I found gold in Sofala.

Sofala is a town the government did not want anyone to know about. Gold was found in the country around it years before the rush, and the discovery was suppressed long enough for officialdom to get its house in order — duties, claims, the architecture of taking a thing from someone and calling it a transaction. It did not work. The rush came anyway, and Sofala is what was left of it: a small main street, an old pub, hills that still hold gold if you know where to look.

I rode out of Sydney early. Hunter — the 2025 Himalayan 450 I had then owned for three months — was loaded heavy: tent, ferro rod, MSR water filter on an Osprey bag, the cast-iron pan I keep meaning to replace and keep not. The plan, written on the back of a Bilpin Four Square receipt, said: Razorback Ridge, Sofala, camp on the Turon, pan in the morning. It is the only honest plan I have ever ridden with.

Three and a half hours, fifth visit, and I still get the geography wrong on the way in.

Razorback Ridge is what it sounds like. It is also the kind of road that punishes riders who’ve started thinking about the campsite before they’ve finished thinking about the corner. I got down without incident, which is the most I’ll ever say about a road I’ve survived. There is a stretch where the tree line breaks and you can see a long way west, and that is where most riders stop and pretend to check their tyres so they can stand and look. I did the same.

▍ Wide · Hunter loaded by the river, fire smoke across the grass

The country here was logged, panned, lost, found, lost again. It still feels like the kind of place that has more secrets than it’s telling.

The river crossing on the way to camp was the first thing that asked something of the bike. Not a deep crossing — knee-high at most — but the bed had been chewed by 4WDs into a mess of bowling-ball cobble, and the line I picked was wrong by about two metres. The boot went in. The boot stayed in. Hunter, to his credit, did not stall, and we came out the far side with my left foot squelching and a small, late, private resolution to pay closer attention to people who’ve already crossed when I haven’t.

I camped on Crown land, which in this part of New South Wales means: park the bike, find a flat spot, leave it better than you found it. Green Point is the well-known alternative — a proper campsite with public toilets along the same river — but for a single night, a fire pit you build yourself is good enough. I made the fire on the second strike of the ferro rod, which is the kind of small competence that feels much larger than it is when you’re alone.

▍ Engine and frame, droplets still on the metal — Hunter after the river crossing

The engine after the crossing. The bike came through better than I did, which is most of what I will ever ask of a bike.

A fire pit you build yourself is good enough. The wood does the moralising for you.

The Turon at night is a quiet, particular kind of quiet. Not silent — there is water, and possums, and the long faint clack of the bike cooling — but quiet enough that the inside of your own head gets noticed. I read for an hour by headtorch and then put the book away because the book was in the way of the night.

Gold collects where the current slows. The trick — what little of it I know — is to read the river for the places it gives up. The roots of an old tree on the inside of a bend. A hollow under a rock that the spring flood would have packed with heavier stuff. I picked the roots. I scooped, swirled, tipped, swirled, tipped — the motion that everyone who has ever panned has done forever, that humans have been doing in this river since the eighteen-fifties — and the heavier black sand gathered in the bottom of the pan.

And under the black sand, when the last water went off the lip, were specks. Not twenty-eight grams in one pan — that was a story from the rush, the kind of number a town tells about itself for a hundred and seventy years — but specks. Real ones. Five or six, brighter than they had any business being against the wet black.

I sat back on my heels and laughed, which is the only useful response to a thing that small mattering that much. Then I scooped again.

A written companion to Episode 1 — I Found Gold in Sofala on the Motorcycle Seat Wisdom YouTube channel.