The mystery behind every cache of valuables

Gold Gem & Treasure was recently contacted by a long-time detectorist in Victoria who has persisted with his efforts to uncover treasure from a rubbishy area adjacent to a busy road. Up until a couple of months ago, he had been reasonably successful despite the opinion of others that he was wasting his time detecting in the area. Too much rubbish they reckoned. Far too many targets that were worthless scraps of metal. And then he found a rusty old tin with nine 1820 gold sovereigns in it! He did the right thing and took the sovereigns to the local police but they weren’t very interested in doing the paperwork. They told him he could keep the sovereigns as no-one would be lodging a claim for coins that were more than 200 years old. The fact that the coins could have been part of a modern-day collection that had been lost or stolen didn’t cross their minds. We’re hoping the finder of the sovereigns will elaborate further on his experience so that we can share it with you, but it reminded us of a story we published some time ago about another cache found by one of our readers. Back then he told his story writing under the pseudonym Argonaut. “It was 1986 when I joined a safari, organised by John Dyer, to wave metal detectors over the alluvial goldfields of Western Australia.

The party of about 30 were to be guided to various locations and instructed on metal detectors and their operation by David de Havelland, a well-known prospecting authority and the author of the Gold and Ghosts series of books. Starting from Leonora, the group searched several areas of known alluvial ground with very modest success. The caravan wended its way over many unproductive areas, however, that period of the excursion was rated successful by a handful of detectorists in the group who had found several ounces in nuggets. The caravan eventually set up camp near the old workings of the ‘Famous Blue’, near Laverton. To that point in the expedition my Garrett ADS detector had only located rusty tins, .22 bullets and shells and a silver 1885 English sixpence.

That night we had a lecture on where there were possible targets on the old workings. “Dig any signal, it could possibly be of value,” was the advice. Next morning the message was “Stay on the far (west) side of the lode as we (David de Havelland and his mate) have cleaned out whatever was on this (east) side.” I walked up the east slope noting that the bulldozing there had left a virgin strip of ground where, after swinging wide to avoid a grove of trees, the operator had failed to doze a long strip of diminishing width which had served as a road into the camp site. By the time I reached the west slope, after checking the old shaft and dumps on the rise, the whole area had been claimed. The area was thronged with fellow enthusiasts who, in my absence, had each marked out an area of the slope as their claim, leaving very little vacant ground for my attention. I did find a spot down on the edge of the scrub that gave a response from my detector but on further exploration it proved to be the location of the old blacksmith’s shop, so I didn’t dally. Some of the “claims” were proving productive. Bill Sears was successful in locating a patch of small pieces and recovered quite a few. Our guide had shot off on his motor bike to parts unknown, then I sighted John Dyer going over the line of lode to disappear out of sight onto the east slope. Not having an area available to me on the west slope, I moved around the edge of the scrub to look up the length of the east slope. There, on that proclaimed worked out area, was our safari leader detecting over the windrows left by the recent bulldozing.

Fair enough! Obviously, he begged to differ with de Havelland’s claim that the area had been cleaned out. No-one gets all the gold, right. So, I started detecting from the extreme end of the eastern slope, on a line which would take me down the centre of the strip of the track leading up to the grove of trees. There were no signals right up to the edge of the trees, so, still swinging my detector, I decided to skirt them. Ahead of my path numerous tufts of paper protruded from the ground, indicating that the recent occupants of the campsite in the trees had, during their stay, buried the kind of waste you really don’t want to find. I consequently changed course to follow a line just clear of the lower edge of the grove of trees. Wham! The signal at the base of a tree rocked me. Surely in that location it must be a tin can the campers had buried, but, well aware of the instructions given to us, namely ‘dig every metallic signal’, I drove my pick into the centre of the target. That was unfortunate as the blow shattered a rusty biscuit box but, when I pulled the blade of the pick towards me, it brought into sight a lump of quartz freely laced with gold. The size of a billiard ball, it was the first of many. I can now admit I momentarily lost control. “John, I’ve struck the lost lode,” I shouted. This brought the whole party over to “the lode” to marvel at the specimen pieces I unearthed with every stroke of the pick. These soon filled my hat and a linen specimen bag, a relic of my service in the mining industry. It was evident that the plant had been contained in a tin because when we sieved the dirt that came from the hole, numerous fragments of rusty tin were found. On wetting a trial panful of the soil with the limited water available from a nearby gamma hole, it was evident it was float gold. Upon stirring the dish, the water was soon covered with a sheen of fine gold particles. I didn’t persevere with panning but rather bagged all the soil to bring it home as ballast and recover its values at leisure. David de Havelland was generous in his praise. “You’ve made history this day; the first known cache found in Australia.” I had no further finds on that trip but it was really a quite rewarding safari for me as it financed a world trip for my wife and myself.” David de Havelland might have been right if he was describing Argonaut’s find as the first cache of its kind ever unearthed in Australia, but it was certainly not the first cache ever found. There were numerous valuable finds pre-dating Argonaut’s, though not of specimen gold.

