Monday started with an absolutely beautiful crisp morning — the sort that makes you want to just be outside.
It was also the big day. Before the trip, I’d done the research and picked one piece of ground I wanted to get to if I possibly could. Everywhere I’d been so far had been chosen by the weather and the road closures, not by me. For the first time all trip, every road was open. So off I went to see if I could get there.
The drive out went well, right up until the road I was on stopped following the track on the map. There was no other track from the way I’d come in. I thought I saw some tyre marks and what looked like a small track, followed them, and ended up in the middle of the bush, not sure if there was a way through. There was. Eventually.
Within a few minutes of detecting, it was obvious the ground had changed. The sound was much more stable — none of the warble and wail of the last few days. After a week of soaked ground talking at me, it had finally gone quiet.
The bad news was the junk. Piece after piece after piece of it. I was getting quite despairing, thinking: I can’t just keep digging every five minutes for junk.
So the next plan was a cup of tea, and a slice of the amazing date loaf that Amanda, my partner, has been making for me, covered in butter. I sat on the tailgate looking out at vast amounts of not a lot, but blue sky, and just felt so blessed to be out there. It really did feel good to be out.
The next move was the second spot I’d picked. When I looked over that way, somebody was already there. Not wanting to go and steal ground, I went to an alternative patch, found a couple more pieces of junk, and gave it an hour. When I looked back over, they’d gone. Off we went.
This was Junk City. There’s a line of old mine shafts here, all in a row along the magnetic anomaly — the line people seem to follow round Leonora for the gold. Around them: tin cans, and bits of iron everywhere. At one stage I was thinking of giving up, but I persisted, and moved a bit further away from the shafts, hoping for less junk. There wasn’t.
When there’s a piece of tin in the ground, the detector absolutely screams. It’s such an oversaturated target. Then, mid-swing, a different sound came through. Kind of hollow, lower-pitched. It didn’t scream, but it was strong, it was definitely there, and I could pinpoint it. It wasn’t like the ground noise, and it wasn’t like the tin.
My pinpointing is slowly improving. I wouldn’t call it great — there are still times I’m kicking dirt left, right and centre. But as I dug, the target got stronger and stayed in exactly the same place. The opposite of attached to nothing. I kept digging, got it out of the hole, expecting the usual piece of tin.
It was a nugget.
It did feel good. Here I was, in the place I’d chosen, with a detector, picking out a sound, finding it — and finding gold. That’s what I came here to do. It really did feel like a job well done.
I carried on searching the area. Next came the sound I’d got used to: a screaming surface target. Tin, obviously. To my surprise, it was a second piece of gold. So much for that theory.
By then I’d run out of the water I was carrying, so I went back to the car feeling quite happy, then went back out and found another two pieces. All four in that same small area. On the pocket scale: 1.291 grams.
On Sunday I wrote that I might be missing gold. On Monday, on quiet ground, four pieces turned up. Draw your own conclusions.
What could have been another disaster of a day actually turned out quite good.
I came here not knowing anything. On YouTube, the videos show people getting gold. I’ve no doubt the finds they show are real — that’s absolutely honest. But I don’t believe it’s quite the whole truth. What they don’t show is the hours in between: the walking around, the picking up junk, the research, and all the other time spent. I think they condense finding five pieces of gold into one video.
For the record, I’ve now found five pieces of gold. It took nine days. That’s the video they don’t make.
Two things had me laughing to myself today. The first was finding what looked like buckshot. Oh great — somebody’s fired buckshot into a goldfield. How many pieces of lead are in buckshot? A few thousand, I guess. That’s a lot of holes.
The second was the old expression “more junk than you could shake a stick at”. And then I thought: well, I actually am shaking a stick. It’s a carbon-fibre stick with a coil on the end. So that was my saying for the day: more junk than you could shake a carbon-fibre stick with a coil on the end at.
The nugget tally, which stayed at one on Sunday, is now five.
Yeah — good day.