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The Gold I've Missed


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Back to the gold I have missed.

When the hand of faith turned up, my mate Ian M spun out and said , "that's it. All the good gold is gone". He gave up detecting and bought a small sluicing plant, which he operated around old puddling dams, finding 'fly poop', and getting his blood sucked out by leaches. I persevered with detecting, changing my Whites to a RB7 Bounty Hunter Red Baron, which I quite liked, because I hip mounted it, and the discriminator worked well. I worked alone and with a partner occasionally. I became acquainted with the goldfields closer to my home in Geelong. Rokewood, Illabarook, Happy Valley, Scarsdale, and Smythesdale, where I finally started to hit regular gold.

I found a spot called Wreby's gully, where the ground had been open cut, shallow shafted and surfaced. There was a large company (Boral ) that had a gravel extraction  quarry that in part encompassed old diggings, and nearby I found a rough and rarely used track that wound off the nearby sealed road into the area. Shallow ground was yielding me small bright colors, and although it was scrubby I was getting what I classed as a good result.

On arriving one weekend morning I couldn't help noticing that the track had been a lot more used than previously, and there were a couple of cars parked in the bush where I would normally park. Two guys were drinking coffee when I pulled up, and greeted me. "I think we are a bit late mate", one of them said. "Ay ", was about the only response I could come up with. They then went on to explain that an old guy had just further up the gully found a piece almost a hundred ounces using an early Whites detector. It happened just a few days previous.

"Not again" I thought.

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Some more gold I almost missed. Not in the same league as Reggies missed monsters but glad I eventually found it. :sad:

After my sobering experience on old Harrys place I began thinking about other signals I'd ignored. Only one stood out in memory.

A few days earlier I'd been detecting alongside the Kingower-Arnold road in an area where the once impenetrable scrub had finally died and disintegrated. Right on the edge of the dirt road I'd heard a good strong subsurface signal, which I attributed to roadside rubbish buried by the grader (of which there was a great deal)  I now resolved to return, and up came this pretty 1.7 ounce bit:

ndrd5v.jpg

I then observed that the road had cut through an alluvial tongue of auriferous wash which had crossed the road, so I detected the adjacent paddock and turned up a couple of ounces in bits.

 Heck! Makes me shudder to think how much gold I've almost certainly left for others to find. :blush:

 

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Location, 2 hrs drive outside the Golden Triangle Victoria

Yellowfin and myself were visiting a non detecting friend, who was into making bush furniture, he wanted to go out bush and collect wood for this hobby, He was an old guy, so we offered to help out, jumped in his old land rover and off we went, down this track, up another, after a bumpy drive that lasted around 20 mins, we arrived at a place where he wanted to get this huge bulge off the side of a very large tree, we assisted cutting this lump off the tree and loaded into the box trailer.

On the way out he slowed, said you boys play with those detector things, a mate of a mate found a bit of gold over there near that tree, was as big as his thumb nail, just sitting in the grass.

The ground looked unremarkable, but we did notice some old timers holes down the track where it joined another larger track, and along it we passed a dozed area of about an acre in area.

Some years later we decided to visit the place with our SD 2000's, arriving late in the afternoon, parked the car right at the tree where our old mate had cut the bulge off.

Set up my SD walked 10 meters and picked up a 7oz bit at 3", next a flat bit on the surface that looked like something had squashed it, Picked up several more, from 10 grams to around an oz before the light had gone for the day.

Between the two of us we picked up 600 odd oz out of the place, largest was the 7oz bit from day 1 and the smallest the 10 gram bit also from day 1, all the gold was very shallow from the surface down to 3" and ran in a band of really noisy ground about 3 meters wide, that ran down to the old timers holes down the track.

Picked up one i missed some years later with a 3500 that went an oz, it was hard up against an old tree stump.

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The stories you boys tell ...

Now, someone coming back over those same areas would not have a clue as to the real geology (amount of gold once there).  You have detected most of the evidence away.

What were the clues that made them work it the first time?  I mean, why had there been some evidence of workings there from many years before when the only thing a man had to search with was his eyes, digging instruments and brains?

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That's a very good question mn90403, this particular area the original gold was discovered by timber cutters, where gold was seen among the roots of fallen trees.

I've not dug any deep gold in this area, in fact many of my finds were on the surface only covered by leaves.

The run of gold we found was all very shallow, and was not on any kind of hard bottom, or red clay that I've become accustomed to.

One could quite easily have dug past the gold, it was all contained in a greyish coloured very fine gravel and not very worn or rounded.

The only outstanding feature, was the band of ground was very noisy, I don't recall it being overly noisy with the SD or 3500 though.

Like most prospector's, I've returned to the scene of the crime many time's, when pickings have become slim or I've purchased the latest and greatest detector.

Hint: if you see Reg's or JR's dial out bush, they ain't there for nothing:wink: 

The 5000 struggled on that band of dirt as did the SDC, the SDC surprised me as I was sure it would pick up the odd small.

The 5000 with a detech 15” DD worked reasonably well last year when I tried it out on the spot, but no gold, although I did find a very deep musket ball.

JR or Reg are better with the geology than I, so I’ve tried to describe the area as best I can, maybe they will offer an opinion.

The old timers diggings are in completely different dirt, Pipe clay and are only about 50 meters away from where we found are last bit in the band.

In a straight line from the Old timers diggings across a hill, there are more old diggings in pipe clay, we did get some very good gold up to an oz off the heaps and off the wall's of the holes.

The old timers had pushed through a false bottom here.

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What kind of trees were they harvesting there?

Wouldn't that be interesting to see big nuggets in the roots.  Were all the trees sawed or did some of them get tumbled and throw up a bunch of roots?

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Hard to know what the story is with that run, Egxie4, but if the gold was not too jagged then you were possibly working the shallow beginnings of a tertiary lead. These can be phenomenally rich but sometimes missed by the old boys since, as you noticed, they have few clues to identify them by.

The reason they were missed is because early prospectors usually started further down the lead and followed the run upstream, guided by the pipeclay (Pipeclay is the kaolinised (oxidised) bedrock material from the lower levels of an ancient streambed)  Once this thinned and disappeared the only clue to continue searching by was following the line of colours in the wash.  If these stopped appearing then they often moved on, sometimes incorrectly assuming they had reached the start of the lead.

The Chinese diggers were more cautious and often puddled large areas around the heads of old leads. The Whipstick forest north of Bendigo has many examples of this practice. Had the Chinese been working your area then chances are they would have found your 600 oz.

That's a large quantity of gold, BTW. I'll be applying for a loan from you and Yellowfin shortly. :wink:

How are you finding the QED?

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54 minutes ago, mn90403 said:

What kind of trees were they harvesting there?

Wouldn't that be interesting to see big nuggets in the roots.  Were all the trees sawed or did some of them get tumbled and throw up a bunch of roots?

They would have been harvesting the hardwood gum trees, most were sawn leaving a stump a few feet high, the gold they would have first discovered would have been in the roots of trees, fallen over during storms 

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3 hours ago, egixe4 said:

Hint: if you see Reg's or JR's dial out bush, they ain't there for nothing:wink: 

Sometimes we are, unfortunately!  :sad:

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