Gold Rush

by Jim Richards

  I was more comfortable in Guyana. For all the opprobrium poured upon the late President Burnham for his economic lunacy, he had taken significant steps to shield the indigenous peoples, passing laws to protect them and enacting reserves as their homelands. Although my experiences in Ekereku had shown me it was debatable as to where their homelands actually were.

  Back at Ekereku, Charlie and I dredged on. But the beauty of the place was waning, to be replaced by the monochrome green of hell. Mentally I was fading, and bouts of this bush madness were taking hold. My opera cassette tapes had long ago been mangled and the tape player had died in the humidity. The drawn-out evenings in the hammock were now filled with thoughts of el Inferno Verde, where I felt destined for an early grave.

  Charlie and I persevered with our dredging for another two trips. We had some mixed success, but never repeated the glory of our pothole day. I was eventually finished off by a couple of nasty repeat bouts of malaria, a leftover from my Golden Star days. I also had a tropical ulcer on each foot that had not healed for months, and added to this were constant ear infections from the diving, some of which I still get to this day. All of that poor diet was catching up with me.

  It was June 1992 and I had spent nearly a year in the cold, dark waters of Ekereku. I needed to get out of the tropics. Many of my British predecessors in what was then British Guiana never made it home from the original frenzied diamond rushes of the 1920s.

  My nickname at university had been ‘Terminator’, because I never gave up. This laudable trait had served me well in life so far, but was now turning into a potentially fatal liability. It was a difficult decision. I felt strangely unsettled and unfulfilled at leaving the country and didn’t really want to go. It was as though I had unfinished business there, but I had to face up to the realities of my health issues.

  I called it a day. My lovely mining gear was sold to Cyrilda; I gave Charlie some money and heartfelt thanks, and bought a ticket back to the UK.

  Perhaps I would return to Guyana someday, perhaps not. There were certainly opportunities here, but maybe there were bigger opportunities elsewhere? My aim in coming to Guyana in the first place had been to make a lot of money in mining, I had been unsuccessful in that endeavour; nevertheless the ambition still burned strongly within me. I would just have to pursue the dream another way.

  On the positive side, I felt the experience would stand me in good stead in the future. I also had 30 carats of rough diamonds, 5 ounces of gold and a couple of thousand dollars, which represented enough capital to grubstake myself for my next attempt at profit and adventure, wherever that would be.

  On my way out to the airport for the final time, the taxi driver asked, ‘You comin’ back, man?’

  ‘I don’t think so, I’ve taken some blows here,’ I replied, reverting naturally to the Guyanese slang for having a hard time.

  ‘Yes, everybody takes blows in Guyana,’ he said.

  CHAPTER 12

  HOW TO FIND A GOLD MINE

  Returning to the UK was almost as big a culture shock as going to Guyana had been in the first place. After swimming in a sea of smiling black faces, returning to an ocean of gloomy white ones was not uplifting.

  One bonus was regularly seeing Sarah, and I also enjoyed spending time with my parents, family and old friends. But I was restless and after the stimulation of South America, I found it difficult to settle or concentrate on any one thing.

  I had also walked into the UK’s worst recession in twenty years and knew that my money from Guyana wouldn’t last long. I needed a job to keep me going while I worked out my next step and recovered my health.

  So I hunted around for work. I tried the City for some kind of employment in the financial sector, but there were lay-offs everywhere.

  I sought geological work – there was nothing going. Anyone with a job wasn’t moving and a whole army of well-qualified unemployed were circling like sharks looking for any opening.

  I had some skills: army experience, Spanish and knowledge of mining and exploration geology. But these were not much use in the UK at that time.

  I had soon sold off my gold. Dammit, the UK was expensive. I could have signed on to the dole, but I didn’t want to get sucked into that. I’d always felt that if I didn’t earn it, I shouldn’t spend it. I had wanted to keep the diamonds to pay for my next venture, but I had to dig into that reserve too.

  I stayed with a good friend in Glasgow for a while, on and off, and scouted out opportunities north of the border. I tried door-knocking Glasgow pubs and shops looking for work. If you have ever tried asking for a job in Glasgow, with a middle-class English accent, during a recession, well, get ready for some hostility.

  One guy tried to headbutt me and administer the Glasgow kiss. Thankfully he was drunk and some previous boxing experience I had from 1 Para came in handy as I took evasive action. Following that, I had a knife pulled on me in a pub and was told to ‘Fuck off, ya English cunt.’ This was doubly hurtful as I’m Welsh. I took pleasure in the beautiful city and the humorous people, but when it came to job hunting in Glasgow I decided discretion might be the better part of valour.

  Aberdeen was a bit more promising – apart from the weather. It was the centre of the British oil industry and was a cosmopolitan place with people from all over the world: no problem with my accent in Aberdeen.

  Also, the oil industry did at least employ geologists, which was a good start. But the recession was biting as hard as the frost, not helped by a low oil price. I nearly scored a job with a mud-logging company and then with an offshore geophysical survey company, but not quite.

  I was at least encouraged by the ‘knock on the door with a CV’ approach, and was received in a friendly and encouraging way in Aberdeen.

