Lucky Eddie
Sr. Member
- Feb 9, 2010
- 358
- 187
So like most Gold tales - this one's tall as it is true!.
18 months back my eldest lad worked for the conservation crowd (Parks Wildlife) as a fire fighter, truck driver, and plant operator (Cat 950 and D8 Dozer) in a forestry area.
He gets told he is going away for 2 weeks working for the Dept up on a flora and fauna reserve in the Goldfields (Coz they don't have many staff and no heavy machinery) to do some machine work...
Nothing beats a change of scenery so off he goes.
When he gets there he is given a big job to do digging holes with the Cat 950 Loader.
This former leasehold sheep station in the Goldfields....was less than marginal - the owners of the lease didn't want to continue on with it - so the Govt agreed to pay them out early for the remaining balance of their 99 year lease entitlement and de-stock it & turn it into a flora & fauna reserve of a few zillion acres & give it a chance to regenerate the native vegetation as a bit of a hideout for wild animals and somewhere that native flora could regain a bit of a foothold without being eaten by goats and sheep soon as it sprouted!
We are talking arid country here - ~ 10 inches annual rainfall.
So that well and good - sounds OK on paper.
Because there's a old station house on the property the Dept decided to rent it out for a peppercorn rental to a local on the understanding he would keep an eye on the place (fires etc) & keep the windmills and stock troughs / tanks etc working so that native wildlife could still get a drink....in this desert.
Thats OK too - on paper.
So the tenant one day rings someone in head office up, and says that - there's been a bit of a downpour and hes noticed one of the creek lines has scoured / eroded a bit with the sudden water & once its dried out in a few weeks likely the wind will continue to erode it and it could become a bit of a serious environmental problem in time if left unattended. Would they mind if he laid a few old car tires in the creek bed to catch the sand and slow the flow of water in future downpours to prevent the erosion?.
Someone from head office said "that should be OK - go ahead".
So he did!.
What he neglected to mention is that all the nearbye towns are on the major east - west national highway 1 - that transports freight across this country by the thousands of tonnes a day by road trains!.
And all these hundred of 90 tonne triple trailer road trains, wear out and replace tires in the thousands per year at each of the tire dealerships along the route!.
Old tires - being an environmental hazard - the dealers charge a $15 or $20 / tire "environmental disposal fee", when selling the new ones and fitting them -to cover the cost of recycling & disposal within environmental protection authority guidelines of the old worn out and blown ones.
Over many thousands of tires - that fast adds up to a LOT of $$$ in a short space of time... so the tenant made a deal with all the local tire dealers in all the neighboring towns - that they could bring the tires out to "his place" (his "sheep station" i.e. the one he is a tenant on, that's actually owned by the Govt Conservation Department and vested as a flora and fauna reserve) and they can dump them there for disposal to SAVE the freight cost of trucking them all the way to the city for recycling, as long as they pay him the disposal fee they charge the truckers... of $15 or $20/tire.
So this is a big saving for the dealers coz they don't have to pay long haul freight rates to get rid of them - just take them out to this guys property in their tipping tray service trucks and dump them and pay him a few hundred $$ each load for disposal fee!
This went on for a few years & due to remoteness and distance issues no one actually went out from the dept to keep a check on the place... so no one KNEW that as word spread he was making many $1000's per week for a few years as literally hundreds of thousands of tires were illegally dumped on govt owned land.
Tenant just pocketed the cash for a few years (estimates over $1M) and then did a runner - "shot thru, Blue" leaving no forwarding address (as you do when you pull a multi million $ scam like this) - leaving the govt with the MASSIVE cleanup bill!.
So...
In order to keep it all hush hush - the lad and his work mates get sent for a couple weeks with heavy machinery to dig massive trenches and collect / truck and tip all these hundreds of thousands of old tires into trenches and bury them over, before the press or 'rabid, mung bean eating, tree hugging, land rights for gay whales, greenies crowd, get to see whats going on or worse the Govt Environmental Protection Agency find out, and have no choice but to fine the Govt Conservation Department for allowing the illegal dumping of tires on govt land! (kind of embarrassing).
