Michael Adams

They would just- Pinch it.

Pinch it.

Yeah.

And then go and process it later.

Or they put it in a dummy mine.

In a dummy mine.

That's exactly right.

Yeah.

So they estimated that in 1906, one third of all gold was being stolen.

It was worth a million pounds at the time, which is about $250 million today.

So an enormous amount of money.

So there's big fortunes, I would imagine big family fortunes still in Western Australia that are actually based on this illicit gold.

So one of the detectives said that...

A bloke rocked into town with two pennies to rub together, and three months later bought a house cash outright.

There was big money to be made, so they started a gold detection unit.

They actually set up a police force in Kalgoorlie, Boulder to stop people thieving gold.

They got the miners, then had to actually go into the mine operation area.

undress, dress in work uniforms, go down, come back up, get back out of their uniforms into their civvies so they couldn't spirit stuff away quite as easily.

Yeah, I'm sure it was still possible but not quite as easy.

Yeah, it wasn't as easy.