Do you mean an ordinary post hole digger? Is Petrol the name of the maker? I could not find it on the net.
WA desert - check the map for the few green bits near Perth and down south - the rest is desert! Red earth desert may be hard to dig in - equipment to do this discretely? Roadside - road upgrades, lane widening could result in buried materials being inadvertantly displaced. New developments always occuring could lead to this depending on where it is. State Forest - check in an area that won't be logged or cleared for some reason resulting in uprooting trees and dirt near them- sadly still may occur even though ''protected''. State Forest and other forest areas may be subject to controlled burns or wild bushfires, depth would still be important as well as GPS coordinates - the big tree near the brown rock might not be there in the future. Cheap small block land near Perth - cough, cough. Try near Geraldton - 6 hours drive, but at least you'll find it again when you want to collect your PM. Or, buy small investment property anywhere in a cheap Perth suburb, kick tenants out while you bury PM, build patio and BBQ for new tenants to use on top of PM, rent out, rest easy - make sure you leave a note in your will - "hey kids, check under BBQ in Armadale for spare change". Australia is a big place, WA is the biggest single bit - around 3 times the size of Texas. Tourists wandering/driving around in the ''real'' WA desert do die from lack of preparation - it is not on an irregular basis. Would not advise trying it. Alternatively, I'm 15 minute drive from PM, have a few big trees (looks just like state forest) and good hole digger! Storage fee 1 ounce per month!
Afterthought - check www.realestate.com.au for images of WA areas with land for sale. Not just to buy, but to see the type of landscape in those areas and there will be google maps attached to many pictures of land for sale so you can zoom in and have a look.
Serious question to the OP: If the goal is to hide your PMs to counter the threat of confiscation, is burying them the best way to achieve that? More than a few people left South Africa in the 80s and 90s with their life's savings stored in Krugerrands hidden in hollowed out walking sticks and crutches.
I just asked a real estate agent: "What is your thought on an appropriate price range of a very small lot of land with nothing, or almost nothing, on it in the middle of nowhere or in a ghost town? " The reply was: "prices can range anywhere from 68k to 500k it all depends on how far out you want to travel so it is easier to let me know what budget you have and form there I am able to tell you what you can get for that budget. Also it all depends on what you plan to do with the land, the further out you travel from Perth the less expensive the land." Does it sound OK in the local market?
I am not sure about appellation "OP" but I guess it could be addressed to me. I am not into gold at all. So extreme portability is out of the question for me. But my general idea is to wait out the period of the confiscation. Which could take a long time. It is just a lesser of the evils to me personally.
OP = original poster (you). Personally, I would have severe reservations about buying my stack in the bush somewhere. It's not the worst idea in the world but, for me at least, the risks of doing that would be greater than the risks of going with some of the other options available. You would be amazed at the number of times a piece of dirt in the middle of nowhere gets dug up twice.
I agree with you wholeheartedly that it is not the best option. But besides from buying a lot of land, which it seems to be too expensive ( though I doubt it is really the lowest price available, maybe I should look for it myself without a real estate agent somehow) there is no other options in my case. It is either a confiscable depository or burying somewhere. Braking it into small parts to diversify is the only way to lower the risk of "getting dug up twice".
Sparrow, I do think at this time you are overstating the chance of confiscation. See http://forums.silverstackers.com/message-95206.html#p95206 for my views on it. I think being overseas you haven't got an on-the-ground view of the "mood" in Australia. I would guess that even the most strongest "if you don't hold it you don't own it" person would agree that Australia is no where near the point that the Government would need or consider confiscation. This is what the Aussie stackers here are telling you in a roundabout way. That is not to say that situations can't change quickly, but i don't think confiscation will just happen overnight. Whilst it is not the best of times in the non-mining states of Australia, there is not real doom and gloom mood in the country. Before we get there Australia will have to see a crash in China, which will kill the mining boom going on (the only thing holding us up). That will result in unemployment going up and housing prices starting to fall. Keep in mind that Aussies are paying 7% interest rates on house debt, so first thing Govt is going to do is cut that big time - plenty of room to move down to 0% like US. That will stablise things for a while. If not then Govt has big capacity to take on debt to pump prime the economy (our debt-to-GDP is only 13%, see http://www.theaustralian.com.au/bus...rld-debt-crisis/story-e6frg9if-1225840644595) and will have to given the significant personal debt Aussies hold. My point is that Govt has significant capacity in interest rates and debt to try the same stupid thing the US has. US managed to buffer the 2008 crash till now without any confiscation (couple of years). Aussie Govt "solutions" above will be tried first and it will take a year or two before its realised they haven't worked and then they start to look around for other solutions. Only at this point could you consider confiscation to be on the cards. Australia as always is a few years behind the US. The advantage of this is you almost have a future prediction of our Govt's behaviour as they are likely to do the same things - you will almost be able to tick them off a list I'd suspect. None of the above is saying you shouldn't plan, but I'm saying you will have plenty of warning signs before you need to put your plans into action. Silversardine's comments about Perth state forests are good and why I'd rule them out. Anything 100 miles of Perth is just not remote enough and while there is a lot of area and you could drive a 4WD/SUV/Truck far out into the middle of them under the guise of camping, you still run the risk of having bushwalkers, other 4WD, dirt bike hoons etc bumping into you while you're burying your stash. My suggestion is to come to Perth on a holiday, hire a 4WD and drive to Melbourne. A great adventure/holiday and good cover story. On the way, you'll have to stop on the Nullabor for a night, drive off the road, set up camp and bury the stash. See http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&sou...68,127.727051&spn=14.523919,19.753418&t=h&z=6 for the key part of the trip. That section is 1200km/750miles. No chance of road widening or logging or subdivisions or anything basically. I'm assuming you wouldn't be doing all this for 10oz of gold? Must be a nice problem to have. BullionBull - maybe Sparrow is legit, maybe not, but it is an interesting topic to think about. I've had many unusual discussions with Depository clients in my time and although I've never been asked to think about burying options, it doesn't strike me as out of the ordinary. Maybe I'll suggest the Mint could put together a Bury Your Stash holiday package: various holiday "itineraries" (state forest walkabout, Nullabor, Up North), arrange hire cars, tents & shovels, design a special "bury box" to fit our coin and bar sizes perfectly which is water and rust proof?
