Looking for Gold, Not Aluminium

I came to this country to look for gold. I found a number of other good things- really weird wildlife, great coffee and the know-how to barbecue basically everything- but no gold yet. I just reasoned that people in Australia had all lost interest in the gold craze, mostly because the market has moved on to other things. Coal, for example. And it’s not like the gold rush unearthed EVERY lick of gold under the soil, right? There had to be loads of it left.

Well, maybe. Haven’t found any of it yet, hence why I’m sitting in a coffee shop trying to make adjustments to my metal detector instead of returning to Seattle a rich man. So far I’ve managed to find a bunch of tin cans from the seventies, a cache of rusted coins and a lot of building sites. Makes sense, I suppose, all those steel and aluminium work platforms throwing off my readings. As it turns out, Melbourne has a lot of construction going on, hence all the work platforms, and hence why I’m trying to rework my metal detector to avoid certain types of metal that may be a bit more…common. It’s a lot harder than it sounds.

The guy who owns this place suggested that I go and look in Ballarat, which is a legitimate strategy if I get desperate. But I reason that if there was gold in Ballarat, there has to be gold elsewhere. That’s the thing about the formation of gold; it’s a random occurrence. And then there’s Ballarat, and I can guarantee that a million people are already scouring the place. It’s been picked clean, so I’m looking further afield. Also, they probably have aluminium platforms up there and I’d really rather avoid them.

So that’s why I’m down here, in this rather rural area of Melbourne, whacking my metal detector against the desk and desperately trying to make it find gold and not bailey ladders. We definitely have those back in Seattle. Useful as they probably are, they’re not going to make me rich.

-Leroy