Kitty Pluto

Kitty Pluto or Altengen (1877–1946) was a Kaanju woman from the Cape York Peninsula in North Queensland who worked as a gold miner and prospector. She is credited as finding the largest gold deposits at the Batavia Goldfield. This discovery made her a household name and she was credited as being the only woman to discover a goldfield in the state of Queensland.

Biography Pluto was born in 1877 nearby the Wenlock River and many of her family members worked for William Davis who was better known as 'Pluto', who was an Indigenous Australian miner from the early 1910s. Soon after this the pair married, through tribal law, and they remained together until his death in 1916. In order to hold their claim there is had to be registered under the name of a non-Aboriginal friend as they were not able to hold their own legal rights to it as Aboriginal people.

As an Aboriginal miner, Pluto and her husband were able to work with minimal government interference, despite the restrictions listed by the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897, due to the remote areas in which they worked. It was also easy for miners with limited financial backing to mine alluvial gold as complex equipment was not required. To mine this claim Pluto employed Aboriginal miners to work alongside her and they included William (Billy/Willie) Fox, Tuesday Smith, and Friday Wilson. This discovery, however, brought her and the other Aboriginal people on the field under increased control and government intervention. Because of this, in 1921, she was removed from the goldfield and sent to Yarrabah Mission alongside her son, Young Pluto, her new husband Jacky Flat and Friday Wilson.

This incident did lead to protests and public discussion of the brutality of the treatment they received. These complaints also led to an official investigation.

In 1933 in Cape York Pluto was examined by Raphael Cilento who found her to be suffering from an infection caused by untreated gonorrhea.

Little is known of Pluto's life from this point until 1939 when she was living at the Lockhart River Mission on a special pension from the Queensland government as recognition of her discovery of the goldfield. She died there in 1946.