The Uranium Hunters

by Ross Annabell

Rigby, 1971, [First Edition], ISBN 0851791522, black and white photographic plates, hardcover, dustjacket

Very Good Condition, minor edge and shelf wear, minor rubbing and bumping to edges and corners, no inscriptions, dustjacket shows minor edge and shelf wear (see photographs)

“Uranium hit the news in a big way in August 1970, when the huge deposit of uranium ore found by a woman prospector in the Northern Territory of Australia was valued at many millions of dollars.
The hope of making such a lucky strike was what kept Ross Annabell in the Northern Territory after he was fired from his job as “Editor, chief sub-editor, copy-holder, reader, and chief whipping-boy of the Northern Territory News”.  To learn how to find uranium, he tagged along with a prospecting team which was to make one of the Territory’s biggest strikes, but for the time being he found that there was more money in writing about uranium for news-hungry journals than in looking for it himself.
But at last the lure of a buried fortune became so magnetic that he teamed up with an ex-seaman, and the pair of amateur prospectors slogged off into the rugged hills and bushland.  To begin with, they made every mistake in the book.  They lost themselves, wandered in circles, and followed many false leads.  But they had a lot of fun, including a side venture into crocodile-shooting in which they discovered that “Sex was the mainspring of the Daly River economy.””