So that was the lads job for a couple weeks...with the 950 loader dig big trenches and load trucks with tires and once they were tipped into the trenches cover them over so no one can see where they are!.
Gotta love a good Govt cover-up eh!
Anyway - that's not the real problem...
The real problem is that before they packed up to leave and go back to their Forestry jobs, nearer the coast, with the trucks and heavy machinery - Lad was asked to take the loader up to the old homestead, and about a mile away from the homestead, is the local homestead rubbish dump...where 100+ years worth of old worn out equipment from the shearing station (old cars, trucks, cast iron shearing machinery, corrugated iron etc etc has been dumped for a century - could he also dig a long trench for that and bury it with the 950 loader as well - to "clean up" and make the place more like a flora and fauna reserve ans less like an abandoned old sheep station.
This is where it gets interesting!
Because this job is just dig a trench, and push the old steel in, crush it down, and push dirt over the top - there's no need for anyone else to assist with trucks etc - its a solo one man job with the 950 loader.
So lad takes the cat 950 loader to this old rubbish tip site for the homestead, and starts digging the trench to bury all the old rusting steel rubbish!.
Sounds easy enough with a Cat 950 - but not so!
Lad gets down about 3 - 4 feet and hits cap rock!
Tries everything with the loader and bucket to dislodge this cap rock and keep digging but no go - the 950 loader can't touch this solid granit type cap rock, it just won't budge!.
So to ascertain how big this rock is, he scraped along the rock - pushing the dirt off and it just goes on and on yard after yard.... one HUGE rock.... it would take dynamite & drilling to shift it & likely a dozer not a 950 loader.
So in getting the over burden off - to see how big this rick is, he gets out of the cab an dtakes a good look at this cap rock. Sweeps some of the remaining fine red sand off with his boot then his hands etc... looking for any fissures or cracks he might be able to exploit to break the rock out into pieces with the bucket maybe...
What does he see?
Did I mention this is a goldfields area...
These particular goldfields are some of the richest on earth and home to the Kalgoorlie super pit for e.g.
And - in this darn cap rock that he can't shift? A quartze vein intrusion - with a big fat solid Gold vein in it.... a few feet long (that he could see - it continued back under the earth he hadn't yet pushed off)
Says to me the vein is about as wide as a 5 cent piece & about 3 feet long that he can see - probably more... no idea how deep it goes!
So we chat a bit and decide that since no one he is working with knows about it - maybe best we push the old rusting scrap steel into the hole and then use the loader to cover it back over and make note of the spot (GPS) and say squat to anyone... file it away for a rainy day!
The Dept allows people (OK they turn a blind eye) to metal detectorists camping on the flora fauna reserve (old sheep station) BUT they can only walk around with a detector...and take up to 20 kilos (50 pounds) of samples a day & no use of any hard rock mining tools - no machinery and no blasting etc. You see its not legal to peg a mining lease on land vested for Flora & Fauna reserves!.
You CAN legally "prospect" with a miners right on such land but you can't peg a lease or mine... so the Govt department turn a blind eye and allow detectorists to walk around with a pick and metal detector and take any alluvial gold using hand tools under the rationale that its just "prospecting" within the laws of a miners right but its NOT mining which comes under a different section of the mines act.
We figured by pushing the old rusty steel into the trench and covering it over, that any detectorist who might just stumble on the location, would find so much scrap steel rubbish (100 years worth of rusty food tins & old car bodies etc) that they will twig it's an old rubbish dump (being within a mile of the old homestead) that they will give up and move on before they stumble upon the gold vein.
So herein lies my (our - the son & I) moral, ethical, and legal dilemma!
How do we get at a small fortune in Gold we KNOW 100% is definitely there....when it's not legal to mine the area because of its vesting for Flora & Fauna reserve and thus not legal to peg a mining lease.?
I have been racking my brains for 12 months or so how we might be able to pilfer this vein without getting caught!
Use of any machinery is problematic coiz within 1 mile of the homestead any "caretaker" will hear machinery or blasting, and come to see whats going on & we will get busted in the act!
How does one get at a Gold vein in solid rock, without making ANY blasting drilling or using diamond saws noise, to cut the vein out?
