Remembering the 2,000-ounce patch
by Bruce R. Legendre
When one thinks of big nuggets, monsters such as the Welcome Stranger, the Welcome, the Golden Eagle, and the more recent Hand of Faith all come to mind. Well, we never found a single nugget that came remotely close to any of the four I just mentioned, but my brother, Joe, and I were involved in a couple of patches that went better than 1,500 ounces all up. Not that we got to keep it all, but we were the ones who found the first nuggets in new country where no-one had looked before, or if they had, they’d missed it. I also prospected in two other areas in the Stirling Ranges just north of Leonora where two patches were found that went better than 700 ounces. One was the Royal Arthur found by the Leonora Aborigines in 1989, which turned into a real free-for-all with half the town out there and everybody getting good gold. Believe it or not, it was only 600 or 700 metres from a series of shafts and right in the guts of this new alluvial find was a small surface dig from the old days. The other patch was found close to Mount Fouracre. Peter Randles walked onto it and the exact number of ounces it produced was, well, let’s just say many hundreds.
That patch was situated right next to one of the major tracks in the area with workings to the south and east. The area had been hammered by everyone from Leonora, the local Aborigines, and tourists from every state, but when I visited Peter I had to laugh when he told me he had twigged two beautiful quartz specimens for 30 ounces which had been hiding underneath low hanging mulga branches, the kind that hug the ground. It was the old story of everyone being too lazy to move a few tree limbs that were in the way.
The old extensive alluvial patches where the old timers blew hectares and hectares of loam, like Lake Darlot, Duketon, and Wilsons’ Patch, produced tens of thousands of ounces for the metal detector operators who had been working them since 1977, when it all started with the Garrett Deepseeker. But the best patch, without a doubt, was David John’s prospect in the Goanna Patch. It went 2,000 ounces before David flogged it for a quarter of a million and headed off into the sunrise to the eastern opal fields. My brother, Big Royce, and I were prospecting north of David’s ground back in 1985 and 1986 and we called in to say hello every month or so on our way out of town, having made the run to replenish supplies.
Copies of David John’s book, Bloody Gold, which details the difficulties he faced in winning gold from the Goanna Patch, are hard to come by these days
They were exciting times for David. The gold was coming in daily and it was very good gold. David always enjoyed a bit of company in those days and was celebrating his good fortune on a daily basis: a slab of beer and a bottle of rum together with a few hundred ounces of metal to admire, made for a very festive atmosphere, particularly when we were coming in on the bones of our arse not having found anything in weeks and weeks.
How the whole show came together was that David had given up commercial fishing in South Australia and came out to Leonora as a new chum, with limited assets, an old milk delivery van, a Garrett A2B, and the ability to find just enough gold to keep body and soul together. He’d pegged an SPL (Special Prospectors License) on a mineral claim that was held by a large company as one of many that carpeted the entire area. They did little or no work, content to sit on the ground in a speculative fashion hoping that one day something would occur that would enable them to make money. This modus operandi actually worked if you could hold onto ground long enough and were prepared to fictionalise your annual work reports.
Well, the warden in Leonora’s monthly court granted David the SPL which was no mean feat I can assure you, having attempted the same thing myself with no success. If the opposition showed up maintaining that they were planning an exploration project in the area that you’d pegged, well, you were up the proverbial creek. David had done his homework and was truly prepared to work the ground.
He put a few dry blow shots through a small sampling machine that ran off the battery of a motorcar, and was powered by a windscreen wiper motor. He’d gotten colours of similar texture and size on both sides of a creek and figured that the middle ground between the two must be the source. So he put his entire bankroll – the grand total of 1.5 ounces of gold – into renting a backhoe for half a day. That was it. Half a day to produce the goods or the fat lady had sung.
The backhoe operator came down from Leinster and put in a costean through the creek where David reckoned it might be. Well, to cut a long story short, there ended up being more than 200 ounces in the mullock heaps alone! It was more than enough to kick-start any alluvial operation. David went and bought himself a Cat D7, a compressor, a motor grader, a rock drill, gelignite, another caravan and ute, and heaps of good tucker and refreshments.
He then systematically scraped an area of several hectares over the next couple of years, working some days, celebrating others. He kept all the metal somewhere in his camp which was common knowledge in the goldfields, but I don’t think anyone was game to take him on as he had a reputation of being a bit eccentric and heavily armed – a reputation that I can assure you, was on the money.
David’s 2,000 ounces made him the king of the Eastern goldfields. I saw him every now and then in Leonora after he’d returned from the opal fields. He’d decided to have another crack at gold. Like all of us, he was broader around the waist and his hard drinking days were over.
Today the goldfields need fresh blood. All you need is a reliable detector, a reasonable vehicle and patience, patience, patience. Once you read about the boom, it’s too late. But it can never be too early if you’ve got very little to lose for starters. So, if you’re broke, depressed, have had a gutful of being a citizen or all of the above – have you tried being a prospector?