  After about three months, and in a freezing Scottish winter, I was recalling why I had left the UK in the first place. I liked the place culturally, it just seemed to have limited opportunity for my skill set and interests. Mind you, my CV indicated a wayward temperament which probably did not help my employability.

  However, there wasn’t a single metalliferous mine remaining in the whole of the UK, so how much opportunity did that present?

  The lack of mines in the UK was due to a combination of factors, including competing land usage, environmental policy and a fractured mineral ownership system based on Lord of the Manor–type legacies. Nothing much I could do about any of that.

  I had seen the potential and opportunity that lay in mining overseas, and I still wanted my piece of the action. It wasn’t going to come and find me, so I had to get off my arse and go and find it – again.

  There must be somewhere I could make it in mining without killing myself with tropical diseases in the process. A place with rule of law would be handy too; things in Guyana were precarious without legal title to your work area. I had always held a sneaking suspicion that if I had found anything great in Guyana, I would have been manoeuvred out of the way, as I’d seen happen to others. Without legal protection, your asset can easily become someone else’s.

  A few countries fitted the bill. South Africa had a large mining industry, and I had already visited the place while on leave from the army, but the political situation looked ominous. Canada had opportunities, but was cold. Australia could be a good bet, and seemed to tick all the boxes. At the very least I would increase my experience and knowledge by going there.

  My health was much improved, so I decided to give Australia a go. Both my parents breathed a sigh of relief that I was not off to a diamond rush in Angola, which I had also been contemplating.

  I had found a friendly diamond buyer in Hatton Garden in London – in fact they were all friendly when you walked in off the street with a parcel of rough and a good story. He bought stones off me when I needed some money, and now I sold him most of my remaining parcel to cash up for my next trip. I then went and bought the cheapest air ticket I could find to Australia.

  Sarah was by now reconciled to my travelling foibles,
and this time she was more philosophical about my departure. I hadn’t done a good job in the romance department, and life was teaching me more than just lessons about mining. Sarah sensibly went on to marry someone else, but a lifelong friendship with this remarkable woman is something I still treasure.

  After a final round of goodbyes to family and friends, I was off to Australia and feeling relieved. I could build on my knowledge from South America and once again take the initiative to make something happen in a positive manner. I didn’t know what, and was less concerned about that this time around.

  Australia was a country that in part had been forged by gold rushes. The great rushes of the 1850s in the states of New South Wales and, especially, Victoria had created enormous wealth and rapidly spurred on development. Equally importantly, a prospecting and mining culture had been established in the country, which over the next half-century led to a series of electrifying discoveries that awed not just Australia but the world.

  After Victoria, a string of new discoveries unfolded around the country. The prize goldfield of Pine Creek in the Northern Territory was discovered in 1871 by workers digging holes for the overland telegraph line from Adelaide to Darwin.

  In 1882, the exceptionally rich copper and gold mine of Mount Morgan in Queensland was opened up. This mine transformed its primary owner, William Knox D’Arcy, into Australia’s richest man. He went on to live in high fashion in England and had his profits from the mine sent over to him in gold bars. With some of this money D’Arcy acquired oil leases in Persia and made another fortune. His company, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, went on to become British Petroleum – founded on Australian gold.

  In Tasmania, tin at Mount Bischoff, copper at Mount Lyell and other discoveries transformed the economy of that state.

  This thrilling period of discovery and development culminated in the bonanza West Australian gold rushes of the 1890s, which tripled the population of the state in a decade.

  Australia is the sixth-largest country in the world (by area), and is highly prospective for just about every desirable mineral. From 1900 to current times, Australia’s mining industry grew and diversified almost beyond recognition. New mines for gold, silver, copper, lead, zinc, nickel, tin, tantalum, tungsten, rare earths, uranium, industrial minerals, iron ore and others have opened and closed, often multiple times.

  The Argyle diamond mine in Western Australia was discovered as recently as 1979, and at its peak produced 40 per cent of the world’s diamonds (by weight, not value).

  There is also a major oil and gas industry built around large deposits in various offshore and onshore sedimentary basins, and Australia is now the world’s largest producer of liquefied natural gas (LNG).

  The centre of gravity of Australia’s mining industry has spread from its early beginnings in the south-eastern states of Victoria, New South Wales and Tasmania to now include the vast and geologically diverse interiors of Queensland, the Northern Territory and, above all, Western Australia – the largest state, which today dominates the Australian mining industry in terms of production.

  The Golden Mile at Kalgoorlie in Western Australia is the site of the country’s greatest gold mine (by production). Known as the Super Pit, this mine is a giant hole in the ground 3.5 kilometres long by 1.5 kilometres wide and 570 metres deep. Sixty million ounces of gold (over 1.8 million kilograms, which would weigh slightly more than four fully laden Boeing 747s) have been mined to date from the Golden Mile.

  All of this makes Australia a geologist’s paradise. There are numerous geologists working on these mines (mine geologists), or trying to find sites for new mines (exploration geologists), or working in city offices (St Georges Terrace geologists – named pejoratively by the field-based geologists after Perth’s main financial district).

