Some goldfields snakes have teeth

By BSM

This is a sad but true story which I was personally involved in some years ago. Only the names of the people involved have been changed to protect the guilty, which is the custom in Australia due to our defamation laws which, more often than not, protect the guilty rather than provide some degree of justice for innocent victims. Cutting to the chase, following is an account of the greed and dishonesty that sometimes takes hold when a lot of gold is involved. The main characters in this saga were John and Brad, who, while working in partnership, discovered a leader which turned out to be quite rich. I first met John many years ago in outback Western Australia. I came across him quite by chance as I was driving into an area that looked good on the geological map. I stopped for a yarn and finished up camping with him for several weeks. He turned out to be one of the most knowledgeable people on prospecting and bushcraft I have ever come across. He also had hundreds of stories he could recount about events and people of the west, from politicians and police officers right through to ordinary prospectors like himself. He had been personally involved with a number of these people over the years, and some of them were well-known identities. As with most old-school bushmen and prospectors, he was able to get around the goldfields just by memory, instinct and a simple map of the area. He had no use for new-fangled gadgets such as a GPS. And now to Brad. I had met him on several occasions over the years and while I found him to be a competent young prospector and a decent, honest person, he was a little too inclined to be trusting of people he didn’t know well.

A couple of years after my first encounter with John, I ran into him again in the supermarket of a small outback town in Western Australia. Upon seeing me he rushed up and told me that he and Brad had found a rich leader on unpegged ground and he needed a hand to work it. He asked if I’d be interested in helping for a share in the proceeds. I answered that as long as Brad was amenable to having an extra partner, I’d be happy to help. “Let’s ask him and see what he thinks about it,” I said. John said that Brad wasn’t in town with him, that he was back looking after the camp, but that he was sure it would be all right. “I’ll draw you a mud map and meet you out there when you’ve done your shopping,” John smiled. Later in the day, with my shopping done and my water drums filled, I drove out to Brad and John’s camp and on arrival discovered that John was absent. To say that Brad was surprised to see me would be an understatement. It was obvious John had made no mention to Brad of the proposition he’d put to me. Leaving Brad to it, I wandered off and set up camp some distance away. A couple of hours later John drove back into camp and came over to say hello but made no mention of his earlier offer and neither did I. The next day I had a look at the hole Brad was digging. As he broke up the ground he threw chunks up onto the side. John then checked them with his detector to get the larger lumps of gold which he put into one of several large white glue drums. The rest of the ore was sorted for quality and put into various 44-gallon drums sitting on a large tandem trailer parked alongside the excavation.

At the end of each day, John put the glue drums containing the larger coarse specimens and nuggets into his caravan for safe keeping. Brad had none of the gold in his possession. Each day Brad would work in the hole and John would go out detecting, returning in the afternoon to sort through the material that had come out of the hole. Brad explained that whatever John found while out detecting went into their kitty but that he had only picked up a few grams in the last couple of weeks. I went out prospecting each day and managed to find enough gold to keep the wolf from the door. On my fourth day out, I came across a large patch containing several hundred open detector holes and when I looked up the slope, I saw John’s vehicle parked by some trees. I then spotted him detecting nearby and quickly moved away from the area without attracting his attention, concluding that neither Brad nor John wanted me to know about this part of the operation. After a week or so the drums on the trailer were full and Brad and John towed it away to have it processed by Renae, who had the equipment to carry out this part of the operation on his lease about 120 kilometres away. On their return, Brad suggested that they dolly some of the specimens so that he could go down to Kalgoorlie and sell the gold because he was getting a bit short of cash. Brad had funded the entire operation with no financial input from John. After some discussion, John grudgingly agreed.

The next day Brad and John dollied up the contents of two of the large glue drums. That night, after I’d finished dinner, I strolled up to the campfire where we usually sat and talked for an hour or so but neither Brad nor John was there. I saw John’s caravan light was on and his door was open, so I wandered over. John was inside running the contents of the two dollied drums through a very fine sieve and putting the gold into another container. He looked a little startled when he saw me but recovered quickly and explained that Brad had a headache and had gone to bed early. He then got all of the other drums out of their hiding places in his van and showed me some of the larger pieces. By my reckoning there were at least 800 ounces in the pieces I saw! The next morning, I heard John’s car drive off just after dawn and a little while later, as I was leaving camp, I noticed Brad had a cut-off drum full of water and was starting to pan off some fines. I stopped by and asked him how it was going and why John wasn’t at the pan off. Brad said John had gone detecting because it didn’t need the two of them to do the panning off. I then asked Brad if he was getting much in the pan and he said there was very little and that most of it was extremely fine and would need mercury to separate it. At this point I told him about the amount of gold hidden in John’s caravan and about the episode with the very fine sieve, and that I felt he might getting stitched up.

That evening I heard raised voices up at their camp but decided against intruding. They could settle their differences without my help. Before dawn next morning I heard a vehicle start up and drive away after daylight and noticed that John’s car and caravan were gone. I had my breakfast and wandered up to Brad’s van. Brad then told what had occurred when John had returned to camp the day before. “When John arrived he asked me how much gold I’d got from panning and I told him just over a hundred grams. I said that the rest was too fine to separate and I’d tipped it back into the drum to process later. John then accused me of being a thief and said there had been a lot more gold in it than that. When I told him that you’d seen him fine sieving the dollied material before I got it to pan off and that you’d also seen the drums of gold specimens in his caravan, he said you were a liar. He then picked up the drum of fines and went into his van. Early this morning his car suddenly started up and drove off before I could do anything about it. The battery in my car is flat so I couldn’t go after him.” The equation went something like this: Brad had paid for all of the fuel, the hire of a generator and kanga hammers, had done all of the work in the hole, was unaware of the large patch that John was working, and had finished up with 100 grams (he was lucky John didn’t take that as well). When Brad eventually got to Renae’s lease, he was told that the ten 44s of ore that had looked so rich had, after processing, only returned a little over an ounce in total but because he felt sorry for Brad, Renae said he wouldn’t charge him for the processing and generously gave him 15 grams of gold. How’s that for kindness? It’s pretty obvious that John and Renae, a couple of creatures so low they could hide under a cockroach’s arsehole, had stitched up Brad from the outset. They say what goes around comes around but whether John and Renae were looking the other way when karma eventually hit them, I can only hope.