COIN AND RELIC HUNTING WESTERN AUSTRALIA Edition 1 June 2011
This edtion the focus is beach detecting,, relic hunting a old town 4 hours inland and finally getting children involved in detecting
Beach detecting in Western Australia is easy enough, our winters are mild in the south and perfect warm weather in the north. But up north many beaches are closed due to mining or mangroves, add that to crocodile and jellyfish problems in the north you find the beach is not a good site to detect. A exception to this is of course cable beach and really any beach close to Broome. Now in the south, basically south of Geraldton you will find the beach at Lancelin perfect after a long weekend as the town swells up in population and is only 1 hour north of the metro area. The metro beaches fall into two simple groups, north and south of the river. South of the river, Rockingham has several good beaches and excellent foreshore at Rockingham as well with many playgrounds as well to detect, next southern beach is coogee which is in the woodman point reserve, this reserve has military links back to the second world war and some of those buildings still stand today. So there you can scan the playgrounds, or the beaches especially as there is two caravan parks their and finally scan the dunes around the military sites. Last southern beach to consider is south beach near Fremantle, this been a popular beach for over 150 years, lots of history their and lots of people in summer. But north of the river is where the action or the money is, coins and rings. All the beaches up their from port beach to trigg beach are over filled in summer. My favorite walk is from city beach to Scarborough beach, this is a long walk and you have loads of areas to detect on it. Scarborough and Cottesloe beaches both have great foreshore reserves and playgrounds, picnic areas to detect. Now where to start on a beach, well easy to answer start at the path leading to beach and fan out when it hits the beach, go at low tide as this exposes more area that people have entered water when in high tide, remember sunscreen is shocking to apply if u wearing rings as it allows them to just slip off and you wont feel them fall off or hear them hit the sand or water. Usually as you first put hand in water it will come off, thus going at low tide will give you a chance to find a ring or two.
On some beaches you can find banks of dried seaweed which has washed ashore, its worth a shot at detecting over it as they can collect stuff dropped in the ocean, I also aim at areas with loads of shells, this is a deposit site for the ocean and you will find coins in their amongst the bottle caps. Now bottle caps, learn to live with them, don’t fret that you get them all the time, just think you are clearing up a danger to other uses of the sand who may cut themselves on the slowly rusting tops. Dig everything that comes up on your detector even if you think it’s a bottle top it could be a ring or a coin. Remember beach detecting can be a great hobby for a family, children love following you around and love it even more when you find money for them to buy a icecream from local shop, which is another area at beaches worth looking for, food outlets mean loose change.
Relic hunting, this can be a rewarding and very relaxing past time. This edition I will talk about relic hunting the pump station 5 Yerbillon Western Australia. The Yerbillon Pump station was constructed between 1900 and 1904, its purpose was to pump water the almost 600 kilometres from the coast to the outback gold town of Kalgoorlie, back in the 1890’s when the pipe line was proposed many people deemed it a impossible plan, yet C.Y O’Connor the pipeline designer and chief engineer went ahead with it and by 1903 fresh water first reached the goldfields and the pipeline was deemed a engineering marvel of the modern world. Yet sadly the stress and hounding of the government and other knockers of the program took its toll on C.Y. O’Connor who rode his horse out to sea at Fremantle and with a single shot ended his life. Now Yerbillon is the 5th of 8 stations, it as a town had a dozen buildings and was famous for its gardens which in the area back in the first half of the 20th century was impossible in the hot dry conditions that the pump station was built, yet with unlimited water from the pipe those 12 homes set about first growing all their own food and later planting ornamentals of which some, like the enormous palm tree, a old rose bed or the stately old fig tree are still alive and well despite the town disappearing 57 years ago.