Apparently Hall’s last words were, “I am wounded; shoot me dead.” He died a few seconds later having already been shot at least 30 times by eight police. It was the 5th of May, 1865, four days short of Hall’s 28th birthday

For example, in June 1941, five schoolchildren found 24 sovereigns and five half sovereigns, worth £64 18 shillings, in a paddock at Gulgong, NSW, but did not know what they were. The children were crossing the paddock on their way to school and found the sovereigns in a tin near an old shack which had been vacant for years. The children showed the sovereigns to their school teacher, who took them to the police. The sovereigns were never claimed and the children got to keep them. In July 1950, two small boys found 83 sovereigns in a corroded insecticide tin. The boys were playing outside a 70-yearold mud-brick house in Kilmore when one of them noticed a loose brick and pulled it out. He put his hand inside and found the tin. The boys thought the coins were only Chinese half-pennies so they put a few in their pockets and dropped the rest on the ground. At home that evening the father of one of the boys examined the coins and then probably broke the existing world record for the 100-yard sprint in order to get back to the old house and recover the remainder of the coins. The coins were later legally claimed as treasure trove by the families of the two boys. And then there is the story of what might be the biggest cache of gold ever discovered in Australia. As reported in the Gundagai Independent newspaper of the 19th of July, 1954, some time in the early part of the century, the Weddin Mountains, specifically a place called ‘Trig Hill’, was visited by three Americans who were searching for some secret object. But before we elaborate, a little bit of background information is required. On the Sandy Creek Road, Piney Range, on the old Whelogo Station, on a property owned by Mr Jack Butler at the time the article appeared, stood six or seven posts of an old building which was the homestead of the famous bushranger Ben Hall. Just over the rise were the remains of the old stockyard, where most of the fine horses owned by Hall perished for want of food and water when he was arrested and taken to Forbes to await trial on a charge of armed robbery. When he was acquitted after a key witness changed his testimony, Hall returned and found most of his horses dead in the yard. This was possibly the catalyst for him cementing his association with Frank Gardiner and embarking on a full-time, though short-lived, career as a bushranger. After the Gardiner-Hall gang robbed the gold escort at Eugowra on the 15th of June, 1862, it was often surmised that most of the 2,700 ounces of gold stolen was still hidden in the Weddin Mountains. On the hill about 5km south of Ben Hall’s old homestead there is a standing rock about 14 metres high which was given the name Trig Hill. Now, back to the three Americans and here we will quote the story that ran in the Gundagai Independent: “Three mysterious strangers arrived by train at Grenfell. They spoke with an American accent and asked the direction of Ben’s old homestead. They said they were prospecting for some minerals that were not gold. When they found the homestead they were not long in locating the trig rock right on top of the hill which could be plainly seen from the starting point. They trenched round the rock on the eastern side for some twenty feet or so and if a visitor called on them to ascertain what success they were meeting with, they always ceased work and would not continue until his departure. One morning, however, they called on a neighbour and gave him their tools, hiring him to drive them to a railway siding on the Forbes-Stockinbingal line where they disappeared as mysteriously as they had come. After a time the old hands put two and two together and came to the conclusion that the three strangers were friends of the notorious Frank Gardiner, who was leader of the gang when the Eugowra escort hold-up took place, and was afterwards arrested, sentenced and then deported to America.” There’s a good chance the three Americans didn’t leave empty handed. It’s a long way from the United States to the Weddin Mountains in NSW. Not the sort of journey one person, let alone three, would have undertaken more than 100 years ago based on a hunch or a rumour. The finding of any cache of valuables, be it gold nuggets, gold coins, or gemstones, begs a number of questions, not the least of which are who hid the valuables and why were they hidden, but most intriguing of all, why did that person never return to collect them.