Kim Hiller Competing in Gold Panning Competitions

Kim and Marcus Binks made up the Australian team for the World Goldpanning Championships in the Czech Republic in 2010.		Kim at the World Championships in Biella, Italy, in 2009.		The finals of the World Championships, in the Czech Republic 2010, in the Traditional "Klondike" pan category.
Getting ready for the Grand Parade – World Champions 2009, Italy.		Aussie flags, especially the Eureka Flag, are highly popular in Europe.		Some of the panners at the 2009 Victorian Championships, Lake Wendouree, Ballarat.
Kim wins the open category at the Far North Queensland Championships in 2007 at Mareeba and picks up a metal detector for first prize.		Winners are grinners!		Demonstrating the production Turbopan – a 50cm monster – at Mareeba Far North Queensland Championships in 2007.
Seeding the buckets at Mareeba.		A team event at Mareeba.

Prospecting in PNG

Highlanders with a commercial sluice.		15 minutes work shoveling into the sluice produced this nice tail. Not bad considering the "heavy black sand" is sulphide tailings from a mine upstream.		They came, they mined, they got thrown out of the country. Plenty of foreigners have tried to exploit the rich alluvial gold in PNG and for various reasons, like greed, fail miserably.

Prospecting in Vietnam

The locals described this wasteland as "place of big shit fight". It's a battlefield. People were buried were they were found – there are headstones all over the field. On the coast near Hoi An.		If you go down to the jungle today, to do a wee bit of prospecting, watch out for unexploded ordnance (UXO) like this grenade booby trap. That was a close call...		Recycling at its finest. The perfect tool for snigging timber out of the jungle.
Three little piggies went to market.		While the women are panning for gold, what does a bloke do to bring home dinner. It's obvious – thatch a boat and go fishing.		Slash and burn agriculture in the jungle. This is a rice and corn paddock.

Hard Rock Mining in South Vietnam

Hard rock miners.		Fun for all the family. Mum runs the hammer mill which feeds onto a sluice.		Technology makes all the difference.
Once was jungle. Agent Orange really opened up the country to mineral development. And horrific genetic defects.		Hard rock gold mining in central South Vietnam.		Hard rock gold mining in central South Vietnam.
This crew of miners are waiting for the blast gases to clear before re-entering the workings. No ventilation, no light, no safety, just high grade gold-copper ore. The ore is brought out in sacks and hand picked, hand crushed then milled in a hammer mill and finally panned off in a panning bay using a batea pan. Occassionally the miners recover gold with mercury but that's another cost so it doesn't happen that much.		After much work, the gold is finally panned off in a batea.		Hon Mo O. This hill is/was a high grade epithermal gold vein. Once a foreign company started to develop the exploration drive (shown below) and in the centre of this picture, the locals mined the vein. The miners at the top on the actual vein got the best grades. There were 4 levels of miners below them – each level processing the tailings of the miners above. The lowest level miners got very little gold. Giang, the bloke in the picture, is standing on tailings that have gone through 5 sluices.
An Australian mineral exploration company was developing this drive.

Terrace Mining in North Vietnam

These terraces mostly have a lot of gold underneath them with some really high grade runs. The inter-connected rice fields took a hundred years to develop.		Just make a dam wall from bamboo and that will hold the water back while we dig below water level.		Labour saving devices are all the rage.
The girls and their "pans". These rocker boxes take 40kg at a time and these women can pan that down in a couple of minutes. These woman are from the Thay people – a minority hill tribe. That's young Dao (em Dao) in the pink. She refused to wear the local garb like the other woman and wanted to be a fashionable Hanoi girl. Her father, Anh Dao, mother Chi Dao, and brother em Dao, didn't like the idea of Dao going off to Hanoi. Who would kill and cook the chickens and the pigs?		Chi Dao goes for gold.		One favourite trick of the locals was to put down these shafts in their back yard down to bedrock. The gold bearing was layer was down about 10 metres. They would excavate, and undercut the sides of the shaft once at the bottom, which resulted in regular cave-ins and fatalities. Once mined out, the hole was used as a long drop toilet, if it wasn't a grave.

Alluvial Mining

A 40 tonne excavator in the Con River, Ha Giang Province, Vietnam. The piles of gravel on the far bank are from the local bucket ladder dredges.		No point in messing around. A 100 metre per hour diesel-electric vibrating deck sluice plant with boiler boxes. When the Vietnamese locals saw this beast they changed their mind about letting us dredge their river.		A more modern method of terrace mining. It didn't impress the locals.

Mineral Exploration in Australia

Drilling with a vacuum rig around Tennant Creek. Good for soil sampling and very fast. Not a lot of penetration power but able to drill through soft rock to refusal.		RC drilling near Pine Creek, Northern Territory.

Gold Price (USD$)