Last night was an early departure for me from the pub, back to my room at 8pm. The nice guys were in the bar and I shook their hands. It’s difficult to tell but I think I’ve brought a bit of a diversion from normal life for the lads. We’ve had a nice time together.

The view from my room showed that God continues to put gold into Moonambel.

This morning I packed and was away by 10.30. It’s been a good home and the boys, and particularly Stewart, have been good company. They’ve all got their issues, but their decency shines more than their dependencies and difficulties. Solid folk. Goodbye Stewart. Like my girls, a second generation Sheffielder.

Back to Melbourne.

And a few seafood meals before departure.

Thanks for reading this.

I’ll blog again, but later this year. There’s a remote area in the French Alps that me and my nephew Daniel might explore in September. Should we be spared.

Night night.

I have faith in Redbank. It is a reasonably sized Conservation Reserve, with different approaches, clear geographical features and a lot of gold has been found here in the past. So today, my last day detecting, I’m going over to the far eastern side of the reserve, where there are old shallow alluvial gold workings. Perfect for an old get with a detector.

Well, it was a perfect morning. And, as I walked along the track bordering the Reserve and private land, the vineyard in the background was impressive. If barely perceptible on this photo!

Any vestige of cloud cleared early and I was busy straight away, collecting lead shot and bullet casings buried in the soil. It’s going to be another long day. And a hotter than normal one.

I’ve had the geographical co-ordinates for most places I’ve detected this trip due to spending a couple of days at home on the state of Victoria geological website and printing out maps of the old workings that I wanted to visit. This gets overtaken by events when you get help from different sources, and most notably Damien, but I’m back to one of my pre-chosen areas. Next to the Sunraysia Highway. The entrained HGVs using this highway at speed forced me to back my car off the roadside and well into an opening in the trees. The force of wind from these monsters is incredible. The heaviest, out in the outback, weigh up to 175 tonnes!

I started detecting and I liked the ground. Not littered with scrap metal and not much of an overburden until you reach the clay and rocks underneath. Then it’s hard work.

Once again the day descended from the start into a shotgun pellet chase. I found dozens.

By early afternoon I’d worked my way down the hill that descended from the Sunraysia Highway, and part way up the side of the hill on the other side of the valley. I’d gone off course and my Garmin said I needed to head due West. I felt more confident. Away from the road, and even the noise of the juggernauts had faded into the background, the lead shot had reduced. It could be on. Suddenly there was a loud shotgun blast that made me jump. The Bush is quiet, spookily so, and the shot really had me leaping like 12 lords.

This is a Nature Conservation Reserve and the shot I was finding were from the old days. Nobody is allowed to fire guns in the Reserve. There were another two shots quickly following each other. Two pillocks with guns or one with a double barrelled shotgun. Not much gets past me.

The direction had shifted to the south and slightly closer. I kept on detecting and thought it would go away. Then another shot, much closer. Shit!

I quickly kicked the earth back into a hole I was digging. I hadn’t come across anybody in my 19 days detecting and I didn’t want to come across whoever this was. Two more shots a bit nearer and I was off. I didn’t run, that would make a noise and I’d probably went a pisser. If I headed towards the sun then I would meet the Highway at a perpendicular. The shots receded, as had my hairline over too many decades to recall. It took me half an hour to get back to the car and I headed back to the giant mullock heap near Moonambel, the scene of my biggest nugget find. As the sky turned deeper Indigo. OK smart arse, if you don’t think it’s Indigo what do you think it is? Prussian Blue? You’re having a laugh!

This wasn’t far from the quarry which I had left in a hurry yesterday after being spooked by someone who was no one saying ‘Hello Dave’. Stewart, the pub owner, had gone up in the afternoon to collect lumps of quartz as decoration for his garden. He was mindful of what I had said about the disembodied voice, and the hairs on the back of his neck (why is it always the back of your neck?) had stood up as soon as he left his Ute. He thought someone there was watching him. He could hear them walking around him in the Bush but couldn’t see them. He was freaked out by it and got back in the Ute and drove home.

The ants, not the big buggers, just the little buggers, go bonkers when they feel the electro magnetic field generated by the detector. It’s like an ant rave. Happy Mondays for Hymenoptera.

I faded into the hot afternoon and for the sixth day running I didn’t find gold. It’s almost like finding gold isn’t the objective. It’s looking for it that counts. Gold is the icing on the cake, but the cake is gold hunting. It’s been 19 successive days of hard labour, rewarded by enough gold and silver, together, to make a ring for my lass. It wasn’t meant to be solely gold, that’s why I found the 190 year old shilling. Lost by some poor lad working his guts out digging a hole halfway up a mountain. It must have slipped out of his pocket and into the mullock heap developing around the excavation. He must have been distraught when he realised it was gone. A shilling in 1860 was enough to keep a family alive for a day. A substantial loss. But I’m sure that he would be happier knowing that his loss is hopefully going to become a family heirloom. Worth little and highly valuable.

I’ve loved being here. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading about it. I’ll do a final blog for this trip tomorrow but the gold hunting is over.

Night night.

It’s hot again, oh my goodness. Back up over 30c today in the quarry I was detecting in. A cauldron, cauldron I tell you!

Brian, my mate from the bar, offered to show me a hidden quarry where there had to be gold.

The pub is closed on a Monday but Stewart cooked me breakfast. Classic and stunning bacon and eggs on toast. Thick, salty bacon, fried to crispness, and perfectly fried eggs. Sometimes with tomatoes and mushrooms.

