I was brought up around gold. Living in a gold area like Ballarat, gold was always a huge part of the local history. As a kid I was exploring every mine and old shaft that I could find. My grandfather encouraged my interest and took me on regular gold panning trips at Barkstead, near Daylesford. He taught me how to wash the dirt and move the pan around so that the gold didn’t wash away into the river.
I graduated to a metal detector in the 1980′s and searched for many hours finding coins, belt buckles, jewellery and old relics.
In 1981 I stumbled across my first gold nugget on the Brown Hill Goldfields. It weighed in at 3.8 grams. I remember riding my bike home as fast as I could to show my parents, then riding another 5km to show my mate. I was hooked – I had Gold Fever!
I have found a lot of gold over the years with the biggest nugget weighing 24&3/4 oz. It is such a buzz when you dig up a gold nugget like that out of the ground. It’s like winning tattslotto!
However, cashing in the gold nuggets that I found left me with a sour taste in my mouth. I noticed that most of the gold dealers I was dealing with were, well, to put it mildly they seemed a bit dodgy. I found out that many other gold prospectors felt the same way when selling their gold to these guys.
So I decided to do something about it.
In 2001 I took on the big guys and I set up my own gold buying business.
I was determined to provide a service based on integrity. I wanted to give prospectors an alternative to dealing with the shady characters that were in the industry.
The service that I then commenced, buying gold with integrity – has struck a chord with the prospectors on the goldfields. When you work hard for your gold, you want to know that the gold buyer is doing the right thing by you and not ripping you off.
I get a kick out of helping prospectors find more gold. I help them with choosing the right detectors, coils and even give access to maps and excerpts of old books. I am an experienced gold prospector, tour operator and have taught 100s of people how to detect, fine tune their machines and generally give them a boost in the right direction to help them find the gold that they’ve been missing.
And, in case you are wondering, I still have that very first gold nugget that I found!