Will the colour of Gold shine when flood waters recede?

With all the floods in Australia currently. How many previously dried creekbeds or hillside washouts will bring to the service the Golden Edge?

If anyone has any great stories, tell us all.

Imagine going back to a old location that you thought had long ago lost all its gold - only to find that now 2 or 3 metres of the loose stuff has washed away and now a golden trail is evident.

Just a thought. Acan

PS to last post.

Happy Christmas and Happy New Year to all.

This is a great forum with a great bunch of crerw.

I tell you all now - 2011 is looking like a BIG year.

Acan

Hi Acan, that's always been my belief, the old timers only relied on evidence that gold was present, No gold No dig.
Erosion especially over the past 20 years with 3 good, well not good? but floods nun the least will have without a doubt reveled some new ground that was to the old timer and to the location metal detectorers? where directed to, will open up never seen before gold bearing ground.
Cheers
Chris
P.s I'm hoping anyway!

The gold fields in Australia were opened up by diggers who new their stuff. who systematicaly searched the land and new what type of ground was likely to contain gold. once they got a sniff of colour the race was on to locate the sourse and tried and true methods were used to zero in on the reefs and they would chase them for miles underground using knowledge of strata, geology and geography. In any one reef mine there would be at least one person responsible for deciding which way to go when a reef disappeared. They were way fitter than you or I and with a lot more determination and intestinal fortitude that would drive them to the limits of physical indurance.
The Chinese on the other hand did not open up new fields, they re worked the fields left by the white honky and they would do ok scraping up the left overs, some of them did find some huge nuggets that were shipped back to china very quickly and not listed on official records.
These blokes would take the ground down to bed rock and wash it all, then they would go over the ground again with brooms, sweeping it clean to get the very finest stuff.

The small stuff that is found today(with a few big nug exceptions) was not payable to work in the old days. Too much dirt and no water, stinking hot dry weather and getting supplies in to last was very difficult. and the gold spread wide and thinly over a large area.

Just imagine setting out from perth on foot or horseback with no roads or tracks out into the centre of WA.
looking for gold and all you have for navigation is a compas, No GPS, No SAT Phone, No Campervan, No Bloody Porta Potti, No sola panels, No internet, No contact with anybody but maybe a few aborigines (who would just as soon stick a spear in you) No flying doctor service, no bloody doctor. A lot of these blokes didn't make it to where they wanted to go but the difficulty of the treck did not dissuwade them from getting into the most hellish places on this planet in the search for gold and other minerals. these are the people who opened up this country and without them you would not be sitting in a comfy chair punching a keboard and talking to people all around the world while knocking back a tinnie and deciding what part of WA you will go to next in your airconed 4 x 4 to swing the detector for a few hours and then trot back into town for a chat with your mates.

Mate if those blokes had metal detectors then, you can be sure that there would not be much left for us to find.
Adrian SS

.

A bit off topic here but still appropriate,I bumped into a guy recently who showed me the gold from a patch he had found in the triangle(North).All up was around 100oz and he only had one thing to say "The old diggers didn,t find this one".
They did a truly remarkable job and I dare say most of our finds are due to them but it shows they certainly didn,t get it all.
Steve

Yeah we all know that there is a lot of gold still to be found including big nuggets in very out of the way places with nuggs still poking out of the ground looking every bit the same as the surounding rock.

Yes even the Chinese can miss a bit now and again and you would be right about the opium dens.

When I was a kid I would listen to stories told by my grandfather about the gold fields and the places he had been. Most of the yarns went over my head and it wasn't until I was in my teens that I began to realise how far he had traveled in his gold prospecting. From Bonang in Victoria up as far as the Palmer River Gold fields and he did it all on his own and on foot carrying all of his gear with him every where he went. Most of the shafts he sank were not much more than 40 foot or so and he dug many during his time on the fields until asthma got the better of him in his 50s and he quit the gold fields completly. He was a classic example of how tough those early miners were.
Some of those Pick, Shovel, Crow Bar and dynamite shafts went down near on a mile! Just to get to the gold!
Then they took off in all directions. Some were so deep that the diggers lived in the mine instead of comming to the top every day. One deep mine (near Bendigo I think) had an area that was used to hold a Gala Ball that celbrated the finding of a Glory Hole, (A large area deep down with a **** load of gold hanging out of the roof and walls everywhere).

