A new breed of Australian gold miners has engineered a renaissance that is winning the world's attention, report Peter Ker and Tess Ingram.
When Joe Foster cleared customs at Melbourne's Tullamarine Airport in   February, it was the first time in 15 years that an Australian immigration stamp had adorned his passport.
Life as the world's biggest active gold investor is busy, and despite producing more gold than all nations except China, Australia had simply not warranted his attention since the turn of the millennium.
"There weren't enough gold companies in Australia to justify a trip and the expense of going all the way down there," Foster, who runs several gold funds for New York investment giant Van Eck, says. 
"Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the South Africans and North Americans took out all the Australian mid-tier and senior companies and there really wasn't much left of interest."
But his interest has been revived. Foster has come to Australia to witness firsthand the extraordinary renaissance of a 165-year-old industry that has taken place in the past three years.
The Australian gold scene was about as fashionable as a hypercolour T-shirt in the winter of 2013.
The tail-end of the resources boom was keeping wages, equipment and input costs high, and then a surprise 30 per cent slump in the gold price sent many local miners into the red.
The biggest of them, Newcrest Mining, was among the worst-performing. It dived from $24.52 to $6.99 in nine months in 2013, a drop of 72 per cent.
With asset valuations slashed by billions of dollars, large international miners raced to quit their "high-cost" Australian mines. As well as watching share prices dive, investors had to swallow lower yield. Again, Newcrest is a good example; it froze dividends in 2013 and hasn't paid one since.
In an extraordinary, almost simultaneous sell-down, Colorado-based Alacer Gold, Canada's Barrick, Russia's Norilsk and US miner Newmont sold a swath of gold mines across Australia and New Zealand, and they weren't the only ones rushing for the exits.
Carrying big debt loads, the international miners wanted to liquidate non-core assets and focus on their flagship mines, most of which were in the Americas. The strategy seemed logical, but, in hindsight, was a huge mistake.
"When you are selling assets in the bottom of a bear market, that is very bad timing in my view," Foster says. "We want to see the opposite; we want to see companies building themselves up in a bear market.
"I think it created a great opportunity for the companies that were able to pick up those properties."
First to step into the breach was local junior Metals X, which spent $40 million buying Canadian company Alacer Gold's two mines near Kalgoorlie in   October 2013.
But more than most companies, Northern Star will be remembered as the early mover. Eight directors, including managing director Bill Beament, had worked inside many of the Western Australian mines that were about to hit the market.
During his time working for mining contractor Barminco, Beament had overseen underground mining at Barrick's Plutonic mine. He knew the geology firsthand, and knew the untapped gold resources that a company of Barrick's size considered too much effort. He also knew the extra fat that came with bureaucratic mining majors.
When Plutonic was put on the market in 2013, Northern Star pounced. Beament described the $25 million purchase as a "screaming" deal.
It was the first in a flurry of deals; within six months, Northern Star had bought five mines, including Newmont's Jundee,, which had often been rated among the top five producers in Australia.
Evolution Mining, then a middling gold miner with big ambitions, had unsuccessfully bid on several of the mines snared by Beament's team. Soon enough, though, its time would come.
With Northern Star gorged like a python that had swallowed more than its own body weight, Evolution had a clear run when Barrick sold its Cowal mine in NSW for $US550 million in   May 2015.
It was a transformational purchase, and came within seven months of two smaller acquisitions: a scrip deal to take the Australian mines of Egyptian-owned company La Mancha, and some exploration ground through the purchase of Phoenix Gold.
By the time Melbourne-based OceanaGold had completed the $US101 million purchase of Newmont's Waihi mine in New Zealand, 14 Australasian gold mines and 23 per cent of Australian gold production had changed hands in little more than two years.
"We have had a reemergence of an Australian gold sector, especially amongst the mid-tier and small-cap companies," Foster says.
Foreign companies' ownership of Australian gold production has been higher than 70 per cent at times in recent decades, but the buying spree drove that down below 50 per cent.
Having made their own luck during the big turnover of assets, a big tailwind started fill the sails of Australian gold's new breed.
From $US1.05 in early 2013, the Australian dollar slipped in concert with gold and other commodity prices. Australian gold producers were receiving US dollars for their gold, but paying their costs in the ever-weaker Australian dollar.
The local currency was $US0.745 on Friday; a fall of about 30 per cent in three years.
Mass job cuts across coal, iron ore and nickel mines freed up labour and contractors, and gave companies the bargaining power.
A sliding oil price in 2015 was the icing on the cake, delivering cheaper diesel to mines that operate far beyond the electricity grid.
This was a tide that lifted all local boats, including those that had missed out on the buying spree, such as Regis Resources.
Repair and restructure jobs such as St Barbara started to soar in valuation, while even the small, marginal mines in the historic Victorian gold towns of Ballarat, Stawell and Bendigo returned to profitability.
Some shuttered mines, such as Saracen's Thunderbox mine in Western Australia, have reopened in the past year after years in hibernation.
With most investors watching the lacklustre performance of the benchmark gold price, which is measured in US dollars, Sandra Close, a director at specialist gold consultancy Surbiton Associates, recently pondered whether local investors realised how good a time it was to be an Australian gold miner.
