Gold! Gold!

Present-day trust issues over money...

Back in the Eighties I knew as a reasonably familiar personal acquiantance, Australia's now most-famous gold prospector Mark Creasy. I knew him through a small band of crazy sharemarket dabblers from the State Fire Brigade, known locally among stockbrokers simply as 'the fire-ees.'

Mark Creasy was considered a brilliant geo by those who knew him even back then. Creasy has by today already made history but will in all possibility go down in history as indeed Australia's greatest legitimate gold prospector. There is a lot about gold prospecting that is not at all well-known and even though the internet provides a good resource that pulls together the wisdom of old hands and careful science and solid university study, there are reasons why only a few special types end up making either the great discoveries still left to be made, or find a steady enough set of patch locations to realise the potential that is all the same definitely still there.

Another of the people I knew back then – and I knew this guy very well – was the electronics engineer who successfully developed the modern Pulse Induction Gold Detector (of course, the device can detect other metals too...) I handed out a few dollars to help him develop the technology but frankly, like quite a few other things I invested in, the basic end market was not there given that the gold price was and had been stuck in the doldrums between $250 and $370-ish for years.

And to be honest I just didn't like the way listed mining companies in those days were doing business and what their ethics were in terms of shareholder's rights. The P.I. device was being hawked around a few local mining companies and for me the whole thing suggested a certain inevitability about loss of control of intellectual property. The fact the technology survives as one of a number of favoured current prospecting instruments is testament to its real usefulness and I'm pleased for that.

My own view is that one cannot rely only on technology but must have the active human brainpower driving it. You need the Mark Creasys.

I have an idle pet fancy that as the gold price rises and people begin again to tour the various gold prospecting grounds, the function of the internet could have a role for those who do not care to brave 50 degree outback temperatures and endless road and sand-track miles and field rations and so on.

But the problem appears to focus on whether or not some stranger can trust some other stranger to hand in any gold nuggets or gold flakes or gold dust to the person who commissioned them to go out and do the laborious field work. And in spite of data logging and telemetry and wireless satellite webcams there is always this element of doubt that stops people from handing over say a hundred bucks to join in a gold prospecting expedition fund and then to just lay back watching through the internet webcams some dilligent students bleep-bleeping their White's goldmasters across the laterite topsoils to acquire a retirement nugget for them.

The vision though, is enticing to me. And so I've got together three listed public companies and one private one, to stump up a hundred thousand dollars in listed shares to underwrite the involvement – as I see it – of a number of private armchair explorers spread around the whole globe who would stick in a few dollars to see if the kids can come up with a few nuggets. So the propositon basically is that an armchair explorer/prospector buys a stake for a hundred dollars (or fifty or whatever) and if there is no gold found or not enough, they get a return anyway via the listed shares that they can sell on the market. As far as any discoveries go, 40 per cent of the nuggets will go to the buying-in stakeholder, 40 per cent to the underwriting companies, and 20 per cent to the people actually doing the physical work. And this seems to me to be a way to fairly split things so that there is little incentive for thieving discovered gold. The field workers could also be handpicked by the companies so that professional judgements are made as to high ethical standards, and many modern-era audits and processes adopted to limit the pocketing of discovered gold – which of course in any case would be illegal and subject to criminal prosecution and likely restitution orders.

I wonder if anyone out there thinks this is as exciting a proposition as I do? (That's the inventor of a British-built robotic detector in the pic, btw...)

There is a lot of highly-prospective gold bearing ground out there in Australia and people I think fail to realise that new methods and technologies definitely can find what older methods definitely will have missed – and that even though the technologies have been available for a number of years, no one really went looking when the price languished around the low to mid hundreds of dollars, in spite of what people assume might have been the case with mining companies.

At $2,000 an ounce the thing is very feasible. But at $5,000 an ounce you'll kick yourself you didn't do it! Will it get to $5,000? Oh yes most certainly it will; the amount of time you hand-wring and negate this idea in your mind because you have doubt and fear and anxiety about money – when it offers the only real liquid thing in town – is multiplied exponentially when it comes to dealing in bits of paper vended by banks or even governments these days.

Certainly contact me if you find yourself interested in any of this: interdeq@iinet.net.au

Best, Calvin J. Bear