About Find Better Country

We take public, official datasets — government geoscience and mineral records, forest boundaries and gazetted fossicking districts, terrain, watercourses and access — and turn them into a clear, ranked read of where to focus in a given forest. It's the same work a careful hunter or prospector does over dozens of hours of maps and satellite imagery, done in minutes and laid out plainly.

We don't sell secret spots. We point you at the right country and explain the reasoning behind it, so you can find the exact spot yourself on the ground. That's deliberate — it's how you actually learn to read country, it spreads people out instead of funnelling everyone to the same hole, and it means what you're buying is understanding, not someone else's pin.

Find Better Country started with a simple frustration: wanting a faster, more rigorous way to work out where to go in unfamiliar country, without days hunched over maps and satellite imagery. I'm not claiming to be the most experienced hunter or prospector out there — I'm a data person who loves the bush, and the guides are the process I use myself, built properly and shared. They get better every time someone tells me what's useful and what isn't, so if you've got local knowledge or a better way of seeing it, I'm all ears.

Every guide tells you where the data is strong and where it runs out. We work from recorded, public information: it's a genuine head start, not a guarantee. Records are incomplete, mapped positions are approximate, and country changes with the seasons and the years. Our guides are a companion to your own boots and your own official maps — never a replacement for them. For anything legal or safety-critical — where you can legally hunt or fossick, exclusion zones, current access — always check the official source. When we're confident, we say so. When we're not, we say that too.

Guides for NSW state forests, covering:

• Deer hunting — terrain, bedding and feed country, access and scouting routes
• Gold prospecting — recorded workings, creek and gradient character, the ground worth working
• Sapphire & zircon fossicking — recorded gem occurrences, host geology, creek sites inside the legal fossicking district

We're expanding across NSW guided by what people actually ask for. Can't see the forest you want? Request a guide.

• Guides beyond NSW — the same approach, more country
• Interactive maps — explore the data yourself, not just read it
• Rural property due diligence — spatial reports on rural blocks (bushfire and flood exposure, terrain, access, land capability and more) to help you understand a property before you inspect or buy. Decision-support to inform your own due diligence — not professional advice, and not a substitute for the relevant authorities or a qualified expert.

We also take on custom spatial analysis and bespoke data work for people and organisations who need the same rigorous, honest approach applied to their own questions. Contact us to talk about what you're working on.

This is a young project and it gets better with input. Request a guide for your patch, suggest a feature, or just tell us what's useful and what isn't. We read everything.