Gold has a Spirit is a large format photography book documenting the lives, stories and methods of Western Australia’s gold prospectors.

This body of work grew out of a global project I have been engaged in for quite some years — documenting the lives of the world’s 45 million artisanal miners. Men, women and children mining with their bare hands and the most primitive of tools, producing a significant proportion of the world’s gold, diamonds, coloured gemstones and a significant share of the world’s other mined commodities.

When it was suggested I turn my lens on Australia’s own prospectors I was initially reluctant. The visual spectacle of large groups of miners working confined areas in places such as Burkina Faso, Ghana, the DRC and parts of Central Asia, South America and South-east Asia is extraordinary — and I knew Australia wouldn’t be able to match that.

At the same time I had been writing critically about the compliance regimes being pushed on artisanal miners by organisations such as the OECD and the World Gold Council. Responsible sourcing. Sustainable supply chains.

I had argued — quite forcefully — that these frameworks delivered almost zero benefit to the miners themselves and were designed primarily to benefit developed world consultants and the world’s largest mining companies. By making it cost and compliance prohibitive for the world’s artisanal miners to continue. Which would ultimately lead them to forgoing their access to resources in favour of the world’s largest companies.

Then Covid hit. Travel became very difficult and I decided to examine the lives of Australia’s own artisanal miners instead. I had no idea what I would find.

It is a project that has extended geographically from the State’s Great Southern to the Kimberley in the State’s north.

It is my intention that the results of this project will be released as a hard cover coffee table book along the lines of my more recent photographic books.

Additional images from this project can be seen in the gallery section of this website.

Over the course of a number of years I gathered some 1500 pages or more of interview transcripts and am currently in the process of synthesising and summarising them all. A huge project which is part and parcel of every book I do these days.

If all goes well I hope to be able to have the printed version of the book back here in Australia ready for distribution during 2027.

I may also do some further interview and photographic work just to augment areas that have piqued my interest.

Some people have suggested that this work is an update of the work that Trish Ainslie and Roger Garwood did during the early 1990s in Western Australia’s Goldfields.

In some ways I guess it is. But in others I would have loved to have had the canvas those great photographers did when they produced their books.

But time moves on and the magnificent people they got to know and photograph - and the times that they lived in - have also moved on. Only to be replaced by other similarly magnificent prospectors that I have been fortunate to come across. The main difference being that this modern world has killed the uniqueness and much of the beauty that lay embedded in the lives that Ainslie and Garwood’s old timers graced.

So this book is my own crack at the remnants of Ainslie and Garwood’s dying breed that was reflected so wonderfully in the titles Off like Flies and Chook on Sundays.

What I found in my work was fascinating — and deeply troubling.

But this book is not only about regulation. It is about the people. Over a number of years I sat with prospectors from the Great Southern to the Kimberley and recorded more than 1500 pages of their stories — how they came to prospecting, how they work, and why they keep going when so much is stacked against them. They are some of the most magnificent people I have had the privilege to photograph.

Regulation had largely killed Australia’s artisanal mining industry. Environmental compliance, native title, cultural heritage legislation, occupational health and safety frameworks — a quagmire of costly regulation that the big mining companies, with their armies of lawyers and entire environment departments, could absorb easily. But which had quietly strangled the small operator.

The game had been rigged for the big guys.

Working batteries had closed en masse, making it almost impossible for small operators to get their ore processed. Underground miners were close to impossible to find.

Despite searching my home state with an almost literal fine tooth comb, genuine full-time artisanal miners were extraordinarily rare. And for every one I found, the problems were almost identical.

Australia’s mining industry was built on the backs of artisanal miners. It happened in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — and now those same forces are at work in the world’s poorest countries, dressed up in the language of human rights and environmental responsibility. A proverbial Trojan horse.

I have no doubt that what happened here awaits the world’s 45 million artisanal miners if the world’s richest nations are allowed to impose this path.

The attention being paid to artisanal mining in developing countries has little to do with caring about miners, their rights or their environment. It is about access. Access to readily mineable reserves — something few Western countries can any longer claim to have.

And Australia’s prospectors confirmed to me exactly where this road leads.

I am an internationally recognised Australian documentary photographer, with more than 20 years working across more than 35 countries on four continents.

I have published nine large format hardcover coffee table books. Eight are sold out.

My work has taken me into some of the most remote and difficult environments on earth documenting large-scale and artisanal mining operations. This has included work documenting some of the world’s highest altitude miners, an active volcano, conflict zones and politically highly sensitive jurisdictions across Africa, Eurasia, Latin America and Australia.

I have documented large-scale and artisanal mining longer and more extensively than almost any photographer working today. I speak at mining conferences around the world about the lives of artisanal miners.

Gold has a Spirit came out of a detour during the Covid years but captures images of Western Australia’s prospectors that date back more than 20 years. It is the book that came out of a book.

Work with the world’s miners has become a part of my life that I could never have imagined. This book reflects deep learnings that have come from my time with miners across Western Australia.