Postcards Home: with Emily Darlow

For Leanne, the moment a metal detector changes its tune somewhere in the red dirt of Western Australia is as exciting today as it was 30 years ago.
“The second the detector sings and gold pops out of the dirt, that’s the moment, every time,” she said.
“You chase that feeling for thirty years and it never gets old.”
For three decades, Leanne and her family have been heading west in search of gold, and what began as an adventure has become an annual winter migration to the Central Goldfields around Leonora, Laverton and Leinster.
This year Leanne travelled with her husband Darren, their daughter Taleesha and Taleesha’s partner Sam, with a mate joining them along the way.
“I’ve been chasing gold in the WA outback for thirty years now and I still get the same buzz I did on my very first trip,” Leanne said.
“Thirty years in and it still feels like freedom the second we cross the border.”
The journey west is almost as much a part of the tradition as prospecting itself, and after so many years the family has accumulated a collection of regular stops and rituals along the way.
They aim to leave by 8am each morning and pull up around 4pm, giving them enough daylight to set up the caravan for the night. There are fish and chips in Ceduna, a lookout for the dingoes that frequent the Nullarbor Roadhouse, a stop at the Great Australian Bight, a meal at Eucla and a chance to stretch their legs at the Caiguna blowhole.

Some years they manage a detour to Esperance before stocking up in Kalgoorlie, perhaps taking a look at the Super Pit or wandering through the Gwalia ghost town before finally heading into the bush.
After four days on the road, one of Leanne’s favourite moments comes when they arrive and simply turn off the engine.
“That first bit of silence after four days on the road is something else,” she said.
From that point, the structured itinerary disappears and the family lets the search for gold dictate what happens next.
“We wake up when the light hits the van, and go on intuition from there,” Leanne said.
“Find gold, we stay. Don’t find gold, we move on.”
Even after years of visiting the same part of Australia, there are still surprises. The family expected Laverton to look much as it always had, but this year they arrived to find a hospital being built and a second supermarket in town.
“Took us a minute to get our bearings in a place we thought we knew inside out,” Leanne said.
Some of the best discoveries, however, have nothing to do with gold, including a chance encounter during a trip to the supermarket in Laverton with Taleesha.
The man standing behind them in the queue was buying kangaroo tails, so mother and daughter struck up a conversation and asked him how he cooked them.
“He told us he burns the hair off over an open fire first, then lets it cook for hours in the coals,” Leanne said.
“Said it comes out beautifully tender.”
It was a brief exchange between strangers in a supermarket queue, but for Leanne it captured something she loves about returning to the region.
“Small moment, but it’s the kind of thing that sticks, a total stranger happy to talk you through generations of know-how in the middle of a supermarket queue.”
Food is a recurring feature of the trip, particularly after hours spent outside prospecting, and Leanne nominates the Desert Inn Hotel in Laverton as a perennial favourite.
Its bangers and mash served inside a giant Yorkshire pudding is, she says, “the kind of meal you think about on the whole drive home”.
Back at camp, dinner goes onto the coals during the afternoon, ready for the evening when everyone gathers around the fire with a glass of wine.
While finding gold provides the obvious adrenaline rush, those evenings have become just as important to Leanne as the hours spent with a detector in hand.
“It’s also the smaller things, campfire nights with everyone scanning the sky for shooting stars, and a succulent camp oven feed,” she said.
There isn’t much of a daily timetable once they’re in the bush, although running a small business means Leanne never completely leaves work behind.
She takes advantage of Western Australia being two hours behind Victoria to get some work done in the cooler mornings while the team back home is already into its day. After that, the schedule depends largely on the conditions and what the detector is telling them: a few hours searching for gold, lunch, a break through the hottest part of the day and then back to camp.
The small communities along the route have also become part of the reason Leanne enjoys returning.
This year, Laverton’s Biggest Morning Tea caught the family by surprise, with locals turning out for games and tables filled with homemade slices and sponges.
Leanne even walked away with a trivia prize after correctly naming Melbourne’s Yarra River.
“I stood there stumped for a second like it was a trick question, then remembered I was about four thousand kilometres from home,” she said.
Thirty years of prospecting have also taught Leanne that the practicalities of outback travel are often fairly simple.
When it comes to packing, she recommends taking half the clothes you think you’ll need because “caravan life doesn’t care about your wardrobe”. Given the choice again, she would also leave the microwave at home and bring an air fryer instead.
Her approach to the journey itself is similarly relaxed.

“We’ve got a rough plan, and then the gold has the final say on where we actually end up,” she said.
For anyone inspired to try prospecting themselves, however, there is one area where Leanne doesn’t recommend simply winging it.
She believes getting proper advice about a metal detector before heading into the goldfields can make an enormous difference, particularly for newcomers trying to understand which machine suits them and how to use it effectively.
This year Leanne mainly used the Gold Monster 2000, which she found light enough for rough ground while still able to pick up small pieces of gold.
For people who like the idea of prospecting but aren’t confident about heading into the goldfields alone, she suggests considering a guided trip where the equipment, knowledge and locations can be sorted out for you.
It’s something Leanne knows well beyond her own annual family adventures. She is part of the family behind Gold & Relics Gold Prospecting Adventures, alongside Darren and Taleesha. The family business introduces newcomers to prospecting as well as helping more experienced gold hunters develop their skills.
Yet after three decades, Leanne’s own reason for returning remains wonderfully uncomplicated.
If she could relive one moment from this year’s journey, it would be those few seconds when the detector tells her there is something beneath her feet and gold begins appearing from the dirt.
“That handful of seconds when gold is practically jumping out of the ground in front of you,” she said.
“You chase that feeling for thirty years and it never gets old.”
Next year, the family will point the caravan towards Western Australia and do it all over again, but before then there’s another holiday on the calendar – Christmas at Lakes Entrance.
For more information about Leanne and Gold & Relics Gold Prospecting Adventures, visit http://www.goldandrelics.com.au/