I thought about planning a raid during "The Kalgoorlie Cup" race week - maybe post a few complimentary free admission tickets and hotel room bookings to the caretaker / tenant anonymously ahead of the race week and hope he goes to town for a week to party bet on the horses, get drunk, visit the ladies of the night in hay Street (the red light district) and play "two up" - while we take a hire skid steer mini digger, electric generator, and diamond saws, crow bars and drill etc and try to pilfer this gold vein before someone else does!.
It's killin' us knowing this golds there........ and we can't think of a legal way to get at it, short of maybe BUYING the remaining years of the 99 year crown land grazing lease on the next door station and offering the Govt "a land swap" deal so that the vesting can be altered and we can legally peg a mining lease on it, and THEN do some exploratory drilling to determine just how much gold reserves is actually there!. Of course once we legally owned it, no doubt the conservation Dept would tell the Environmental Protection Authority about the zillion illegally buried tires and We would cop some kinda fines and massive environment cleanup bill.
Problem is....we don't know the extent of this deposit - it COULD potentially be as big as "the super pit" depicted above (The mine produces 850,000 ounces (28 tonnes) of gold per year & recently poured its 16 millionth ounce of gold)!
This vein COULD be just the tip of the ice berg of a deposit, there's just no way to tell (legally)...well not that I can think of (yet).
Maybe if the Govt department KNEW that their dirty secret about a zillion old tires secretly buried on their flora and fauna reserve was about to be blown wide open - maybe they would be keen on a land swap, where they get "a neighboring station" - that isn't about to Blow up in their face as an environmental catastrophe?
First I'd need to steal the vein of gold to raise the $ to buy the neighboring grazing leasehold crown land.
The land swap idea comes to me coz back when I worked for this same conservation dept, someone found a zillion $ mineral sands deposit while prospecting within a national park, and we did do just that - swapped some agricultural land adjacent to the national park for the area where the Mineral sands was so that it could be mined (Coz the Govt wanted the $zillions in export revenues from the mineral sands deposits exports for the state coz they get mining royalties on every tonne)!.
So there you have it - my moral dilemma - I know where there's a large deposit of gold - & I really can't think of a suitable 'legal way' to get at it!
What would YOU do?
18 months back my eldest lad worked for the conservation crowd (Parks Wildlife) as a fire fighter, truck driver, and plant operator (Cat 950 and D8 Dozer) in a forestry area.
He gets told he is going away for 2 weeks working for the Dept up on a flora and fauna reserve in the Goldfields (Coz they don't have many staff and no heavy machinery) to do some machine work...
Nothing beats a change of scenery so off he goes.
When he gets there he is given a big job to do digging holes with the Cat 950 Loader.
This former leasehold sheep station in the Goldfields....was less than marginal - the owners of the lease didn't want to continue on with it - so the Govt agreed to pay them out early for the remaining balance of their 99 year lease entitlement and de-stock it & turn it into a flora & fauna reserve of a few zillion acres & give it a chance to regenerate the native vegetation as a bit of a hideout for wild animals and somewhere that native flora could regain a bit of a foothold without being eaten by goats and sheep soon as it sprouted!
We are talking arid country here - ~ 10 inches annual rainfall.
So that well and good - sounds OK on paper.
Because there's a old station house on the property the Dept decided to rent it out for a peppercorn rental to a local on the understanding he would keep an eye on the place (fires etc) & keep the windmills and stock troughs / tanks etc working so that native wildlife could still get a drink....in this desert.
Thats OK too - on paper.
So the tenant one day rings someone in head office up, and says that - there's been a bit of a downpour and hes noticed one of the creek lines has scoured / eroded a bit with the sudden water & once its dried out in a few weeks likely the wind will continue to erode it and it could become a bit of a serious environmental problem in time if left unattended. Would they mind if he laid a few old car tires in the creek bed to catch the sand and slow the flow of water in future downpours to prevent the erosion?.
Someone from head office said "that should be OK - go ahead".
So he did!.
What he neglected to mention is that all the nearbye towns are on the major east - west national highway 1 - that transports freight across this country by the thousands of tonnes a day by road trains!.
And all these hundred of 90 tonne triple trailer road trains, wear out and replace tires in the thousands per year at each of the tire dealerships along the route!.
