Digging through the red-brown dirty in Victoria’s north-east, the gold prospector stops as he spots a black nugget.
Chris Bogusis hadn’t happened upon gold, or any other precious metal. Instead, he had accidentally disturbed the burrow of a venomous Australian spider in the remote bush.
The species has similar toxins to the Sydney funnel-web and is highly venomous.
“I noticed a big, black squishy thing that was definitely not a rock,” Bogusis told 9news.com.au.
“I’m just thankful that when I pushed it, it must have pushed it in butt first by the way it was oriented in the scoop.
“I’d never seen a spider like that before.
“It was very unusual. I didn’t see any of the webs, normally when you did up a funnel-web you see the webs and the silk.”
Bogusis said the spider was thankfully “quite docile”, and let him move it to nearby leaf litter.
“Once I got an identification on it, I moved it out of the way,” he said.
“But it was as I was reading about it, I realised just how spicy the animal really was.”
Bogusis started prospecting full-time about seven years ago after “dabbling” with it growing up.
The former archery coach is no stranger to dangerous creatures working in the bush.
He’s stepped on venomous eastern brown snakes and his boxer Fern has even sustained a dry bite, meaning it contained no venom, from one of the reptiles.
“We always wear snake gaiters and ‘walk like a herd of elephants’ is our mantra,” he said.
“Luckily, every time I’ve stepped on a snake it’s been the tail end and their head has been entwined in thick grass.”
Somewhat ironically, Bogusis said his most dangerous animal encounter didn’t happen Down Under.
It happened while walking through a university in British Columbia, Canada’s westernmost province, on a freezing cold day.
“I was going for a walk outside my mining partner’s place and I saw a lizard on the ground,” Bogusis said.
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“I thought ‘oh geez, that lizard is going to get squished. He looks cold and miserable’.
“So I picked him up and tried to find a place to put him and these three teachers stop me.
“One told me ‘that’s an orange-bellied salamander. They are quite toxic’.
“I just dead-eyed them and, I can’t believe to this day I said this, but I said, ‘Oh, it will be fine, I’m Australian’.”
After finding a safe spot for the animal, Bogusis shared his photos online and was quickly informed he had just handled one of the most toxic animals in North America.
“As of the 1970s it had killed six people,” he said.
“It has one of the same toxins as the blue-ringed octopus and excretes it through its skin.”
His adventures have taken him from the wilds of Canada, to the famed “Golden Triangle”, an area from Ballarat across to Bendigo and up to St Arnaud.
But he said “95 per cent” of his gold hunting occurs in a remote region in the north-east; one he would prefer to keep under wraps.
“I found quite a significant chunk of gold not too long ago,” he said.
“We hunt for old mines, so there’s a lot of historical records we use, and then we basically go out into the bush, into these stupidly remote places, and try and find holes in the ground.
“Occasionally you stumble across a mine holding quite a bit of gold.”
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