It’s a Friday morning at the Gold Centre in Maryborough, and the shop feels more like a social club than a place of commerce.
A group who have signed up for a prospecting tour greet each other on the verandah, staff chat with customers seeking advice on various detection devices, and several others have just turned up for a yarn.
All are drawn by a special kind of sickness: gold fever.
Maryborough is located at the centre of Victoria’s Golden Triangle – an area encompassing Ballarat, Bendigo and Wedderburn, which produced some of the world’s largest alluvial nuggets during the gold rush of the 1850s.
It is still one of the most popular destinations in the world for prospectors, including Alaskan couple Keith and Marilyn Fye, who were in the midst of a gold-themed holiday.
“From Sydney, we came down through Albury, then stayed in Yackandandah to see the Eldorado dredge, and we’ll visit Sovereign Hill in Ballarat,” says Marilyn.
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“I feel a little more in touch with the meaning of it coming over here. I mean, gold has a value no matter what part of the planet you’re in, and there’s also a global community around it.”
Since January, the spot price of gold has risen by 45% to a record high of A$5,900 an ounce, its steepest increase since the Iranian revolution caused a 126% spike in 1979.
Analysts predict it may go higher still but, according to the Gold Centre’s owner, Andrew Gladdis, there’s no sign of a fresh gold rush just yet.
“People are definitely putting more effort into finding gold now, and they’re selling rather than keeping, because of the price, but I would say there were more getting into prospecting during Covid,” he says.
Perhaps this is because the most valuable tool you need to find gold is time. This becomes apparent when tour guide Lachy Green takes his budding prospectors out to a test pad, just north of Maryborough.
“To give you a rough idea, in eight hours of detecting with a coil of this size, you’re probably going to cover just over a tennis court of ground in a day,” Green tells his amateur gold diggers.
Each are wielding gold detector coils – the round disc at the end of the detector shaft that sends out an electromagnetic field to find metal objects. Gold detectors – worth anywhere between $1,500 and $10,800 – generally operate at a higher frequency than regular metal detector coils.
Before you even start scouring your chosen patch, he explains, you need to set up the machine to minimise detection of “false targets”.
First, you need to tune out as much electromagnetic interference as possible. If set to a “noisy” frequency, a detector can “woo woo” at power lines, radio signals or even a lightning strike in the next shire.
Then there’s a ground balance, which is especially important in central Victoria, where there are high levels of mineralisation.
“Basically, the machine should have a nice, flat hum,” says Green. “Some run a bit more upset than others, but you’re sort of dumbing it down to ignore that mineralisation.”
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Back in the Gold Centre’s car park, excited western Sydney retiree Rusty Dobson has just purchased a new coil.
“My wife thinks I’d do better off stacking the shelves at Woolworths but, when you’re out there swinging that detector, you’re in the game for something big,” he says.
“That thrill that just gets into your blood, and I also love birdlife, so it’s like bushwalking with fringe benefits.”
Later that day in Fryerstown, about 55km east of Maryborough, a small crowd gathers for the unveiling of a monument to commemorate the discovery of the Heron Nugget in 1855.
At 1,008 ounces (28.5kg), this was the biggest single find in the Forest Creek/Mount Alexander diggings, considered the richest shallow alluvial goldfield the world has ever seen.
The event is part of an effort by the Prospectors and Miners Association of Victoria to publicise the role gold played in Australia’s colonial history.
“Victoria was built on gold,” the association’s president, Jason Cornish, says. “Melbourne was the richest city in the world at one stage, and towns up this way – like Castlemaine and Chewton – they wouldn’t even exist today without the goldfields.
The association is vehemently opposed to a Victorian government proposal to increase the cost of miner’s right permits, which allow prospectors to keep what they find.
There are almost 100,000 current miner’s rights in Victoria. The permit costs $28.60 and lasts for 10 years, but the Victorian government wishes to raise that to $93.10.
Whatever the initial outlay, gold’s value is in its scarcity, something the Maryborough resident Robyn Calhoun is only too aware of after six months of prospecting.
“I’d love to trip over a nugget, but I’ve only found a metal button so far,” she says. “But it’s good exercise, and I love being out in the bush.”
Stuart Walmsley is a photojournalist based in Castlemaine, Victoria
