Published in The Age Newspaper, January 2016
Photo credit: Jason South
For Rastus the dog, it’s another lazy trip to the hills. But for Glenn Mueller of Altona, it’s an addiction.
“See, here,” he says, swirling murky water through gravel in a pan. “I think we’re on the colour. Yep, we’re definitely on the colour here.”
Mueller, 40, of Altona, has been coming to the same spot on the Lerderderg River at Blackwood, near Bacchus Marsh for four years to look for gold.
This summer has been unusually dry.
The “Lerdy” looks more like a snake’s skin than a river. It hangs out a parched tongue all the way to Bacchus Marsh, searching for water, dying of thirst. Locals use it as a highway – you can do the stretch from O’Briens Crossing to Blackwood in a tad over three rock-hopping hours – and its barren banks reveal relics of history stretching back to when the region was infested with gold miners.
They got on the colour big time and all down the riverbed are stone walls, water races and craters reclaimed by the undergrowth. Swallows, cockies and kookaburras sweep overhead, red bellied black snakes coil like discarded rubber on the rocks, then spring to life and shoot into the rapidly evaporating water holes. These are where Mueller gets his colour.
He’s been making and buying his own prospecting equipment since he took up the hobby. A car battery powers a pump that draws muddy water to the top of a sluicing machine called a high banker.
Mueller digs out gravel, dirt, and hopefully gold from the riverbed and buckets it into the top where water washes it down two angled slides and back into the river. Along the way the material passes over holes where the small, heavy stuff drops through and is caught in grooves cut into small rubber mats, called riffles. The heavy stuff includes gold.
“This is our concentrate,” says Mueller. “If there’s gold, it’ll be in here.”
But more filtering is required. Mueller is creating a hierarchy that starts with glum, garden-variety rock and ends with magical specks of gold, winking from a pan.
The riffles are emptied and washed into a bucket, then transferred into the classic gold pan everyone knows so well. Clean water is used to artfully swish round the loose stones.
Eventually the material settles and one by one tiny specks of gold glow to life on the edge of the debris field. Mueller keeps swirling and more gold is somehow spirited into existence. The little specks trace a path down the pan like a twinkling constellation.
“Sometimes I’ll have days where I get nothing, but then I’ll change spots and get back on the colour again. You gotta think like a piece of gold.”
Mueller may think like a mineral, but he doesn’t share the thoughts of most miners, who are traditionally coy about revealing their plots and techniques. Mueller wants to introduce more people to the joys of prospecting. He’s even willing to show you where to go.
“You’ve gotta get it out of the ground. That’s the hard part. So I welcome anybody to come dig with me.” Mueller also uses his engineering and metal work skills to build prospecting equipment, some of which he sells at the post office in Blackwood. “It’s a bit like revival of the gold fields,” he says.
The revival may have something to do with a 2.7 kilogram gold nugget worth an estimated $135,000 found by Kerang man Mick Brown in Wedderburn in March last year.
It sparked a modern-day gold rush by amateur prospectors. Blackwood even hosts annual prospecting competitions, held down near the cricket oval. Mueller struck it big there once when he unearthed half a silver pocket watch.
“You never know what you’ll find,” he says. “Down here in the Lerdy I find old bullets, pennies, sometimes a thruppence .” But the thrill of the chase is always gold. Random revelations that fire reward receptors in the brain and keep you lured, down here in the Lerdy. “In Blackwood the Chinese prospectors came and dug mining tunnels,” Mueller says. They dug their tunnels round, not square, because they were superstitious of spirits hiding in the corners.
If there were any spirits, or anything else, hiding in the corners, Mueller would surely find them. He hunches his back and scrapes his shovel over the bedrock, getting right into the crevices . He leaves no stone unturned. “I’ve got three genetic disorders, two slipped discs and a buggered hand,” he says. “But you gotta persevere in life. I’ve found a hobby where I get my fitness and I get a pay-off at the end.”
Mueller squints down the lifeless Lerdy. The last remaining water holes look ready to evaporate.
Eventually the rain will come and wash away Mueller’s piles of gravel, his orderly hierarchy of stones, leaving no trace of his presence. But Mueller will be back. Back on the chase. Hopefully back on the colour.
