What it's really like to give up a successful career... to become a GOLD DIGGER!

Daily Mail​

5 days ago

Deep in the red dust of the Australian Outback, a lithe young woman is clambering with monkey-like agility around a large and dangerous-looking industrial apparatus which has stalled under the baking hot sun.
With expert fingers, she unpicks the obstruction preventing the brutish- looking machine, known as a dry blower, from greedily swallowing down tonnes of earth and shaking it violently before disgorging it into a neat pile.
Moments earlier, a television camera watched intently as the same woman, her blonde tresses swept back under a broad-brimmed leather hat, swept a metal detector over some newly dug-up ground. 'The ground's been quite promising so far,' she says, holding up a sliver of shiny metal in her hand.
'That's a good sign. Hopefully, we'll get some more,' she adds, as a broad grin cracks her dust-caked cheeks to reveal a perfect row of brilliant white teeth. These are the gold fields of
Western Australia, hundreds of miles to the north and east of the state's main city of Perth.
Since the first lucky strike in 1851, gold fever has brought thousands of itinerant miners to its barren landscape in search of the mineral fortunes buried beneath its blood red soil.
In the century and a half since, some have hit pay dirt, while others have lost everything, including their lives, in this high-risk, high-reward lottery.
As the price of gold soars in a period of global economic uncertainty, however, a new influx of prospectors is fast gripping viewers on the Discovery Channel's popular reality series, Aussie Gold Hunters.
One of the stars of the latest series is the woman with the broad-brimmed hat and even broader smile, who has come further than most, in every sense, to be reborn as a gold hunter Down Under.
'I love being up here in the red dust, in serenity. It's really lovely, it's really nice to get away from the rat race,' says Sheryl Munro, her distinctly un-Aussie accent betraying her Highland roots.
In fact, her desire to follow the road less travelled has led her half a world away from her job as a midwife in her native Scotland to the remote, sparsely populated expanses of this notoriously unforgiving landscape.
Although she only started mining for gold two years ago, the 45-year-old and her Australian partner, Simon Lawes, 50, have dug, smashed, panned and bashed enough gold from the earth to scrape a comfortable living from their gamble.
They face daily danger from sunstroke in the 40C-plus heat, and the numerous species of deadly spiders and poisonous snakes, many hours drive from civilisation and the nearest medical facilities.
But hers is a quietly inspiring tale of a grand adventure sparked by a childhood obsession with Australian daytime soaps and a determination to embrace every opportunity life threw her way.
'The reason I came over here was, I was a diehard Home and Away fan,' she told the Mail. 'From when I was eight, it was always Home and Away at ten past five and then at 5.40pm it was Neighbours. And I used to always say, 'I'm going to go live over there one day'.'
Growing up in Elgin, in Moray, it seemed a bit of a pipe dream: 'No one in my family went to uni, no one really travelled, you know. So when I said that, they were like, 'Yeah, sure, Sheryl'.'
A self-confessed tomboy, she would go shooting with her dad, Jim, who trained gundogs on a sporting estate, or camp out in the hills.
'I was never content with the idea of a three-bedroomed house in Elgin and going on my two-week holiday. It just wasn't for me,' she says.
'I often have this conversation with people – who is the happiest? The ones content with their little lot or those striving for something more?
'Despite what I do now, I'm not striving for money, it's just that life's there to be lived and you have to go out and grab it.
'I want to look back when I'm older and say, 'What an adventure that was!''
After studying nursing and midwifery in Inverness, her first taste of Australia came on a backpacking trip aged 23 in 2003, travelling around in a campervan.
'I just felt like this was my second home straight away,' she said. 'A lot of my Australian friends say, 'You're more Australian than we are'. Like, I love red dust. I love camping. I love being in the Outback.'
Returning to Scotland, she completed her qualifications and applied for her residency permit. 'It's expensive and hard to get residency nowadays. It took me six weeks and £500, because I was on the demand list, being a nurse and a midwife, and I had the experience.'
Not quite a Ten Pound Pom, although not far off it with inflation, she emigrated in 2006 and never looked back, living in Sydney, Darwin, and Port Hedland, before settling in Perth, working as a midwife and bringing up her son, Oliver, by a previous relationship.
She met Simon six years ago through online dating: 'Although we actually only lived two streets away. How's that for a city with a population of 2.3million?
'But we would never have
met otherwise because I was a single parent that really couldn't get out in the evenings very often, and he was a single dad with four children, although they're older.'