Adrian SS

Mymonermanus,
A fascinating post, which gets right to the core of the problem. Just how hungry - on a scale of 1 to 10, do you think the insects might have been ?
Jig

Gday


In the early days the gold was more plentiful than it is today and for the first prospectors in to a new area a lot of the gold was on the surface so the pickings were relatively easy, also as the gold was not worth that much it would have been more viable to get what you could with the least amount of effort and then move on to the next hot spot.

In later years as a majority of these areas were well picked over it took more of a concentrated effort to get the gold, panning, dryblowing or digging a mine shaft, and I suppose by that time a lot of the diggers would have been happy to stay put and work a viable deposit or something rather than dash from place to place, at least if they were getting constant colour they got regular food and a few comforts like grog etc, then that would have become a better lifestyle than being on the road and risking life and limb to get to a place just to find hundreds had been there before you and picked the place clean.

You have to admire their tenacity, after visiting some of the out of the way goldfields and seeing how barren these places are even today you have to wonder whether they were clever prospectors or just foolhardy, I cant decide on which one, but I do believe that they were a very different breed of men than we are today, if we put ourselves in the same situation today that they were in back then, you would have to wonder whether we would be able to do the same thing as they did and live to tell the tale, somehow I doubt it.

The thing that has always stuck in my mind is that there must have been literally hundreds or possibly thousands of men and women who simply vanished without a trace, whether killed by aboriginals or robbers, or simply those who became lost and wandered about until they died, there must have been many relatives and families that never found out where their people went to and spent their remaining lives hoping that they would hear from them or they would eventually turn up home.

Some of the conditions that we encounter even these days while in the bush can be downright uncomfortable and can seem tough even with the mod cons like we have, fresh water, cold beer, ample food, and its during these conditions that I often reflect on the plight of the old timers that found themselves in the same place under the same conditions but without the luxuries that we have today, they truly did it tough, its no wonder that so many died, coupled with the toll that hard living had on their bodies it would not have taken much of a virus or sickness to finish them off, when you look back at some old photographs you can plainly see the gauntness in their faces and the emaciation of their bodies brought about by the rigours of their hard lives.

Hard men they definately were, in later years when many diggers went off to war for queen and country they proved that they could take whatever was dished up to them, in some cases life would have been easier for them at war than it would have been in the bush chasing gold.

cheers

stayyerAU

Good afternoon all gold seekers,
Having lived at Williamstown - Melbourne - for a while I was impressed with the notion that at one point there were upwards of 300 ships moored in the bay without crews as they would set off for the goldfields as soon as they arrived. And given that so many of them walked and carried their own supplies I can imagine in winter being in one of those deep gullies Bendigo or Ballarat way, and they get snow out there, and then I reach into my tucker bag and.... bugger, I forgot to get salt.
It says a lot of how harsh life was for ordinary working people that enduring those kind of deprivations with the chance of striking gold was so much more attractive than working for poverty wages in bloody awful jobs.

Have a great 2011.

Yours tropically, Harry

Hi All
Hundreds of thousands of tonnes of soil will have been eroded and moved in the triangle this year.For the last 12 years it was rare to see any water running a all.With rainfall twice the average creeks that run thru the goldfields will have had their banks eroded.Logic would say that gold has also been moved as a part of this process.It will been interesting to see what can be found when they dry out.
Cheers Dig

Dig24crt what coil do you use in and around eroded banks and creeks my 11" commander mono is ok but can be a bit big in the tight stuff.Frog

Frog
11 mono and 14 X9 mono.Although agree smaller would be better in tight spots
Cheers Dig