Show me the Gold

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I’m afraid, to catch up on the page, that a little condensing is required (possibly a little more than a little). The time that we’ve spent in Aus has gone quickly - this has overflowed to the typing of the web page, and other ‘house keeping’ type things.

After our little trip to Margaret River and the surround we returned to await our package from Gills folks. A relatively simple procedure, under normal circumstances, would be the receiving of this package - not however when you mix the Australian post and customs into the recipe.

We traced our package for days watching it in the dark limbo of between plane and country. We phoned the post office - ‘can’t help you’. We phoned customs only to receive a ‘we wouldn’t be interested in your package’ reply. After 5 days we were getting worried (the package contained a laptop) and had visions of our box - a deserted landscape - and a controlled explosion authorised by the new anti terrorism laws! Our last ditch attempt was a chat to a sub-post office employee, who in turn kindly phoned the main office and had a ‘chat’ - the outcome of which was that our package was being held at customs but they weren’t supposed to tell us this.

After a diplomatic conversation between Gill and the customs people we arranged to visit them the following day and prove that the package didn’t contain contraband and that the laptop wasn’t new and didn’t require duty to be paid on it. We received our laptop. We watched a film on DVD. We were happy. We left Perth.

Ahead we forged and set of for the Nulabor, with a stop planned at Kalgoorlie-Boulder and the Gold area. I quickly set my sights on making us rich with a big find.

The road and the scenery on this western part of Australia is sometimes a little monotonous, but similarly spectacular in its ‘all pervading’ nature. Sometimes days go by with little change in the vista - just the road vanishing into the distance, the scrub land with spots of bush expanding outwards into a blend of colour and texture. All this was brought into the senses with the added impact of heat and smell, especially smell. It seems Kangaroos are not the most road wise of creatures and their size doesn’t help the decomposition process. In places these roos were spaced as little as 50 to 100 metres apart, with only small body parts helping to discern the form from the carnage the road trains had left behind - these apparently being the major roo manglers on the road.

We stopped in the gold mining town of Kalgoorlie-Boulder and learned a lot about the making of this young country - about its mining and gold-fuelled past, about its small town outlook and about ‘skimpies’. This latter discovery was unfortunately not explored further but is a tradition of mining towns and apparently involves ladies and the lack of clothes there-on.

While in one of the gold capitals of the country it seemed a shame to leave without making our fortune, so off I set with trowel in hand and gold in mind. First we found a quiet spot off the road and searched through the scrub for that elusive lump of Aurum (it’s Latin you know), not aware at this point just how illegal this practice was!

After a good few hours of this Fossicking (a new word for us, and we’re not sure if this is international or just an Aus word?) we - well Gill - decided we had explored this get-rich-quick scheme quite enough. Off we went, on the road again, without gold but with a little more understanding of what made this country tick!

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Photos

Up yours Tonka
Gold MUST be heavy

The Bight
It's a bit of a mouthfull