Simon was also putting all his spare time into getting his goldmining business up and running. When it started to take off and he was at it full-time, he suggested she came with him so they could spend more time together.
They started off near the tiny community of Cue (population 170), where gold was first
discovered in 1892, about 400 miles or a seven-hour drive north-east of their home in Perth. They camped out with their dry blower and a couple of diggers for company.
'It can be very extreme. I think that's what I liked about it,' she said. Extreme can mean close encounters with creepy crawlies, but none of that fazes her: 'No, I've been bitten by a King Brown, one of the deadliest snakes in Australia. But that wasn't actually mining.
'That was up in Coral Bay, probably 12 hours' drive from Perth. I stood on a baby snake and it bit my toe, and I had to get the Royal Flying Doctors to get me out, and I had all my cardiac enzymes affected, and my blood started coagulating.
'But you just don't really think about it. I'm not really scared of spiders or snakes and stuff, and you just think, if it happens, well, I've got some medical knowledge. We'll work through it, and we'll be fine.'
She is admirably phlegmatic about the many dangers of her new way of life: 'You're standing on top of dry blowers in the heat, and it would be super easy to get sunstroke.
'But you just have to be super sensible about it and drink plenty.
'And yeah, you've got snakes and dodgy spiders, but you hardly see them as they're more scared of you than you are of them.
'There was a snake in camp just this summer. I went to put on the light beside the barbecue and saw this thing slither. I nearly put my hand on it, but it wasn't a deadly snake, it was only a python…'
Other risks are learned through painful experience: 'I've burnt my hand picking up tools because you forget how hot they are.
'I swear and throw it down. So you have to keep your tools cool in a bucket of water.'
Arguably, their biggest enemy is something very familiar to all Scots. Rain turns the light red dust into thick gloopy mud that makes prospecting impossible and dries as hard as cement on the diggers and dry blowers.
'You've got to chisel the dirt out when it dries off and then it's just an absolute mess,' said Sheryl.
Days of rain can dent profits. Sometimes, they just come up empty-handed – but they've still managed to make AUD 175,000 (£82,500) a year to grow the business.
'I have huge admiration for Simon, because many times we almost went bankrupt because we're still striving for this goal,' said Sheryl. 'I probably would have maybe given up.
'But he was like, 'No, I'm going to do this, we'll do this' He's very headstrong.'
And resourceful. With such vast distances to cover between home in Perth and their camp, Simon and Sheryl are no different to the jolly swagmen of old driving a cart with all their picks and shovels, food and water over miles of unwelcoming terrain.
When things go wrong, suddenly there are big decisions to make – the Outback is the last place you want to be stranded for long.
Sheryl believes preparation is the best defence: 'Logistics is a massive thing, because where we are there's not a shop.
'We'll get car parts from a local dump to fix up our machinery because we have to think creatively and rely on ourselves.
'Simon's learned how to weld to patch bits because if we don't do it, we don't make money.'
On the flipside, there is always the chance of stumbling across the find that'll make their fortune.
Simon and Sheryl aim to rake in an ounce a day of gold, mostly 'alluvial' gold dust that lies on or near the surface, worth around £2,500. Their biggest single haul was around £15,000 worth, but that is still some way short of Aussie Gold Hunter's record.
In 2019, the show captured the moment two prospectors unearthed a 95oz nugget valued at more than £109,000 40 miles northwest of Melbourne, Victoria, not far from where the world's largest single nugget was pulled from just over an inch below the ground in 1869.
Nicknamed 'Welcome Stranger', it was more than 2ft long, weighed 97.1kg and would be worth around £4.5million at today's prices.
Sheryl said: 'I always tell my mum, 'I'll be a millionaire one day, and I'll get you business class flights over, don't you worry'. And she's like, 'I quite believe you will, Sheryl'.'
After all this time, does she miss the Auld Country? 'I hadn't been back to Scotland for seven years until we went to Elgin last year.
'It was Simon's first time and he absolutely loved it – he went stalking with my dad. He wants to buy a wee but 'n' ben and come back for a few months a year.
'My parents will be 70 soon and they separated five years ago. I always worry as they get old, but they both said, 'Don't ever come back for us; we can see how great your life is, and how happy you are, and how it suits you.'
'It's hard to do, although my mum Alison's got a great network of friends. I'm super close to her and she comes out for three months each year in November to look after Oliver while we're away.
'My dad's coming out in May and my brother Lee and his family are coming over next Christmas. It's possible to stay close, but you have to make the effort.
'I do love Scotland and half my heart will always be there, but the other half's here. I feel that I'm home.'