One Piece of Fence Wire

Tony reckons the ground takes five days to dry out. Wednesday was day one of the five, and it started the way Tuesday finished: wet, grey, and going nowhere. I got as far as the car, more or less soaked, thoroughly fed up, and quietly doing the sums on whether the trip had ended without telling me.

Then I bumped into Terry.

Terry did the Gold Talk three-day course a couple of years back and had come along on Monday’s field day. He was heading out to see whether the tenements could actually be reached, given the state of the roads, and did I want to come along. Yes. Yes, I did.

Getting out there was a mission in itself. We went in on an old road that used to serve a mine site, then left it for the tracks. Part way in we reached a salt flat: flat, wet, and soft, the sort of surface that looks fine right up until it isn’t. Terry reckoned there was a fair chance of breaking through the crust and going in to the axles, so we turned round and found another way in. I’d like to think I’d have stopped too. I’m glad I didn’t have to find out.

Two vehicles, both carrying recovery gear, one of them driven by someone who had been out there before. That is the whole reason the day was possible. One car on its own, on soft ground after that much rain, isn’t prospecting. It’s an appointment with a shovel.

We made it in. The Prado came out of it with a stripe of red mud up the driver’s side and the general look of having earned it. Not bogged. Not once. I want that on the record, because I suspect it won’t always be true.

Then the detecting. The ground was soaking, and Tony’s warning turned out to be exactly right: wet ground talks back to the coil. There were targets springing up everywhere. Every sweep found something, and digging established that most of the somethings weren’t there. Chasing sounds through mud for a few hours is very hard work, and I loved every minute of it.

Total find for the day: one piece of fence wire.

Regular readers — both of you — will remember Monday’s fifteen centimetres of fencing wire and the shell game it played with me. This one at least had the decency to come out of the hole first time. Wire: two. Prospector: nil.

One thing worth saying once. The ground out here is dotted with old workings — shafts the old timers sank and never filled in. Some have timber across the mouth. Some have nothing at all: a hole in the ironstone, spoil heaps around it, and a long way down. You watch where you put your feet, and you watch twice when the detector is on and your eyes are on the coil. I’ll not go on about it. I mention it because the photographs don’t do the depth justice.

Somewhere in the middle of all this I had my first ever Billy tea, with Terry. There is no photograph of it. I was drinking it.

Back at Gwalia I got the camera out and walked the ghost town for a bit. A rusted bath. A wrecked wheelbarrow. An iron cottage under a gum tree. All of it left where it was put down when the mine shut and everybody went. Hoover House is next door to it, which is a strange thing to come home to.

So: set out soaking and fed up, thinking the trip was over. Met a bloke called Terry. Drove a long way on tracks. Turned back at a salt flat. Got in. Found a piece of fence wire. Came home with a dirty car, no gold, and the best day since I got here.

Four days in, the finds to date are one piece of tin, one nail, and two pieces of fence wire. The gold has waited a few million years. It can manage a Wednesday as well.