Then I picked Brian up in the car and he guided me up into the Redbank Conservation area. Past where I’ve been before, and he told me when to stop. We walked up the side of the mountain to our right and he led me up a winding path to a hidden quarry. I drove him back to his house and then drove back up.

I grabbed my gear and walked to the highest part of the quarry.

I started detecting, and after digging up lots of lead shotgun pellets I stopped and drank half a litre of water from my Camelbak. Within minutes of restarting detecting I was thirsty again. This was my 18th day of detecting on the trot and I was feeling it. The quarry formed a natural amphitheatre to capture heat and exclude the breeze. I tried to keep ahead on hydration and I wasn’t sweating, just transpiring into the atmosphere. I was disappearing through my own pores.

The sky here is amazing. It starts at the colour of a Caribbean bay and rises through a range of blues to Indigo.

I think blue and green should be together seen in this context.

Brian says he’s lived in the Bush most of his life and loves it. Some days he climbs a mountain and just sits on the top all day. He’s in his fifties, he’s on his own, although his sister shares his house, and he has a Staffy dog. Life is straightforward for him and I just love the guy. Serge too, who lives in the pub. He’s in his fifties. When he was a baby he fell in the fire. His eyesight is poor because his eyes burned. His left hand and foot are short without nails because they caught fire. He’s vulnerable and suppresses bad things that have happened since, through medication, both prescribed and proscribed. He is the gentlest and nicest of men.

Stewart, the pub owner, is in his sixties and is surrounded by chaos. He wants to sell the pub but nobody wants to buy it. Twenty young Swedish women on a bus journey around Australia turned up the other night and blasted out ABBA on the jukebox. Drove me out of the place. A hen party turned up the previous week and ran amok! Stewart likes to sit in his armchair in the pub, which is dark and never looks open, and watch US detective and courtroom programmes. Customers are an unnecessary diversion from the tv. When things kick off he sinks lower in his chair until he reaches the point where he says ‘You can all f*** off, I’m closing’. He’s a diamond and he’s looked after me, telling me which patrons are iffy and have done time and which of the others I can trust.

The middle of nowhere and we have Eastenders on steroids.

Meanwhile back into this furnace I ask you now to venture, you whom I cannot betray. Thanks Leonard. It doesn’t help that I not only have to wear boots, I also don heavy duty Swiss army trousers, but I have to tuck them in my socks to stop Bull Ants and scorpions getting up my legs. Sweaty or what? But at the moment it is dry heat so, as I said earlier, I am just transpirational.

It was poor going so I dropped down the sides of the quarry to detect the slopes lower down. Each metre lower added another 1c to the temperature, or so it felt. No joy at this level. So I dropped down to the quarry floor and detected there.

Sometimes the sound of a target is so faint that you think it can’t possibly be anything other than hot rocks, stones containing a high concentration of iron minerals, or the detector sighing at the absence of gold. Then you scrape the surface off with your boot, and the sound becomes a little more distinct. Then out with the pick and scrape off half an inch of the compacted clay or earth/rock mixture, usually baked into a concrete consistency. The detector sound will now clearly reveal a target. Turn the pick round, its head is triangular in shape, and use the pointed apex to dig deeper, then scrape out the dislodged material. When the target has still not been removed from the hole it cannot possibly be anything but gold. Shotgun pellets or bullets, even from 180 years ago, would not have penetrated this deeply. Then after you have thrashed the earth with your pick for half an hour, removed tens of kilos of material in a large pile, and you finally put your detector down the hole, and it is silent, the target is outed!

By this time you have drunk a couple of litres of water to keep you from fainting. Now it takes a further ten minutes to determine where the target is on the pile of earth, and to run it across the detector in your scoop. Until there are only a few pieces left in your scoop and the detector is now making a very loud noise. Finally there are a couple of pieces of earth left in the scoop, and it is still making the detector wildly excited, so you take one out. And when you pass the scoop over the detector with the remaining piece of earth it goes ballistic. Then you break the clod in half. And a lead shotgun pellet falls out.

Then by law you are required to infill the hole with any material that you have taken out. Replace any plants accidentally uprooted, because uprooting them is a criminal offence, and then return the original dead leaf cover. I kid you not. And I’ve been doing this for seven hours a day, non-stop for 18 days. And for the last 5 days I’ve not found gold.

I worked my way to the edge of the quarry floor, where the forest met the open space. There was a huge pile of earth and rocks, where an old gold mine had been infilled with its mullock heap.

Sorry to keep crapping on about the heat. I never thought I’d last this long. The flies are buggers too. Landing on your eyes to steal some liquid. Keep an eye open for Bull Ants and don’t even bother about snakes, they seem to be sleeping at this time of year.

By now it was late afternoon. My water was low. The heat hadn’t abated and I picked up a faint signal. Going through the half hour ritual of digging a deep hole and finding a shotgun pellet, I found a shotgun pellet. As I stood up, completely exhausted, something strange happened.

I walked back to the car and drove to Stewart’s pub. The bar was closed. I had a tin of chilli con carne in my room, and a small tin of Heinz baked beans. I emptied them into a plastic takeaway container, put it in the microwave in the galley at the pub for four minutes and smothered it with Tabasco, what I’d bought yesterday. Within 15 minutes I could take on the bloody world. Come on!!! Have a go!!! I’m big Dave Smith from Sheffield!!!!!!

Night night.