If you’ve been to Tocumwal then you have probably heard of the large Airbase that was there during WW II until the 1960’s. We managed to find some crown land that sits on an old piece of the airbase and took the X-Terras over it for the day. We got no signals at all for a start and then we both hit old dump sites close to each other. The X-Terra’s had a bit of a struggle to separate targets so lots of digging was involved to weed out the junk.
I picked up this 1916 English penny in my dump spot but the best finds were coming from the other site. We found 3 large machine gun shells probably from a Browning gun mounted on an aircraft, manufactured in US during WWII.
There were plenty of broken bottles in both spots with the occasional whole one coming up.
There was a number of old toys coming up as well.
As far as coins were concerned we had found mostly half pennies at the dump spots, almost all around 1940’s issue.
I went to detect around a small hill nearby, picking up about 20 rifle shells and odd bits and pieces of machinery. In a quiet spot with no junk signals, I came across a florin, soon followed by another and a sixpence.
The area near this spot was full of tin and sheets of metal, presumably, a building had been bulldozed and buried. Maybe more than one building as a lot of ground was undetectable for us.
The usual belt buckles and utensils, as well as rifle shells which were a bit smaller than the .303’s we usually find. One last sweep of the dump sites turned up a threepence but nothing else so we called it a day.
You can find a written history here on the website of the local aviation museum.