yea its not far to travel, i just cant seem to find enough coal with cracks in it lol as its not everywhere, and as for bedrock i dont think it has bed rock just mud going by the history from when the dredges worked the stream, its very bright gold , most flat flakes an odd thicker bits. so only thing left to do would be to get a good sluice going an shovel the gravel for a few hours, if the gold iam getting is flood gold then i should be able to suck these cracks again? what i need to do is invent something that can suck really hard but also fit in the small cracks to clean them better.
as for the mataura river , im not to sure, there is gold there but its a big river.