Thames School of Mines

To step into the school is to get a vivid sense of how practical science and technology was taught in our pioneering past. You’ll see authentic period equipment and classic gold rush machinery, classrooms, labs, microscopes and maps of the gold fields, a model of a whole stamper battery system and an actual small-scale stamper battery, mining documents and historic photos. The original furnace room, where gold was laboriously extracted and then assayed, is well worth a look.