Darren started panning for gold with his grandfather at Daylesford in the mid-1970s, aged thirteen, then taught himself metal detecting in the 1980s on a second-hand Garrett Deepseeker — his first nugget took six months to find. He began running regular prospecting trips into Western Australia in 1995 and started buying and selling gold in 2000; the guided tours themselves only began in 2007, after friends kept asking him to teach them. He now runs Gold & Relics from a former bank building in Clunes, with his wife Leanne handling operations and daughter Taleesha the design and social side. One-day tours work the ground around Creswick and Ballarat; bootcamps run two to five days across the Victorian goldfields, and longer trips of seven, ten or fourteen days push out to Kalgoorlie and the Western Australian goldfields. Darren has personally found more than 500 ounces of gold, including a 24-ounce nugget, on country he now guides guests through himself, alongside his own guides Peter and Dave. Gold & Relics is a Parks Victoria Licensed Tour Operator, and every trip — a single day or two weeks — runs on ground the family has worked for decades.