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.