Ned Conroy, the craggy-browed Scotsman with the missing teeth and a dusty face the colour of the red earth he dug in, loved the bush, and the chase for floaters – those bits of gold on the surface – and then the dig-down search for the hidden reef.

And he wasn’t perturbed by the near-miss when, in the pitch black after his lamp snuffed out, several tons of earth collapsed right in front of him.

Or the time when a large snake tumbled down the mine shaft and landed on his shoulder.

When I visited them in 1970, Ned and his mate Banjo were two of the last three prospectors at Darlot, in Western Australia’s northern goldfields, where once there had been something like 5,000 people.

Ned was an alcoholic. He said working remotely in the bush suited him, keeping him on the task of the search for the yellow stuff, and away from the hotels.

Ned talks widely of the joys of life in isolation, the routine of a bushman, the challenges of surviving when you’re not finding much, and the beauty of a harsh landscape.

From the age of 12 Les Craigie was a professional boxer. In our interview he compared an easily bruised apple with the delicacy of a pummelled human brain. At 21 he’d had enough of the risks, and for the next 25 years he worked deep underground in the Broken Hill silver-lead mines – to face different but equally real dangers.

In 1948 Les climbed up out of the deep shafts and headed west, taking up his own silver-gold claim in the Barratta Ranges. From miner, he became a prospector.

Oh sure, that still meant picking and blasting his way beneath the surface, but with more time up top to gaze and to wander, taking in the beauty of the trees, the wildflowers, and to breathe unpolluted fresh air.

Twenty three years later, in 1970 when I interviewed him, Les Craigie was still his own man, content in the serenity.

Woops. Once again, we’re a long way from the usual Red Dust Tapes Outback territory.

This is the second of the two-part anecdotes of John ’Snow’ Williams, who first went to the Antarctic in 1958, at the end of the International Geophysical Year.

In this era the world was gripped with the fear of nuclear war, with the United States and Russia flinging threats at each other. So it was remarkable that a year of scientific co-operation was achieved, that had many significant, and shared, outcomes.

In this second episode, John talks of expeditions to count fleas on seals and Emperor penguins, one mechanical problem after another, escaping from crevasses, and a brief boozy encounter with the Russians.