Being 16 and the eldest of 4 boys, treasure hunting was no new endeavour. But when that Minelab X-TERRA 305 came out from under the Christmas tree, a whole new world opened up to me and my siblings. 6 months on and we had become quite apt at finding bottle tops and soda can pull rings, a few decimal coins, the odd unknown chunk of rusty iron, but not much in the way of ‘treasure’. Then one day, while reading an online forum, I came across an article about the history of Bunyaville State Forest. We had lived in Bunyaville Forest for 6 years and loved to explore its secrets but never had guessed that it had such a rich history.
Unprofitable seam gold mines, Aboriginal migration highways and, most interesting to me, it was the site of a decommissioned ordinance disposal bunker during WW2!
It took days of searching by my 12 year old brother and I to locate the old wooden bunker and adjacent pit which looked as if some huge giant had taken a bite out of the hill side. Immediately the excitement was off the charts. The very next morning we dismantled our X-TERRA, packed some lunch and rode through the bush to the site we had identified the day before.
The first hour or two was disheartening. We couldn’t seem to find anything besides bits of modern day junk. That’s when the turning point came. We discovered that you could exclude certain signals (amateur I know, but hey, we are learning ;) ). This new-found power quickly led to the discovery of a few bullet shells in a small trench opposite the mysterious pit. To us, this was the most brilliant thing in the whole world. Real bullet shells, and we found them! But that was only the beginning.
We reasoned that the soldiers would have been shooting at ‘something’ in the pit. So that’s where we went next. What seemed like bucket loads of rusty iron shrapnel clogged the ground around the pit. But with the help of our new found discrimination settings, the better finds quickly started materialising.
Bullet shells of every size, pre decimal Australian coins, and a Japanese landmine detonator! Then, just when we thought we would die from sheer overwhelming excitement, the detector went crazy. We had found something big…very big. The ground was so hard that it took us what seemed like hours to remove the 10cm of soil between us and the target. At first we were disappointed because the piece of metal looked like an ordinary old pipe about 8cm in diameter. But ever so slowly, as the dirt was etched away, the mind blowing awesomeness of what we had found became clear. It was a WW2 tank shell, grimy and corroded but by far the most incredible treasure we could ever have imagined.
The adventure that metal detecting has brought us surpasses all its other qualities. To go from historic research to finding WW2 relics out in the bush is one of the greatest feelings of achievement anyone could experience.
We returned to that site with our X-TERRA 305 many, many times and continued to find beautiful pieces of history but none greater than on that hot summers day where we transformed our treasure hunting dreams into a reality, a reality which has inspired me and my brothers to follow the detectors path for many years to come.
Jake - Queensland, Australia
