Ron the ex-truck driver wore a biker's goatee beard and sleeveless shirts that showed his biceps like bruised hams. I thought him volatile, not least in the way he railed against "bastard gold-filching tourists".But Ron had a reputation for having an uncanny sense of gold - a commodity so elusive that many diggers bestowed it with metaphysical qualities, capable even of choosing its keeper "But Ron.. it just comes to him," said one digger. But I never quite shook the need to find treasure...The months I spent at the deserted mine site, watched over by eagles wheeling in a searing blue sky, were filthy, frustrating and back-breaking. But they were also electrifying, because there really was gold beneath my feet. And with every pan, I felt perilously close to making real the very fantasies that had sustained me as a kid.I looked twice at anything moderately pale-coloured in the pan. But then I saw gold for the first time, and understood why the prospectors said: "You'll know it when you see it." It sent me reeling.It was literally a pin-head of metal, but so unmistakably lustrous that I never needed to second-glance again. When the ancients held gold they thought they were holding the sun, which meant god and immortality.

When I held up my pin-head, dabbed on a fingertip - and all the pin-heads in the months after - I saw a dragon on its heap of coins, a pirate kicking back the lid on a chest full of doubloons, a wagon of gold bars defended by the US cavalry.Each night, I returned to the pub to place my film canister of yellow specks on the bar, raising a few laughs and earning a few jibes. But it also worked some magic.The people of Kookynie saw me as a bit of a prat, but at least I wasn't a "big-noter", at least I was "having a go". Kevin, who'd done his years as a digger, noted my growing understanding of the metal's devious properties: how its shocking density influenced its dynamics of travel, how the swirling pan was a micro-cosmic replay of gold moving through a shifting landscape, a geomorphic drama 2.5 billion years in the telling. And he began to quietly give me encouragement, clues, ideas, advice...In time, I also unearthed the history of the goldfields, and not only through books. Kevin's wife Marg visited my campsite, sometimes when I was cooking breakfast over a small fire. She'd hand me freshly baked muffins and talk about the history of the town, pointing to the places where residents had lived during the 1900s.

The brothel was here; a race track was there; further on was the old cemetery, one of the graves turned backwards since the occupant had done himself in. "They used to chuck themselves into flooded shafts," she'd say of victims demoralised by alcohol and failure "It was the quickest way. Besides, it let the coroner record 'death by drowning', which spared relatives the shame of suicide."After a while, I was called on to help out in the pub. When I wasn't adding to my £1.50 fortune in gold specks, I earned money by dragging rotten bags of garbage to the dump, scraping inch-thick lamb-fat from the bottom of a spit-roast or raking a tiny patch of lawn Which was quite a privileged job. And every awkward excavation I made with my oversized spade promised to come good.Eventually I bottomed out. Or more exactly I grew up and accepted that the Midland soils were barren of valuable metals, either dug to death by previous generations or sealed with a generous layer of housing estates and NCP carparks.