Well, it turns out Aaron, the owner of Reeds, is a master of his craft. We walked into his store with the simple goal of hiring a metal detector and walked out as the proud (and slightly bewildered) owners of a brand-new Minelab Equinox 800.
Complete with all the “essential” accessories we never knew we needed. Who knew gold hunting required more gear than a moon landing?
Finally, we hit the road. Armed with a machine we barely knew how to use and a confidence level best described as “optimistically clueless,” we were ready to strike it rich. I had done some solid “research” (a.k.a. binge-watched YouTube videos), figuring out where we could legally prospect. Meanwhile, Debbie handled the serious stuff and got us the required Miners Rights licenses. She also enrolled us both to APLA , a move that proved invaluable when it came to not getting arrested for accidental trespassing.
We picked Bullfinch as our starting point. It’s a ghost town these days, but back in the day, it pumped out gold like a Vegas slot machine. My logic? If they found heaps back then, surely they left a few nuggets behind for us amateurs.
We found a promising spot on a tenement, just a kilometre or so from the road, and set up camp. It was stunningly peaceful, and here we were with a metal detector we hadn’t quite figured out how to turn on. And then we discovered why gold hunting isn’t exactly a popular summer activity. Imagine standing in the middle of a giant, sun-soaked frying pan while wielding a metal stick that beeps at every bottle cap buried since 1923.
But hey, we were on a mission: gold or sunstroke, whichever came first.
Our metal detector worked as advertised and found us plenty of metal. When you look around you think you are in pristine bush land but we found plenty of evidence to suggest that we where not the first people to venture to these parts. We found bullet cases, nails, old rusty knifes, bits of old horseshoe but no gold. We encountered hot rocks for the first time and I now know them to be a regular thorn in the prospectors side.
The mornings and evenings were spectacular BUT talk about “mad dogs and Englishmen”, the middle of the day was unbearable. It reached over 40 degrees on our first two days and with only our tent and awning for shade it was too much. We didn’t want to cut our holiday short so we booked into a hotel in Kal (Kalgoorlie) and spent New Year’s Eve visiting as many pubs along Hannon Street as we could. We ended up in the Criterion Hotel watching the locals strutting their stuff, singing karaoke, a night never to be forgotten.
We didn’t find gold but I knew that we would be back.