Post 02 — The Route In
Kalgoorlie made me realise the gold rush isn’t over
I went to Kalgoorlie on holiday.
I’d vaguely heard of the place. Big mine. Old gold town. Outback. The usual.
What I hadn’t realised, until I was standing in it, was that the gold rush isn’t a history exhibit out there. It’s still going. People are still finding it. Right now. In 2026.
That changed something in my head.
I’d been thinking of gold the way most people think of it — something other people had, somewhere else, a long time ago. Kalgoorlie put it in front of me as a thing happening on the same continent I was standing on.
I’m 61. I haven’t got forever.
What exactly am I waiting for?
The phone call
I was nervous about ringing him.
He was an acquaintance of an acquaintance. I’d been given his number and told he was the bloke to talk to if I wanted to know anything about prospecting in WA. I’d never met him. I didn’t know what kind of welcome I was going to get from a stranger fielding questions from a complete beginner.
I needn’t have worried.
He warmed up the moment he realised what I was calling about. Not just polite — actually pleased. He loved prospecting. He’d been very successful at it. And the idea of a 61-year-old engineer wanting to give it a go didn’t strike him as remotely mad.
That was the moment something shifted for me. If someone who actually did this thought it was a perfectly reasonable thing to take on, then maybe I wasn’t talking myself into something stupid.
We had a long chat. About everything. Detectors. Ground. Where to start. What not to bother with. Mistakes he’d watched other people make.
When it boiled down, two things kept coming up: I needed a Miner’s Right, and I needed to get myself onto Gold Talk.
After we hung up, he texted me. No words. Just photos.
Gold Talk and APLA
The text was two photos.
The first was him. With his detector. Holding the biggest gold nugget I’d ever seen outside a museum cabinet.
The second was a screenshot of a website. Gold Talk Leonora.
He didn’t need to add words. The pictures said: this is real, this works, here’s where you go.
I was sold. I went to the Gold Talk Leonora website and booked the 3-day prospecting course on the spot.
Then I kept reading.
That’s when APLA came up. Gold Talk runs a network of tenements — legal patches of ground you’re allowed to detect on — and to use any of them you have to be a member of APLA (the Amalgamated Prospectors and Leaseholders Association of WA).
So that was another box.
Miner’s Right. Course in Leonora. APLA membership.
The list was getting longer.
Tengraph
I’d been adding things to the list. I hadn’t thought about where I was actually allowed to detect.
YouTube fixed that.
The algorithm, apparently having decided I was now a prospector, started serving me prospecting videos. One of them was about a thing called Tengraph — a free online map run by the WA government that shows you who owns what ground. Every tenement, every lease, every reserve. Colour-coded. Searchable.
In theory.
In practice, Tengraph is what happens when a government map system is built once and then never quite finished. It works. Just not in any way that feels natural to anyone born after about 1970.
But you have to learn it. Because the alternative is walking onto someone’s lease, swinging a metal detector around, and finding out the hard way that you weren’t supposed to.
Another box.
Miner’s Right. Course in Leonora. APLA membership. Learn Tengraph.
Building the app, and bumping into AI
At some point the list stopped fitting in my head.
Miner’s Right. Course in Leonora. APLA membership. Tengraph. And underneath all of that — what detector, what coil, what battery, what ground, what gear, what hadn’t I thought of yet.
I’m an engineer. When something gets too complicated to hold in my head, I build something to hold it instead.
So I started building a map. Not Tengraph. Mine. Somewhere I could pull everything together — the ground I was allowed on, the gear I had, the things I was learning, the places I was planning to go. A place to think out loud, in pixels.
And while I was building it, I kept bumping into a question.
What if I asked an AI?
Turns out, quite a lot.
That’s the next part of the story.
I came back from Kalgoorlie wondering what I was waiting for.
Not much later I had a Miner’s Right on order. A course booked. APLA paperwork going in. A map app taking shape on my laptop. And a head full of questions for an AI that hadn’t existed two years ago.
I hadn’t found a single grain of gold yet.
But I was in the game.
— Rob
Next post: The map app, and what happens when an old engineer asks an AI for help.