He knows the Western Australian goldfields reasonably well and felt that he knew a couple of bits of ground that might be worth hitting. Heavy penalties can be imposed through the courts for people stealing gold off registered tenements, and beside that the odd prospector has ended up being bruised for being where they should not have been. The bit of ground Mark had selected for us was on a registered tenement, that was being worked by a bloke who I will call Fred. Fred has about 1000 acres in 4 adjoining claims. He has worked a large portion of the area using metal detectors, jack hammers and a dry blower.
Dry blowers are unique to arid areas of Australia where there is no water to run a 'wet plant'.
They can be quite effective and fine gold down to 0.01 of a gram can be recovered. Anyway, Fred had been using his dry blower for some time and had scratched out a living. The camp was luxurious by our bush standards. The deal that Mark had struck with Fred was that Mark, Garry, Rob and I would camp at Fred's base camp and use it as our base. This appeared to be a good deal because we knew the area was nugget producing, and that Fred was a hard nosed leaseholder who had never let people onto his claim to detect for gold.