When I was 17 in the latter 90s I lived in a ghost town called kookynie in western Australia, towards Leonora, was an amazing place riddled with history and mine shafts huge ones under the town I spent a lot of time exploring. A lot of them still had all the gear from early 1900s, tools, wheelbarrows, carts and tracks…
In one I found a bottle with a newspaper clipping inside, it was an advert for a bicycle for sale it turned out to be the exact one that was hanging in the wee local museum… like to think it was the motivation for a young worker.
I worked down the road on yerilla station where there were mineshafts everywhere. Found a wee nugget in the kicked up ground in the sheep yards one day.
I did a lot of drilling around Kookynie / Leonora / Laverton / Agnew / Wiluna and to the East in the 80’s and 90’s, as well as up in the Pilbara and Kimberley.