First thing to do before relic hunting any site is to get a map of the site and as many photos of the buildings that used to exist on the site. Now where to find those maps and photos, first you can use http://trove.nla.gov.au/ trove is a federal government site containing photos, maps, old newspaper articles, basically anything you could hope to know about a subject but don’t have the time or access to a large library microfiche database. Next stopping point on your researching mission is a tourist information centre, preferably a manned one that is close to where you are going, that way you can ask questions on the site and is the case with Yerbillon I was actually told to detect their by a tour operator at the tourist information centre, he said that he has been going there and that a lot can be found in the site. Yerbillon you easily could spend a month solid detecting the site and not detect the whole area in that time. I have broken this relic site into 4 main areas. First is the area around the pumping station. The pumping station is off limits, asbestos roofs have contaminated the site, but the building still stands proud and tall 108 years after it was built, a cyclone fence around it keeps you out of harms way. This area between the cyclone fence and the town, the dam and other work buildings from 1904 is worth detecting, its where the men worked and coins abound in the area, plus is the most visited site at the pump station by tourists, so pull tabs abound and some modern coins. The next site is the old town, this had 12 buildings, driveways, clothes lines, concrete garage slabs, steps to old now long vanished verandahs exist and give you some degree of ability to picture where home stood. You can still follow the garden path from front fence to front porch steps or follow the old driveways to old garage concrete slabs. There is a amazing amount of infrastructure still in place if you look for it, I have found raised vegetable gardens, a grape arbor and a clothes line. I have found pennies from 1912 in these home sites and even a old toy car from 1965 in there which is 11 years after the town was emptied, so has been a popular picnic area now for over a century.
After the town comes the railway siding, this a few hundred metres from the town and pump station location, in those metres you have thick heath shrubs and given time and patience that heath would be worth detecting, it’s the way goods where walked, wheelbarrowed or carried back to the homes and pump station. The railway siding is where all goods where delivered and where people could hope on or off a train to Perth or Kalgoorlie. The railway stopped passing in this area by 1971 and stopped servicing the town in the 1950’s. So once you get around all the dog spikes that abound near any railway, is good spot to tune out iron on your detector, this spot can turn up coins, jewellery and any day to day goods used a century ago. Final site is the school, the school serviced the town is close to railway siding and almost half way between railway siding and town. Once again heath shrubs surround it but you can easily see how the kids would have walked to and from school, the school site I have found has been used over past 50 years to dump rubbish from local farms? I assume farms as nearest town is a good 40 kilometres away. This rubbish could turn out to be a source of relics, many old intact bottles can be found buried in shallow soil or sun baking.
Detecting with Children, kids love treasure stories and what kid does not like digging up treasure, it’s a fantasy we call carried through our childhood. Now imagine the joy you get if your parent buys a metal detector and takes you coin/relic hunting. Is a great way to bond, a great way to teach them about the great outdoors, the world beyond the computer and toys of home. First up let them sort out the soil, do the sifting in the sifter and don’t knock what they find, remember a bottle cap is just as much fun to them as a 1912 penny is to you. So admire, congratulate what they find.
First way I got my 9 year old daughter to start using detector was to put soil from the hole into a sifter, mine is a large 40cm circular plastic design, then I allowed my child to hold and wave detector over the sifter. Was not long before I found she started scanning the area around us while she waited for me to put more soil in the sifter. Was not long before she was mastering pinpointing with the Garrett Ace 350 that we use. One thing children do have is enthusiasm and this age are not afraid to ask why something works, so she has had to know what each button on my detector does. It has come to the stage now where I am saving for a second detector and will give her the Ace 350.
A ford corsair found while detecting at Yerbillon, once my child realized that a detector can turn up toys she was sold on the hobby.
Well this ends this edition of my magazine, hopefully my first effort at being a editor has been of some entertainment or use to you, if you interested in watching videos of us out detecting then please go to youtube, my tag is jacktreasurehunter and my channel is http://www.youtube.com/user/jacktreasurehunter
I purchased my Garrett Ace 350 from Ed at www.texaspremiumdetectors.com in texas, it took 3 weeks for the detector to reach Western Australia but I save $200 by importing it than if I brought from a local shop who would also have had to import it, these detectors are made in Texas USA so makes more sense to buy direct from USA and cut out the middleman. Once again thankyou for reading and keep your eye out for future editions or leave a message on youtube if you want more information on anything I have written.