As I mentioned in a post earlier this week we spent the Australia Day long weekend up in the bush, camping, relaxing and pretending that we were taking fossicking for gold as seriously as the rest of the group of campers we were with.
We don’t usually take the search as seriously as them, we go on the group weekends away for relaxation, finding lumps of gold would be nice but we are plain old lazy…. 🙂
Recorder 30 Nov 1932 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article96018207
When I found this article today I wished that finding gold was as easy for us as it was for Mr. J. Maguire in Eidsvold, Queensland, in 1932.
It would appear that for him that taking advantage of somebody elses hard work and looking in some twenty-year-old fence post holes really paid off when he found they still contained gold.
If only this sort of thing was a regular occurrence I might be able to get the Man outside to build me a new back verandah a bit faster!
I wonder if the original diggers noticed gold coming out of the holes all those years ago? I doubt it. If they had noticed the gold I bet the posts would have been hurriedly shoved in the ridiculously wide holes any old way and the job abandoned before the end!
So do these modern-day prospectors ever find any gold on their weekend searches?
Actually they do! We were enticed down to the creek after being shown a decent piece that had just been panned out.
We might have very little luck but some of the more obsessed members of the group don’t consider their weekend complete unless they have found enough to pay for their weekend away. 😀
I love the idea of fossicking, although I’d rather find opals. Sadly I’ll have to remain an armchair fossicker as I’m lazy too! That said, next time I dig a hole in the garden I might pay a bit more attention to what comes out. After all, Warrandyte was a goldmining town!
The FIL often goes down to Warrandyte with his gear and spends the afternoon standing in the river searching for flecks, he never comes home empty-handed.
If I were you I would be looking too, you never know what you might find 🙂
Maybe once the kids are older and the Man and I can wander off without worrying about the kids being bored we might have better luck. For now we will just keep enjoying the camping and hope to stumble across a gigantic nugget by accident 😀
We’re on a ridge so I don’t fancy my chances but… it would be nice wouldn’t it? The Flory Nugget. Or perhaps Meeka’s Mint?
Even though the chances are slim you never know what you might find…. 🙂
lol – all I’m finding so far is lots of shale and clay!
What’s that old saying? “You can’t see the wood for the trees”. In this case the fencers couldn’t see the gold for the hole… How many times does this happen in life, you rush rush and miss the gold in the process, and in this case, real gold.
I agree, so many people let the small good stuff that makes life wonderful slip through their fingers in their rush to get to the next BIG thing.