LAVERTON AREA

Thought we had better give you an update. We are still in Laverton. The weather has been great, usually between 18 to 24 degrees during the day. The caravan park can be nearly empty one day and then all of a sudden everyone comes in from the bush to have showers or do their washing and there are people everywhere. One old prospector does it hard. He just sleeps on a stretcher under the tree (photo below). All sorts come in from Ocka’s, caravans, campers (large and small), tents, swags and even some that just sleep in their cars.

We have been going out nearly everyday either prospecting or exploring. We are heading off the main tracks most of the time and it is amazing what you find out there. The ground is just quartz and iron stone with a few bushes and small trees and you think you are miles from anywhere until you come across an old well with a tank and yards or you can be detecting what you think is virgin ground and you’ll swing across a boot nail some old timer has lost on his way to a new mine. They scare the crap out of you because detecting on virgin ground is very quiet inside your little headphone world, then all of a sudden something screams in your ear, it’s bad enough thinking someone is watching you all the time anyway. How they ever farmed out here is unbelievable. There are plenty of creeks and lakes but not a drop of water anywhere. It is a shame that someone hasn’t kept the wells in good condition but I suppose if they are not farming out there anymore, there is no real use for them.

There are old mining camps everywhere and heaps of abandoned mines. They did it hard in those days. The amount of ground they moved and how they moved it is unbelievable. There are still 4 mines operating in the area today. The bigger one, Granny Smith’s has it’s own air strip and fly in/fly out their workers.

There are plenty of old town sites around as well. At every one you will find a few bottle dumps. Usually most of the bottles are broken but you can get an idea of how old they are. We have found the remnants of some really nice looking old bottles/jars, some are purple and hexaganol and others are old hand blown bottles. We found two bottles in one piece but they weren’t hand made. One had no writing and the other was an old Lea & Perrin Worcestershire sauce. There are also plenty of old tobacco tins, bike tube repair tins, sardine tins and plenty of horse shoes. It is just amazing to think that they actually lived in these remote places with such basic supplies and means of transport and how long they would have taken to get there.

There are a couple of grave sites out in the bush around this area. One is of a 16 year old New Zealand prospector who got struck by lightning in 1896 and at another site call “Red Flag” there are the graves of a couple who died when the roof of their dug out collapsed under heavy rain . There is a story written on the fence of their old dugout, explaining their plight and tells the story of how they can be seen walking hand in hand around the well on a moon-lit night. Strangely enough Billy the bitch (one of our dogs) was staring at the well, barking and going off and as it was a full moon that night approaching we decided to leave them in peace and head home to the bus.

We have found a total of 16 nuggets so far. The weights range from .35 gram to 1.1 grams. Hopefully we will keep finding them ‘cause at this size, we are going to have to find a few to make it worth while. It’s still fun trying. Some of the people we have got to know here have done pretty well for themselves, one couple left yesterday 21st Aug and we had drinks for them the night before and I asked Fay the wife how they had faired in 4 mths and she said they’d done very well, without letting on how well (they don’t work, so your guess).

LAVERTON - BASE CAMP

We are going to stay in Laverton for a while and use it as our base camp. It is central to Northern Goldfields district. There are many old townships and mining camps to explore as well as all the vast land to detect on.

Before leaving Victoria I purchased two books on Ebay written by DW Dehavilland. In his books he has meticulously written about all the gold mined areas and areas that could possibly contain gold deposits in Western Australia. Using this info, combined with Google Earth, I can read up about the areas of History and then fly over and into an area, suss it all out get the coordinates. I then punch it into the GPS and the next day we’re of on a new adventure, even if at the end of the day there is no gold we’ve still been and seen things nobody else is likely to get near.

Probably the second day we were at the Laverton C/van Park a little beat up old caravan pulled in beside us with a fairly unkemped looking fella about 55-60 (we think). Dianne looked at me and we both thought what have we got here. Well this bloke has a name and his name is Darcy. He hails from NSW somewhere and is now a full time prospector apart from doing the odd job around the park when he’s here. At the moment he’s waiting for his new Metal Detector to be returned after a recall on them 2 weeks ago and he’s chaffing at the bit to get back out there. In the meantime Darcy has been a wealth of knowledge and even helped us with repairs on the bus, (fibreglassing my hole in the roof) but the biggest surprise was he has leant Dianne his old Detector to use. Darcy also put us onto an area to look which had been worked fairly hard over the years but still gave up some gold and bingo, we had our first nuggets, only small but a really nice feeling to pull gold out of the ground instead of wire, buttons or other crap. One thing you learn pretty quick is to go out looking with the idea you might get lucky, but just enjoy being out there hiding from the Lease holders, dodging other prospectors and travelling this great land of ours.