Digger: One man, one pan and a million square miles of outback

Author(s): Max Anderson

Location(s): Goldfields Region, Western Australia

Genre(s): Adventure, Nonfiction

Era(s): Contemporary

A naïve Englishman stops at a pub in a goldfields ghost town. He has a shovel, a suitcase of books and a dog with a stupid name. “I’d like to find some gold!” he announces brightly. The huge bloke behind the bar takes a pull on his cigarillo and squints through the smoke: “Yeah,” he drawls quietly, “there’s a few around here who’d like to do that…”
As a boy, Max Anderson dug holes in his parents’ back garden hoping to find buried treasure. In 2002, aged 36, he dug another hole for himself: he quit his job with a London newspaper to try his luck among the hard-bitten gold prospectors of the West Australian deserts. Funny, honest and uplifting, Digger is an outback classic combining a modern adventure story with one of the greatest chapters in Australian history – the opening of the Kalgoorlie goldfields. Whether you’re a ‘new chum’ with a metal detector, an old hand cursed with gold fever or an armchair traveller looking for literary riches, Digger will have you yelling ‘Eureka!’

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