Yep, all sounds fair enough. I'd feel the same way if it were my place.
there's a few blokes on here with attitudes that aren't welcome, like complaining if a cocky denies access when door knocking as if they had the right to be on their private land
Perhaps some of these comments are made out of frustration? You're a very lucky bloke, far luckier than 99.99% of fossickers in that you have your own private fossicking area in your back yard. This is something almost all other fossickers can only dream of.
It is not a very good time in history to be a fossicker/prospector, certainly not in Queensland at least. People doing the wrong thing in the past has tainted property owners attitudes but the spectre of public liability is right up there with it - simply put, people suing property owners because they didn't look where they put their own clumsy foot in the bush and hurt themselves has pretty much ruined everything. How willing would
you be to take the risk that letting people on your place for a scratch ended with litigation?
There was a time when we prospectors could hold a small miners right applicable in rural areas - it was prospectors who opened up Queensland on the heels of the early explorers, pastoralists and others came later. There were rules, you could not approach a house, shed or other structure within a certain distance, you could not interfere with fences, gates, troughs, bores, stock etc. If you breached the rules, you could lose it.
But small miners rights were repealed some years ago and with it, the number of fossicking opportunities available to most people fell to zero. My region encompasses a vast tract of land, probably almost as big as a small European country. The dominant geology is volcanic and as such, gemmy things are to be found dotted all about the place. Number of legally sanctioned fossicking areas in my region? Zero. Zip, zero, zilch, nada, none. The nearest such area is 5-6 hours drive away from me, too far for a weekend trip.
Large tracts of land have been set aside by state government for timber - that is to say that unlike a national park, every tree with a millable log will eventually be cut down - but if I walk in there and stick a pick in the ground, I'm a criminal and can be punished most severely. Strangely, 4WD clubs can often take their vehicles in there and rip up hillsides with big off-road tyres but if I run a single sieve full of dirt through, I'm gone.
So that leaves us only private property to pursue our once-legitimate recreational activity - and I can tell you that polite requests made to property owners almost always result in a flat "no".
How times change. Prospectors opened up Queensland but now we are almost second-class citizens - distrusted by landholders, despised by greens (who are in policy-making positions of power), effectively locked out of all but a tiny handful of purpose-made areas scattered very, very far and wide across an enormous state.
There can be no excuse for trespassing - but the frustration is understandable from my point of view.
