Jun 17

Written by:
6/17/2010 8:53 AM 

By Barrie Johnson

 

Australia has a marvelous history of gold prospecting, especially in Wedderburn. This small country town is located in one of the richest goldfields in the country.

 

About 70 percent of the largest gold nuggets in the world were discovered in the Wedderburn area. This includes the Welcome Stranger found by Deason and Oates in 1869 weighing 2,520 ounces. This is the largest nugget ever discovered. Kevin Hillier found the Hand of Faith in 1980 weighing 876 ounces in the same area. This nugget now resides in the Golden Nugget Saloon in Las Vegas.

 

In 1982, I was standing beside the display case with the Hand Of Faith inside it. I tapped the top of the case and said to my wife, Pat, “this nugget came out of the ground a few miles from our front door.” We were surrounded by Americans who heard what I said and I spent quite a while talking about gold detecting to a lot of interested people.

 

I came up to Wedderburn in 1984 and started Barrie Johnson Detector Services. Until I retired in 2005, we had a very busy business selling Minelab Detectors. We were also the Australian service agents for Minelab and manufactured the Nugget Finder Coils. These top-of-the-range coils are still being manufactured by my son, Rohan.

 

It was a fascinating time and we had hundreds of detector people come through, including quite a few Americans. I saw hundreds of ounces of gold and I have taken hundreds of photos over the years.

 

The metal detecting boom started about 1960 with Garrett Whites supplying excellent detectors. However, the detecting game really took of when Minelab started releasing its range of detectors about 1986. The big step forward was the ability of the Minelab detectors to get good depth in the highly-mineralized ground that contains the nuggets in the Victorian and Australian gold fìelds. The technology kept getting better all the time. Upon the release of the fìrst Multi-Period Pulse Induction detector (SD2000) in 1995, the nuggets poured out - and it’s still happening now.

 

I remember a young chap buying an SD2000 from us in 1995. I gave him a map of the

local gold fields and jokingly put a cross on the map saying he would find a large nugget there. And three weeks later he walked into the shop and produced a 300-ounce nugget that he found with his detector only a few miles away. He jokingly said he found it where I put the cross but it was a few miles from it. This was the largest nugget that I saw in the 20 years of the business, but there were many more well over 100 ounces.

 

Another interesting story is about old Jack. This chap was a professional prospector from the time he retired and one of the photos accompanying this article shows the table with 410 ounces of nuggets on it that Jack had hand-detected in the Golden Triangle of Victoria. Jack was a very successful prospector from the time he retired because he had the mental attitude toward detecting that most detector operators find hard to implement.

 

Old Jack would usually call in about every three months or so to see us. Often he would say he had dug hundreds of holes within the three months and only found a small amount of gold. But he would then come in three months later and frequently drop a lot of nuggets on the table and say he had a good run.

 

At the end of the year, Jack would divide his ounces by 52 and work out his weekly average of gold. It usually meant that he had worked for quite a few months digging hundreds of holes for very little, but the good months more than made up for the bad ones.

 

To sum up, he worked for maybe eight months for a few 100 dollars, but the remaining months often paid him tens of thousands of dollars. His work philosophy is the secret of successful gold detecting. And there are quite a few people out there such as Jack detecting.

 

The township of Wedderburn is built upon gold fields and it would be fascinating to know how many thousands of ounces would be under the houses and streets. The Buttericks family owned a house in Wedderburn with a small side yard back in the 1950’s and decided to dig it up looking for nuggets. This was in the days before detectors. And they found nearly 200 ounces of gold.

 

This created enormous interest and the council actually allowed prospectors to dig shafts on Wilson Street at the front of the house - and sure enough they found more nuggets. The finds continued and, in one day, over 5,000 people jammed the streets looking on. Nuggets weighing seven, 22, 34, 68, 75 and 168 ounces, plus many smaller pieces, were found within a few days at the house and in the street.

 

The house and block of land are still there. If the old house was ever demolished, it would be interesting to detect the ground underneath it. I would suspect there would be enough nuggets to pay for a new home.

 

Over the years, a very popular gold mining method called dozing and detecting has started in the golden triangle. This is based on the fact that even the latest detectors with big coils don’t go much deeper than 24 inches reliably. So the obvious answer was to bring in a bulldozer and, after detecting the surface, scrape of three feet or so and redetect. This is repeated down to a depth of 12 to 14 feet or so.

