‘Danger out there’: death or glory in new Australian gold rush
A surge in gold prices has fuelled an increase in wannabe prospectors near Melbourne and almost 100,000 permits have been issued. Is the risk worth the reward?
Not all that far from Moliagul, a rural hamlet in Victoria, Australia, where 155 years ago two Cornish miners found a fortune under their feet, Luke Phillips put on his wet weather gear and took his metal detector out into the scrub.
What followed has gone down in gold-hunting legend. “We’ve got a nice deep target here,” Phillips, a used-car salesman, told his friend Andrew as they began digging in August. “Unless that’s a lead bullet or a miner’s nail, it’s got to be a fair bit of gold.”
As his friend filmed, the hole in the clay got deeper. Then, a glimmer of gold clearly gleaming. “Holy smokes,” Phillips said in the video posted to his YouTube channel, Dig It Detecting. “What a f--king clump,” his friend added of the 30oz (850g) nugget valued at £40,000 ($78,690).
As the price of gold soars in a period of global economic uncertainty, hordes of hunters have been descending on places such as Moliagul in a second gold rush just 190km from Melbourne. “I’m not a rich man, so to me, it is life changing,” Phillips said, adding that he had spent the money on a four-wheel drive vehicle he had long wanted.
Many of those who find gold near Moliagul end up taking it the short distance to Melbourne. Rajiv Arora, a gold dealer in the city, said the number of people coming through his doors has surged. A woman carried in a newly unearthed 500g nugget he valued at £27,400 ($53,900) only a few weeks ago.
In Victoria hunters only need to pay £13.45 ($26.50) for the 10-year right to search and the number of people with a permit has increased from 40,000 to almost 100,000 over the past five years.
Jason Cornish, the president of the Prospectors and Mining Association of Victoria, said: “It’s just kept going up with the price of gold.” However, Phillips warned that this comes with risks.
Spurred on by gold prices rising by almost a third last year, inexperienced Australians are venturing into the Outback.
“[Gold fields] can be very dangerous places between everything that wants to bite us, like dangerous spiders and snakes, to walking around old mine shafts all day long,” Phillips said.
Barry Podmore, 73, was the latest gold hunter to disappear. He drove alone for 320km northeast of Perth, the Western Australian capital, in early December to the remote Karroun Hills in search of the metal. Neither Podmore nor his vehicle have been found.
Garry Edser, a veteran Queensland geologist, 65, and Kristine Starr, 69, vanished in gold fields 480km west of Cairns in mid-November. Their bodies were later found and their families believe they became lost deep in the outback after taking a wrong turn.
In December, Western Australia police also found the body of the prospector William Wadsworth, 76, who disappeared on August 15.
One of Australia’s best-known missing prospector cases also happened in the state when the husband and wife Ray and Jennie Kehlet disappeared 644km northwest of Perth in 2015. Ray Kehlet’s remains were later found inside an abandoned mine shaft and a coroner declared his death a homicide. His wife has never been found.
Phillips fears the numbers venturing into the outback will continue to rise. Many are drawn by the promise of finding another “Welcome Stranger”, the 72kg nugget found by two Cornishmen in 1869, which would be worth about £4.5 million ($8.85m) today.
He said: “Gold’s a funny thing. Gold does strange things to people.”
The Times
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