Gold Rush: Tyler Mahoney's Mining Dynasty Explained
Tyler Mahoney joined Discovery's expansive "Gold Rush" franchise in 2018 and became a part of the mainline series during Season 13 in 2022. After establishing herself as a "Gold Rush" mainstay, she spoke to Daily Mail Online about her career trajectory, detailing how she was born into a gold mining dynasty.
As Mahoney explained, her first relative to work in the industry was her great-grandfather, Ned Turner. In her autobiography "Gold Digger: Chasing the Mother Lode in a Man's World," a preview of which is available on Amazon, she mentions that Turner was so successful that a region of Western Australia became known as Famous Ned's Patch for his work digging up 800 ounces of gold. Today, that quantity is worth the equivalent of $2 million. Nola, Ned's daughter and Mahoney's grandmother, then kept the family business going. "She loved prospecting and definitely had gold fever," Mahoney said.
Through her family, Mahoney was introduced to mining work at a young age, spending childhood summers looking for gold in the Australian outback. "We spent most of my childhood in places hundreds of kilometers from the closest town but we loved it," she said. "We would run amok out bush, riding dirt bikes, exploring old shafts, chasing goannas. We didn't even have electricity after dark when we were out bush. No TVs or computers or any technology."
Her parents Ted and Lecky both still mine gold, and they continue to work together alongside her brother Reece to this day.
Tyler Mahoney has still faced harassment in the industry
According to the Western Australian government's mines department, 11 of the world's largest mines are in Western Australia alone. So, while gold may be a niche field, Tyler Mahoney and her family work in one of its most prominent locales. During her interview with Daily Mail Online, she characterized the industry as largely male-dominated and shared that she experiences sexual harassment on a semi-regular basis. "As a woman, it is very hard to get a place at the table and then when you're at the table, it's bloody hard to be respected and heard," she said.
Mahoney's grandmother, then, presumably overcame comparable or even greater difficulty to succeed in the gold mining business decades earlier. "There weren't many women prospecting in her time so she definitely helped pave the way for me to come through," she continued.
Growing up, she likewise witnessed how others in the industry treated her mother differently than her father. To illustrate this point, she shared an anecdote about the time a man attempted to sell fake gold to the shop her family runs, only to rebuke both her and her mother for refusing to purchase his inauthentic product. So, while by Mahoney's account, it's plenty difficult to succeed as a woman in her chosen profession, she's at least able to look for guidance to the example her grandmother set decades earlier in the business that became her birthright.