Sofala, and the river that gives.

Razorback Ridge, a sketchy crossing of the Turon, and a first pan that did not come up empty.

The Turon was deeper than the line on the bank suggested. Halfway across, water came over the boot, then the gusset of the pant, and Hunter’s revs dropped through the kind of register that has the rider’s mouth go dry without consulting the rider. He didn’t stall. The far bank rose, the front wheel found a slab of shale that wanted to take it sideways, and we were across before I’d quite processed being in.

Sofala is three and a half hours west of Sydney if you take the freeway, longer if you don’t. I didn’t. The back way in is over Razorback Ridge — gravel switchbacks, paddocks the colour of old hay, magpies on the fence-posts giving the bike a long, considered look. The Turon flows slow at the bottom of it. Slow enough that the heavy stuff has time to settle, which is the only reason any of what I came for was here in the first place.

Sofala is the oldest gold-mining town in Australia. The rush hit in 1851. For a short, electric stretch the population went up several thousand percent and every farmhand within a fortnight’s ride dropped his plough and walked here. Edward Hargraves had found the first payable gold a few months earlier near Bathurst and the colonial government had, very quietly, asked him not to mention it — they had a colony to run, and a colony with no farmhands is not a colony for long. The news got out anyway. News like that always does.

Gold settles where current slows. So, it turns out, does most of what is worth noticing.

I picked a bend on the river where a willow had fallen across the inside of a curve. The roots had pulled a small dam of gravel into a shape that looked, to my untrained eye, like a place a heavy thing might come to rest. Gold is nineteen-and-a-bit times heavier than water. It does not float, it does not drift, it lies down in every eddy and hollow and waits. The trick of finding it is mostly the trick of standing where the river is too tired to carry it any further.

The first pan came up with several specks. They are small enough that a breath moves them, and large enough that the back of the brain registers them with a tiny, unreasonable jolt — the same jolt, I suspect, the man in 1851 felt when he tipped his pan and saw what he saw. The records from the rush mention a single pan, on a good day, on a good bend, that came up with twenty-eight grams. I did not pull twenty-eight grams. I pulled enough to know the river had not forgotten how.

The Chinese miners came after the Europeans. They worked the creeks the rush had given up on — the boring ones, the slow ones, the ones where the easy gold had been taken and only the patient gold was left. They re-worked tailings. They built wing-dams the Europeans hadn’t bothered with. They were, by all accounts I can find, the most careful workers on the field, and the careful ones found gold the hurried ones had walked past. There is a small lesson in that, sitting on a riverbank with a pan, and I tried not to make too much of it.

I camped on Crown land beside the river. No-one for kilometres. The MSR pump on the Osprey bag, water boiled twice for a cup of tea, a wallaby in the scrub doing the still-as-stone thing wallabies do until they decide you are not, in the end, the shape of a problem. The fire was small and legal. The stars came out the way they do when there is no town between you and them.

Panning is paying attention, slowed down. You scoop, you submerge, you swirl, you tilt — and the only way the trick works is if you do each step at the speed the water is willing to be worked at. Hurry it and you wash the heavy stuff out with the light. Riding is the same animal. Hurry the corner and the corner takes its tax. Most things worth doing reward the same kind of attention. The river was just the river that taught me first.

The fire went down to coals.

The wallaby went back into the scrub.

The Turon kept doing what the Turon does.

A written companion to Episode 1: I found gold in Sofala on the Motorcycle Seat Wisdom YouTube channel.