Old tires - being an environmental hazard - the dealers charge a $15 or $20 / tire "environmental disposal fee", when selling the new ones and fitting them -to cover the cost of recycling & disposal within environmental protection authority guidelines of the old worn out and blown ones.
Over many thousands of tires - that fast adds up to a LOT of $$$ in a short space of time... so the tenant made a deal with all the local tire dealers in all the neighboring towns - that they could bring the tires out to "his place" (his "sheep station" i.e. the one he is a tenant on, that's actually owned by the Govt Conservation Department and vested as a flora and fauna reserve) and they can dump them there for disposal to SAVE the freight cost of trucking them all the way to the city for recycling, as long as they pay him the disposal fee they charge the truckers... of $15 or $20/tire.
So this is a big saving for the dealers coz they don't have to pay long haul freight rates to get rid of them - just take them out to this guys property in their tipping tray service trucks and dump them and pay him a few hundred $$ each load for disposal fee!
This went on for a few years & due to remoteness and distance issues no one actually went out from the dept to keep a check on the place... so no one KNEW that as word spread he was making many $1000's per week for a few years as literally hundreds of thousands of tires were illegally dumped on govt owned land.
Tenant just pocketed the cash for a few years (estimates over $1M) and then did a runner - "shot thru, Blue" leaving no forwarding address (as you do when you pull a multi million $ scam like this) - leaving the govt with the MASSIVE cleanup bill!.
So...
In order to keep it all hush hush - the lad and his work mates get sent for a couple weeks with heavy machinery to dig massive trenches and collect / truck and tip all these hundreds of thousands of old tires into trenches and bury them over, before the press or 'rabid, mung bean eating, tree hugging, land rights for gay whales, greenies crowd, get to see whats going on or worse the Govt Environmental Protection Agency find out, and have no choice but to fine the Govt Conservation Department for allowing the illegal dumping of tires on govt land! (kind of embarrassing).
So that was the lads job for a couple weeks...with the 950 loader dig big trenches and load trucks with tires and once they were tipped into the trenches cover them over so no one can see where they are!.
Gotta love a good Govt cover-up eh!
Anyway - that's not the real problem...
The real problem is that before they packed up to leave and go back to their Forestry jobs, nearer the coast, with the trucks and heavy machinery - Lad was asked to take the loader up to the old homestead, and about a mile away from the homestead, is the local homestead rubbish dump...where 100+ years worth of old worn out equipment from the shearing station (old cars, trucks, cast iron shearing machinery, corrugated iron etc etc has been dumped for a century - could he also dig a long trench for that and bury it with the 950 loader as well - to "clean up" and make the place more like a flora and fauna reserve ans less like an abandoned old sheep station.
This is where it gets interesting!
Because this job is just dig a trench, and push the old steel in, crush it down, and push dirt over the top - there's no need for anyone else to assist with trucks etc - its a solo one man job with the 950 loader.
So lad takes the cat 950 loader to this old rubbish tip site for the homestead, and starts digging the trench to bury all the old rusting steel rubbish!.
Sounds easy enough with a Cat 950 - but not so!
Lad gets down about 3 - 4 feet and hits cap rock!
Tries everything with the loader and bucket to dislodge this cap rock and keep digging but no go - the 950 loader can't touch this solid granit type cap rock, it just won't budge!.
So to ascertain how big this rock is, he scraped along the rock - pushing the dirt off and it just goes on and on yard after yard.... one HUGE rock.... it would take dynamite & drilling to shift it & likely a dozer not a 950 loader.
So in getting the over burden off - to see how big this rick is, he gets out of the cab an dtakes a good look at this cap rock. Sweeps some of the remaining fine red sand off with his boot then his hands etc... looking for any fissures or cracks he might be able to exploit to break the rock out into pieces with the bucket maybe...
What does he see?
Did I mention this is a goldfields area...
These particular goldfields are some of the richest on earth and home to the Kalgoorlie super pit for e.g.
And - in this darn cap rock that he can't shift? A quartze vein intrusion - with a big fat solid Gold vein in it.... a few feet long (that he could see - it continued back under the earth he hadn't yet pushed off)
Says to me the vein is about as wide as a 5 cent piece & about 3 feet long that he can see - probably more... no idea how deep it goes!