"I wonder if investors are aware that the Australian-dollar gold price, at around $1700 per ounce, is only about $100 per ounce less than the all-time-record Australian-dollar gold price reached in   August 2011," she says.
The twin trends of asset accumulation and cost deflation have delivered astonishing wealth to Australia's new breed of gold miners.
Evolution and OceanaGold have seen their respective market capitalisations surge from about $600 million in mid-2013 to about $2.4 billion on Friday.
From a $79 million tiddler in   July 2013, Saracen has blossomed into an $830 million company.
St Barbara was in ruins in   December 2014 when it was valued at just $35 million, but the arrival of Bob Vassie has precipitated an amazing recovery to a market capitalisation of $1.13 billion.
In the six years since its shares were fetching 3.7Â¢, Northern Star shares have become 103 times more valuable to trade at $3.82. Those five mine acquisitions have delivered to Northern Star shareholders a $2.37 billion market capitalisation.
Among the beneficiaries of the valuation rise is Beament, and his management have been among the most deserving.
Like most of the Northern Star team, Beament pumped his own money into the company during its penny-dreadful days, and his 10.82 million shares are now worth almost $42 million.
Australian gold's establishment company, Newcrest, has also soared in valuation from less than $6 billion to $13.4 billion in less than three years, without buying a thing.
Far from unfashionable, Australia is now among the world's most attractive destinations for investing in gold, Foster says.
"If I had to single out a country, I think Canada and Australia are standouts right now, and both for similar reasons. The currencies are weak and the costs are low. I don't think I could pick one over the other," he says.
Amazing gold opportunities exist in places where wages are dramatically lower, such as west Africa, Latin America and Papua New Guinea.
But like many institutional investors, Foster doesn't want a bar of the geopolitical risk that comes with those jurisdictions.
"I am more or less avoiding places like Indonesia or PNG. I am OK if it's part of a broader portfolio which is diversified geographically, but if I am investing in a single mine or or single property company I would avoid those areas."
Foreign institutions have poured into Australia's mid-tier gold stocks, and now dominate the share registers of the new breed, although some of that is due to scrip-based deals during the buying spree.
Only 6 per cent of OceanaGold's register is now Australian - well below the 38 per cent hold that locals had on the company in 2012. American, Canadian and European investors have picked up the slack.
A similar scenario has played out at Evolution, where in the past 15 months, Australian ownership has fallen from 58.4 per cent to 24.8 per cent.
"I think there has been a lot more interest with offshore funds in Australian gold companies," Newcrest chief executive Sandeep Biswas said in   February.
"We do have a lot of offshore shareholders in our shareholder base."
The Australian exposure of Foster's own GDX gold fund has grown from less than 4 per cent in 2013 to about 12 per cent today.
But Foster stresses no destination is perfect.
"Australian companies tend to have short reserve lives," he says, in reference to the untapped gold still available to miners.
"That is one of the disadvantages. Investors like to see a longer reserve life than what these companies are showing currently.
"What I found on my trip is that these companies are working, doing a lot of drilling now they have money to spend, so I think we will see the reserve lives increasing across a lot of these companies."
Having digested their acquisitions, the likes of Northern Star and Evolution are now focusing on organic growth, and are pumping millions of dollars into the ground through exploration drilling. They hope to find the extra gold reserves within and around their mines that the likes of Barrick and Newmont couldn't be bothered to chase.
Data released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in recent weeks revealed national gold exploration expenditure had hit a 2\xC2&#189;-year high of $138.2 million.
The spend is up 70 per cent from the 14-year low seen in mid-2014.
With the world starting to notice the Australian gold scene, two miners have recently had approaches for their mines.
The mine that started Northern Star's buying spree, Plutonic, is in the shop window, after receiving unsolicited bids.
Better known as a nickel miner, Panoramic Resources says it has also received interest in its shuttered Gidgee gold asset.
But despite those approaches, few believe the big international miners are about to buy back into Australia.
"I don't see that pendulum changing where international [mining] companies are starting to look to Australia in the near term. But never say never," Evolution managing director Jake Klein said in   February.
Pengana Capital's resources fund manager Tim Schroeders agrees: "There will be some assets come up for sale but I don't think you are going to see a mass migration back to Australia."
Like any self-respecting gold bug, Foster is convinced the new breed of Australian gold companies will find supportive pricing for any new exploration discoveries in the years ahead, despite the US Federal Reserve recently raising interest rates for the first time in nine years.
"I think we will look back on that [the rise in US interest rates on   December 16] as a turning point across many markets ... it has finally happened and it looks like the Fed might have made a mistake and it doesn't look like they will be able raise as aggressively as they thought," Foster says.
"They might have to reverse course at some point; that is causing people to lose faith and trust in central banks and that is a big reason why gold is moving higher this year. We have been in a very strong down trend for five years and we have finally broken out of that.
"My target [gold price] was $US1225 per ounce; once we cleared that, I was willing to declare an end to the bear market. Now we will see if the $US1225 per ounce level becomes the support level."