HARRIETVILLE might have been built on gold but Les Lawson and Archie Wilson are two of only a few miners remaining in the district.
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And if you stop for a chat, these two men will spin you a yarn of daring days, sometimes hundreds of feet below.
Mr Lawson, 87, who now lives at Bright's Hawthorn Village Aged Care Hostel, was born at Walhalla.
His father taught him how to use explosives at the age of nine.
It's a skill that set him up for life.
"He taught me how to use dynamite and how to use it properly," Mr Lawson said.
"I earned my living with explosives and I think I did reasonably well, I was never short of a bob."
Mr Wilson started life as a woodcutter and worked for many years at Woods Point, south of Mansfield.
It was all axe work at the beginning then he was felling giant mountain ash with cross-cut saws and later climbing 15 feet up trees on pegs.
"Sure it was hard work," he said.
"If we got four or five trees a day it would be good going."
Mr Wilson invested in the A1 mine at Woods Point in the 1960s with a group of mates when the owners had given up hope.
"We had a fair idea there was still stuff left there that we could get and it paid off in the long run," he said.
"Eventually we struck the gold on number 18 level (1800 feet below); there was gold sticking out everywhere."
While there was plenty of reward for those who worked hard to find it, goldmining was never without its many risks.
"When I was working in the shaft repairing the battens it was quite dirty," Mr Wilson said.
"You're working on top of a cage but it was all wet -- you were always wet and dirty and greasy.
"But that was the way it was. It was a good life -- you get risks everywhere and you get used to it."
When Mr Lawson and Mr Wilson were both expert miners, they joined forces at Harrietville to work at the Sambas mine, which will soon celebrate 100 years of continuous mining.
Mr Lawson had taken the Sambas on tribute, meaning the mine's owner supplied the machinery, paid all the expenses but only took a small percentage of the profits while Mr Lawson and his miners did all the work.
Mr Lawson rang his mate to ask if he wanted to be involved.
"I'll see you in the morning," was Mr Wilson's reply to the offer.
"We were getting 200 ounces a month, at $500 and $600 an ounce and our expenses were virtually nil," Mr Lawson said.
Mining held an appeal that secured these miners' loyalties for many years.
And at 81, Mr Wilson still remembers the excitement of seeing the gleam of the seam.
"Gold? There was heaps of it and when we struck it at level 18 it was like a jeweller's shop," he said.