 

The results of this method have been outstanding, opening up huge areas that have been surface-detected by hundreds of people. The only catch is that you have to invest in a mining claim. However, over the past 10 years or so, I have seen hundreds of ounces detected from previously-detected areas using this principle. And, of course, after finishing the operator has to restore the area to its previous condition.

 

Another great attraction is the Wedderburn Detector Jamboree, which we started in 2000 and now attracts hundreds of detector people to the town every year. Every March, when the Jamboree is held over the weekend, we go out and bury 100 numbered metal discs about half inch in diameter in two areas of about l0 acres each. On the Saturday and Sunday morning, the detector people are given maps showing the areas and hundreds head out. The ones who are lucky enough to find one or more tokens bring their tokens into the jamboree organizers and, on Sunday afternoon, all the recovered tokens are put into a container and the winning numbers are drawn out.

 

There are a great range of prizes, the top one being Minelab super detector. The very interesting thing is that the sites are randomly selected in the land around the town every year and quite a few nuggets come out. At the last Jamboree in’09, I saw 32 nuggets, the biggest one being 14 grams.

 

You can always have a problem even with the most careful planning. A couple of years ago, we put out the tokens in two areas as usual on the Thursday evening. We do this very carefully so nobody knows where the tokens are. However, on the Saturday morning when the first 50 or so people drove out to the token area, guess what? A detector club of about 40 people had arrived late on Friday evening and camped on the token sight. Imagine the pandemonium when over 50 people drove into the club’s camping site and started to detect everywhere. It soon sorted itself out with the club removing all their caravans and camping gear. Life’s not dull.

 

There is another aspect of gold detecting that is very interesting - the coins and relics that are unearthed from these historical areas. Over the years, I have seen many fascinating items come out of the ground. Gold coins are still being discovered, such as the sovereigns, silver tobacco cases, old digging tools, belt buckles with interesting insignias and a lot of other memorabilia going back as far as 1850 or so.

 

An interesting thing happened to me at the Wedderburn rally in’98. A couple of weeks before the rally, I was out detecting at Beggary Hill. This is a famous area where a group of children on a school excursion picked up a 70-ounce nugget from the surface back in the 50’s. I got a good signal on my detector and dug up a target that turned out to be a nice brooch. After cleaning the brooch, I was amazed to read “Back to Wedderburn 1946.” The odds on me finding this must have been a million-to-one.

 

There are large amount of bullets that are found with detectors. They are often the big, lead bullets from Martini Henrys and other old firearms and can make an interesting collection particularly to the firearm enthusiasts.

 

So if you are coming to a great historic gold field like the Golden Triangle, invest in a top-of-the-range pulse induction detector and make yourself known to the tourism info centers as they often have guided tours around the gold fields.

 

A few clues about what to look for in the gold fields. An important start is to look for the mullock heap areas. The mullock heaps are the mounds of dirt where the miners sank their shafts, as far back as the 1860’s. There are still hundreds of these mounds on the crown land mining areas and the amount of nuggets still corning out is amazing. They tend to be small nuggets missed in the early panning days, but a few pieces a day soon add up. And the occasional big piece still surfaces.

 

Creek beds should always be detected and you can always approach the local land owners for permission to go onto property located in the gold fields.

 

Swing the coil steadily from side to side at a slow rate, keeping it parallel to the ground and as close as possible. Also make sure you overlap your sweeps. Listen to the sounds carefully and practice with a small target such as a nugget or small coin buried in the ground at various depths.

 

Remember that no detector identifies just gold, and you should dig every signal. Leave the discriminators off.

 

A very important thing to remember is that the detector senses surface area more than mass. This means that a nice round one-ounce nugget will give less of a signal than a much lighter piece with a large flat surface parallel to the coil’s surface. And the reverse applies if the flat piece has its edge facing the coil surface.

 

The important thing is to dig everything. This is a good reason to detect areas that have had heavy machinery drive over them, particularly if the ground was wet at the time. If you see the tracks of a bulldozer going though a previously detected area, detect its track marks in the hope that its weight has flattened out a few nuggets thus making them easier to detect because there is now more surface area parallel to the coil.