine, and suddenly the abandoned ground was the most valuable on the field. The lesson of Golden Gate is the lesson of so much hard-rock mining: the gold was never where it was easy, and the difference between a worthless claim and a fortune was often a few more metres of patient, dangerous digging.

The Golden Gate reef was a large, well-defined body of gold-bearing quartz shot through with sulphides, running north to north-west and worked along a total length of 2.5 kilometres. It drew serious capital - mines like Golden Gate No. 1, Croydon Consols, and the South claims paid real dividends in the 1890s and 1900s. Between 1886 and 1911, in its most productive years, the reef yielded around 483,000 ounces of gold from 244,364 long tons of ore. That single reef accounted for more than one-third of everything the entire Croydon goldfield ever produced. The payable ore, though, was shallow by the standards of deep mining - the records suggest it petered out at a vertical depth of roughly 90 metres - and a reef that does not go down forever is a town with an expiry date.

While the gold lasted, Golden Gate was a real place with a real life, not just a cluster of shafts. It sat right on the Normanton-to-Croydon railway, four miles west of Croydon, and from 1902 a weekend "suburban" railmotor service connected the two towns - a commuter line in the middle of the Gulf Savannah. Excursion trains brought picnickers and race-day crowds out along the line. There were the ordinary institutions of an Australian mining town: a post office, a school, businesses, a cemetery. The reef's prosperity peaked between about 1895 and 1901, the years when fifteen hundred people could make a living from the ground beneath their feet and the railway connected them to the wider world.

Decline came as surely as it had come to Croydon itself. Production fell away after 1911, and the slow unwinding followed the familiar order of a dying field: the post office closed in 1919, the school in 1921, the last mining company shut its operations in 1922. The people left, the buildings were carted off or fell down, and the savannah took back its ground. What survives is a heritage-listed complex of relics - the Croydon Consols pump shaft, the No. 10 North mine, the battery and cyanide plant, and the Golden Gate cemetery - scattered across country that gives no hint a town of fifteen hundred ever stood here. Some of the old workings still hold contamination from the chemistry of gold extraction, so the warning signs are worth heeding. It is a quiet, sobering place: proof of how completely a boom can erase itself.