So we chat a bit and decide that since no one he is working with knows about it - maybe best we push the old rusting scrap steel into the hole and then use the loader to cover it back over and make note of the spot (GPS) and say squat to anyone... file it away for a rainy day!
The Dept allows people (OK they turn a blind eye) to metal detectorists camping on the flora fauna reserve (old sheep station) BUT they can only walk around with a detector...and take up to 20 kilos (50 pounds) of samples a day & no use of any hard rock mining tools - no machinery and no blasting etc. You see its not legal to peg a mining lease on land vested for Flora & Fauna reserves!.
You CAN legally "prospect" with a miners right on such land but you can't peg a lease or mine... so the Govt department turn a blind eye and allow detectorists to walk around with a pick and metal detector and take any alluvial gold using hand tools under the rationale that its just "prospecting" within the laws of a miners right but its NOT mining which comes under a different section of the mines act.
We figured by pushing the old rusty steel into the trench and covering it over, that any detectorist who might just stumble on the location, would find so much scrap steel rubbish (100 years worth of rusty food tins & old car bodies etc) that they will twig it's an old rubbish dump (being within a mile of the old homestead) that they will give up and move on before they stumble upon the gold vein.
So herein lies my (our - the son & I) moral, ethical, and legal dilemma!
How do we get at a small fortune in Gold we KNOW 100% is definitely there....when it's not legal to mine the area because of its vesting for Flora & Fauna reserve and thus not legal to peg a mining lease.?
I have been racking my brains for 12 months or so how we might be able to pilfer this vein without getting caught!
Use of any machinery is problematic coiz within 1 mile of the homestead any "caretaker" will hear machinery or blasting, and come to see whats going on & we will get busted in the act!
How does one get at a Gold vein in solid rock, without making ANY blasting drilling or using diamond saws noise, to cut the vein out?
I thought about planning a raid during "The Kalgoorlie Cup" race week - maybe post a few complimentary free admission tickets and hotel room bookings to the caretaker / tenant anonymously ahead of the race week and hope he goes to town for a week to party bet on the horses, get drunk, visit the ladies of the night in hay Street (the red light district) and play "two up" - while we take a hire skid steer mini digger, electric generator, and diamond saws, crow bars and drill etc and try to pilfer this gold vein before someone else does!.
It's killin' us knowing this golds there........ and we can't think of a legal way to get at it, short of maybe BUYING the remaining years of the 99 year crown land grazing lease on the next door station and offering the Govt "a land swap" deal so that the vesting can be altered and we can legally peg a mining lease on it, and THEN do some exploratory drilling to determine just how much gold reserves is actually there!. Of course once we legally owned it, no doubt the conservation Dept would tell the Environmental Protection Authority about the zillion illegally buried tires and We would cop some kinda fines and massive environment cleanup bill.
Problem is....we don't know the extent of this deposit - it COULD potentially be as big as "the super pit" depicted above (The mine produces 850,000 ounces (28 tonnes) of gold per year & recently poured its 16 millionth ounce of gold)!
This vein COULD be just the tip of the ice berg of a deposit, there's just no way to tell (legally)...well not that I can think of (yet).
Maybe if the Govt department KNEW that their dirty secret about a zillion old tires secretly buried on their flora and fauna reserve was about to be blown wide open - maybe they would be keen on a land swap, where they get "a neighboring station" - that isn't about to Blow up in their face as an environmental catastrophe?
First I'd need to steal the vein of gold to raise the $ to buy the neighboring grazing leasehold crown land.
The land swap idea comes to me coz back when I worked for this same conservation dept, someone found a zillion $ mineral sands deposit while prospecting within a national park, and we did do just that - swapped some agricultural land adjacent to the national park for the area where the Mineral sands was so that it could be mined (Coz the Govt wanted the $zillions in export revenues from the mineral sands deposits exports for the state coz they get mining royalties on every tonne)!.
So there you have it - my moral dilemma - I know where there's a large deposit of gold - & I really can't think of a suitable 'legal way' to get at it!
What would YOU do?
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