General News
5 June, 2024
Has Bluey Beeman stumbled upon the North West's next big thing?
Scott Sheard, better known as Bluey Beeman, thinks he's found a big deposit of minerals.
The story of fossicking, prospecting, and mining usually starts with a wanderer – a man exploring some quiet corner of earth in search of something – a man who is often shocked and stunned when he actually stumbles upon it.
John Campbell Miles, the founder of Mount Isa, had been a ploughman, water carter, railway navvy, wild pig hunter and windmill repairman before he stumbled upon coarse galena, the sulphide of lead, inside a random rock he had decided to hack away at while his horse was wallowing beside a small watering hole between Duchess and Camooweal more than a century ago.
Scott Sheard is another wanderer. The red haired 52-year-old arrived in Mount Isa two decades ago – he had worked as a builder with Blue Star Contracting, moonlighted as a taxi driver and become known around the city as a beekeeper (AKA Bluey Beeman) before a serious back injury temporarily halted him in his tracks.
But you can’t force a wanderer to be sedentary for too long and so it was that Bluey soon began looking to rehabilitate himself with some “exercise with purpose,” as he puts it.
Bluey soon rediscovered an old hobby – he dug out his fossicking equipment and began taking his two sons and wife on Sunday picnics, mostly around Lake Julius, armed with a well-thumbed copy of Mount Isa Trails, where he would combine some hiking with studies of the local native bee population and, of course, a bit of fossicking.
It was on one such Sunday outing when he was walking – quite literally – in the footsteps of Campbell Miles, that he made a chance discovery that has changed the direction of his life.
Of course, he just didn’t know that at the time.
“I went out there with my gold detector and I thought the chances of me actually discovering any gold were next to none, but I thought it was a way to motivate myself to get off the couch and get out there for some exercise while spending a bit of time with my boys who love going out and smashing some rocks,” Bluey said.
So when he stumbled on a few ‘silver icebergs,’ as he calls them, scattered on the ground in a location slightly off the highway, halfway between Mount Isa and Cloncurry, in 2017, he took them home merely as a keepsake and tossed them under a mango tree in his yard, where they would remain for the next three years.
“I didn’t think anything more of them” Bluey admitted.
“It wasn’t until I had a dream during the pandemic that I decided to look at them again.”
Bluey can’t remember the exact moment he focused on those silver icebergs again – he says he might have seen something on the television about gold and silver investing, which was common during the pandemic – but he does remember a vivid dream he had where he stood proudly, side by side with local politicians Tony McGrady and Robbie Katter as he cut the ribbon on a freshly minted mine.
He took another look at the dirty, abandoned rocks still under the mango tree and decided to pay the $160 to get them tested.
The silver icebergs turned out to be galena, the most common form of lead ore, and the same mineral discovered by Miles that sparked the foundation of Mount Isa.
But even Bluey admits he didn’t believe at first the high-grade occurrences of lead, sulphur and silver reported in his rock samples.
“When I saw the results come back, I thought they had got a decimal point wrong – I showed the results to a few of my mates who agreed that there must be a mistake,” he said.
“But it looked the part, and it felt the part, so I decided to send the samples away again for another look. And results came back even better.”
According to Bluey, the rock chip samples have returned grading results of up to 85.4 per cent Pb (lead), 12.65 per cent sulphur and up to 249 parts per million (ppm) silver.
He was soon on the phone to discover if the tenement was available for purchase from the state government. It wasn’t.
So he took his sample results to a few mates, convinced them to take a risk and invest in the mining game and negotiated the purchase of the tenement from a Perth-based company.
By the end of 2022, he and his mates and family members were in the proud possession of Greens Creek Tenement, operating under the appropriate name, Bluey Beeman Pty Ltd.
Since that time, Bluey said he has spent increasingly more time out at the site, with more results coming in from across the 41km2 tenement – recent soil sampling has uncovered high grade levels of copper, manganese and hematite.
At the weekend another geologist had been at the site, with an XRF machine showing positive signs of rare earth in the soil and rock.
Samples are planned to be sent for further testing in the coming weeks.
Bluey is now looking to rachet up the operation a level – he is on the hunt for investors to chip in up to $100,000 for a Versatile Time Domain Electromagnetic (VTEM) geophysical airborne survey via helicopter to expand the knowledge of the tenement area.
He said geologists had told him the initial surveys indicated there could be more substantial finds yet to be uncovered within the tenement and so gaining further data is crucial.
Bluey said he did not intend for his wanderings to take him into the mining game, but he is committed to the task and believes in his dream of taking the tenement all the way to mining extraction in the future someday.
“At the Mount Isa mining expo (MPX) a few weeks ago, one of the geologists came up to me when he heard what I had found and told me ‘it is men like you that discover places like Mount Isa’,” Bluey said.
“Campbell Miles discovered some heavy rocks all those years ago and got them tested and Mount Isa was born.
“I could be sitting on top of a silver-tipped iceberg.”