About hiding metals, please note http://forums.silverstackers.com/topic-7272-hiding-metal-horror-stories.html
You can bet there'll be truckies now driving up and down the Nullabor with metal dtectors looking at camp spots or GPSing any campers they spot for future attention.
Lol. Best post I've read in a while. It begs the question though of getting the stuff out I'd change the stainless chain to thick nylon rope for other anchor lines leading to a buried stack. A metal detector will pick up the chain but not nylon rope.
bron suchecki, I love your writings including one on the prospects of the confiscation! I have become suspicious not of your government in general though as far as I can recall quite recently one of your bosses did try to do something which I did not like at all. I am distrusting all the fraudulent fiat system. First of all the USA. It just recently occur to me that after it's collapsed everything would change. Drastically. There will be no globalization and everything which it entails. Everybody will be taking care of its own. The way it should be. Old stile reputation will be worth much less. The very reason I wanted to hide in the " PM bunker" was to avoid being robbed by the leaches. It would be a dereliction of duty to not be consistent to the very end. Maybe I would trust the Swiss with my PM. They can do nothing but store wealth. But for Australia it is just a side job. There is too much English Fabian Socialist spirit in it. Which I dislike. Therefore I do not feel comfortable with it. Sorry.
$68 000 - $500 000 for land (no house) in the local market is fairly accurate - the low end would be way out - even out of Geraldton I would think - try Mullewa! Upper range if near small towns in WA mid west would be for larger acerages or if closer to Geraldton for example would be coastal suburbs. Looking without an agent wouldn't help much - but you could try a private real estate site (search online) - wouldn't save very much and could result in faulty contracts if not done correctly. Perth real estate is expensive, as is much of the rest of Australia. Would cost about $280 000 for a small house and land in Armadale for example which is an outer Perth suburb. Much of Perth is more expensive than that by a long way. Bron's suggestion to travel the Nullabor is good - don't bury anything near Coober Pedy though - opal miners everywhere - and lots of big holes in the ground to fall into! However, it is true that most of us here in Australia don't really have any expectation that the gov't will come knocking on our doors looking for shiny stuff to take away. Having dealt with a few govt depts recently I honestly don't think they could organise themselves to get the right person to the right door anyway! In fact, if you sent the relevant department an email and said " got your confiscation notice - come and get my PMs", you would have to make 5 follow up calls, re-send all your previous emails and paperwork, find out three people had left that job and the new person/s didn't know anything about it, then eventually ring the ombudsman and get the dept fined three times for not following up on reports, only to finally have them cancel the confiscation because the original confiscation notice was now over 12 months old and there was a new government in place. It is true that maybe we feel more secure here in Australia than we should, thinking ''it'' (whatever IT is) will not happen here. But, IT would probably need to happen almost everywhere else in the world before IT would happen here and we would hear about it well in advance. As Bron said, there would be a fair warning of that type of political or economic climate allowing ample reaction time (even to vote that gov't out perhaps!). There is a reason that we feel more secure here and perhaps it is difficult to understand that if you are from a very different culture/country- and that is a reference to how informed people who live in Australia think, not to the unaware sheeple, as some would call the average non PM stacker.
http://www.realestate.com.au/property-livestock-vic-glenpatrick-7288036 Just do a realestate search for land > 40,000 m2 (10 acres) and put price lowest to highest. That is 20 acres of bushland 200km from melbourne for $35,000 and there are thousands of those out there.
Big call seeing as it sounds like you've never visited here. I hear Australia being labelled "socialist" by Americans all the time, which apparently is primarily due to our Medicare system. Apart from that though, our governments can't privatise government owned corporations and utilities fast enough, which to me is the opposite of socialism! Australian political doctrine is less about "everyone being equal" and more about "minimum standards". We still have a housing bubble down here, partly because of the favorable tax treatment of property investors. The government actively supports this minority of Australians in staying ahead.