  However, despite all of this activity, mining is (and presumably always will be) a cyclical industry, alternating between boom and bust. It was a bust when I turned up.

  ‘We are now over Australian airspace,’ the pilot announced.

  I stood up to get my bag out of the overhead locker, only to be cooling my heels for another two hours till we landed. Much to the amusement of my fellow passengers, I had totally underestimated the size of the country.

  It was January 1993, and arriving in Cairns in Far North Queensland was a respite after the UK winter. Cairns was a tidy, tropical town on the coast. I felt at home.

  I went to the local library and did the basic research that I should have done prior to leaving the UK. I realised that I ought to have flown into Perth in Western Australia, the mining capital, but the cheapie charter flight to Cairns had seduced me.

  Not to worry. There was plenty of mining in Queensland and the Northern Territory. I decided to avoid the big southern cities and instead work my way around the more isolated far north and west of the country. This time I knew the score. I needed to sort out all my old problems again if I was to make a fortune in the mining industry, which was still my aim.

  First up: find a job and get some capital. The logical thing to do was to make my way towards Perth and look for mining jobs as I went. However, the size of the country was starting to dawn on me, as this journey was a daunting 7,000 kilometres.

  My Guyanese cash was dwindling now, so there was some urgency on the work front. I went to the promisingly named Miners Den in Cairns. This was an Aladdin’s cave for the aspiring gold prospector, with all of the gear: sieves, pans, dry blowers and, intriguingly, metal detectors.

  ‘How do people go with these, mate?’ I enquired of the owner.

  He looked at me earnestly. ‘They are the essential tool,’ he said. ‘No self-respecting gold prospector would go out without his metal detector to find gold nuggets.’

  ‘Anywhere local to give it a go?’

  ‘Funny you should ask. A client of mine popped in last week, just back from Georgetown, and he had metal-detected this ten-ounce nugget – a real beauty.’

  He whipped out a photo of a large gold nugget, and I was turned from cynic into instant customer. I have no idea where that nugget really came from, but the selling power of his photo was considerable. If he had laid the real thing on the table, he could have convinced me to go to Antarctica.

  I used up precious cash reserves buying a second-hand metal detector and off I went to try my luck around Georgetown, a day’s journey inland. This detector was a classic of its day, a Minelab GT 16000, and it became a trusted companion of mine.

  No luck this time though: a few days later, with sunburn and no nuggets, I returned to Cairns, older but wiser. I was at least learning new techniques, but a job hunt in tandem with metal detecting might be a more practical plan

  Moving inland from the coast of Queensland, my first stop was the pleasant town of Charters Towers, once a major gold-mining centre with its own purpose-built stock exchange. When I toured that handsome and unused building, I reflected that I too was finding myself surplus to requirements. This negative thinking may have dented my confidence, because I found no work there.

  The metal detecting was again fruitless, and I was realising that temperamentally I was not well suited to this particular discipline. My impetuous approach did not yield results with detecting, where the patient and assiduous prospector was the better man. Was there a wider lesson for me here?

  Next was Mount Isa, a major copper-lead-zinc mining centre in western Queensland. The town consisted of fairly ordinary single-storey detached houses and businesses all laid out on a grid pattern. Blazing red hills lay on one side, with the mine and smelter smokestack on the other. The place was dusty and full of male blue-collar miners; tough guys doing tough jobs and spending plenty of their money on drinking.

  The recession was biting here too, especially because the base metals prices were so low. There were a fair number of itinerant Australians travelling around job hunting, and I was competing for work against these people. My problem was that I only had a temporary working visa, valid for three months with any one emplo
yer.

  This competitive disadvantage was a bit disheartening, but I remembered my lesson from when I arrived in Guyana and had solved all my problems in one go: Keep at it.

  After several days job hunting with other itinerants in Mount Isa, a few of us scored some work – unloading and stacking chocolate Easter bunnies at the local supermarket. It was the first money I had made since I’d left Guyana.

  We all went out that night to the pub to celebrate our bunny pay. I staggered home and collapsed into my dormitory bunk bed. Some hours later I awoke to a fracas between two of my Aussie drinking companions.

  A guy on one of the top bunks had lost control of his bladder. He had let loose so much urine that it had gone clean through the mattress and soaked the guy on the bottom bunk.

  ‘Fucking worm, ya’v pissed all over me, ya stinking dog,’ the beneficiary of the urine snarled, using the Australian argot, which is rich in faunal metaphors.

  This perversely cheered me up, and also seemed to change my luck. The next day I scored a lift out of Mount Isa with two strippers (exotic dancers, as they called themselves), whom I had befriended at the backpacker hostel. Kylene and Leanne were a chirpy pair of lesbians and both appeared eminently qualified for their work – especially the ‘double act’, as they described it. They were on their own job-hunting circuit heading towards Darwin, which was also my direction.

  We drove to Tennant Creek, a gold mining and pastoral town in the Northern Territory. It was grim: a single main street lined with drunk and destitute Aboriginal people flanked by their hungry dogs. We stayed in the caravan park, and were kept awake half the night by the sound of street fights and men beating women. The next morning my job seeking at the local mining company office drew a polite blank, which I was not completely unhappy about.