April 2024

I recently read an article by someone complaining about the boredom of retirement and no longer having the chance to learn new things. If you are a regular reader of this blog, you’ll know that this really got my goat up!

One of the big surprises of retirement and spending time on the road has been the things that we’ve learned. Not just about caravans and towing. We had to learn that very quickly, and we are still learning eleven years or so after buying our first van. But other stuff too.

Stuff like, navigation and geography, weather and climate, geology, biology, history, agriculture, arts, and culture to name a few.

Australia has a rich history of digging up stuff, you name it, and you’ll find it under someone’s backyard, but let’s talk about the pretty stuff gemology & mineralogy.

Sapphires

Central Queensland is known for its gem fields around Emerald, Sapphire, and Rubyvale and people come from far and wide for a bit of fossicking. Not knowing what to do we found ourselves in Rubyvale at a place called Willy’s Wash, where they do the digging, and you do the picking.

Out of curiosity we follow a sign to Willy’s Wash and spend $15 for a bucket of ‘wash’ or should I say gravel. A bubbly lady called Karen shows us how to wash the wash in a Willoughby. Which is a dunker that sluices your colander of wash. We upend the colander of wash on a hessian bag and set to with a pair of tweezers to sort through the pile of now clean gravel to find the sapphires. I am eternally grateful to Karen for showing us what to look for because all the pretty stones turn out to be rubbish and the stuff that looks like bits of black road gravel are actually the sapphires. Thus an hour or more passed as we washed wash and picked at tiny bits of gravel. I was so engrossed with this fossicking that I didn’t even notice that the mine was actually beside us and Karen’s partner was working the mine below and sending up more buckets of dirt.

Karen tells us that she has been hooked on gems since she was fifteen, almost as long as she’s been hooked on her partner. They went their separate ways then chanced upon each other again a few years ago. Then she got a call from him and he said: “I’ve bought you your dream.” He had bought her the sapphire mine, house, and business. One look at Karen and you can see that she truly is living the dream.

Did we find any of that ‘black gravel’? Sure did and when you hold them up to the light they sparkle, blue, green, and orange. I think I could get hooked on this too, but I doubt that our gems would cover the cost of lunch at the pub.

Opals

Over the years we’ve visited a few opal towns, Coober Pedy, White Cliffs, Lightning Ridge, but it was our first visit to Lightning Ridge in 2016 that sticks in my mind. We were travelling with VeeWee, we hadn’t visited The Ridge at that stage, she had and said it wasn’t much. We pulled up in the main street and were surprised at how interesting it looked. Then and there we decided to stay a few nights. We hadn’t even finished pegging our awnings down before we’d decided to stay a week. The Black Opal Caravan Park truly was a gem. Sorry about that. I might add that we were given mining drills to get our pegs into the compacted dirt.

Lightning Ridge captivated us with its quirkiness and perfectly warm winter temperature, but we did want to see the Grawin Opal Fields about 60kms west. Double or Nuthin’ and Shirley Temple had raved about the place so off we went. By this stage, there was a herd of us as quite a few of our caravan club mates had also arrived (on their way north for the winter).

The Grawin opal field is home to 3 iconic pubs. We set off in a convoy of 3 cars down a good bitumen road to the tiny town of Cumborah. A little further on we turn onto an appalling dirt road that VeeWee rates as worse than the Birdsville Track. Woody is in the back seat thanking God that VeeWee has offered to take us in her car!

We bump along swearing and cursing the road and the dust and reading car door signs hanging from trees that extol the virtues of the three pubs. First is the Grawin Club in the Scrub and another car door reminds us that we are driving on a golf course and should watch for balls. With eyes peeled we find a flag and a rough wooden shelter. Upon entering the ramshackle (this is the only word that describes the whole district) pub we are greeted by a cheery barmaid and the place is cosy and inviting. There’s even a library room. There’s an old miner with hair and whiskers that could house a family of birds who sells us raffle tickets for the local Men’s Shed. We thank him even though we know that we’ll never win yet alone want to trek out here to collect a prize. The barmaid generously gives us a third mud map of the area which helps to make sense of the others that we’ve gathered.

Bouncing off down the road we find the Noodling Dumps. Noodling Dumps? Well, this is where the miners dump their unwanted rock and unlicensed prospectors like us can fossick for opal that the experts have missed. We later learn that this rock is cast off until they find a seam of potch usually forty or so feet down. Thus, we’d be pretty lucky to find anything! But trudge off up the mountain of blinding white clay and rock we did and fossicked about and found some pretty rocks and fossils. We’re easily pleased.

Next stop Glengarry and a charming couple. He is a miner and she runs a craft ‘cottage’. They’re from Canberra and spend the winter up here. I’m sure most Australians would prefer living in a mullock heap to Canberra any day. The Glengarry Hilton is a collection of sheds with a shipping container for a kitchen. This isn’t a building, just a collection of mismatched structures that have settled into several inches of talcum-like white dust. It rises as you walk through it making you feel as though you are Neil Armstrong on the moon. The ‘dining’ area is sort of outdoors and has a piece of carpet laid across the bare ground. Naturally, it is permeated with dust. To be kind, the barmaid is a surly bag. The food though is plentiful and delicious though I doubt that the kitchen staff mix with the bar staff. The unbending barmaid won’t allow Tillie, VeeWee’s poodle onto the ‘premises’ though we find out later that there are tight restrictions on dogs on the opal fields but I’m sure that applies to guard dogs, not tiny toy poodles. In any case, Tillie probably would have suffocated in the thick white dust.

On again past corrugated iron masquerading as houses, hulks that were once cars, and hundreds more mine shafts with little plastic pipes sticking up for air ventilation. The Sheepyard Inn jumps out at us at the sign that says ‘Cars with brakes give way’. A friendly lot this mob is. It is part pub, general store, and war memorial and this barmaid shows the boys how to put on a male chastity belt. What a nice lass. A bunch of miners sit watching TV and cracking one-liners. Now this is a pub.

It is hard to describe Lightning Ridge and the Grawin Opal Fields are nigh on impossible to explain. Quirky, crazy, rusting machinery in a sea of white dust. It has to be seen to be believed and definitely not to be missed.

The return drive sees golfers and even a golf cart belting through the scrub at the Club in the Scrub. Sheep, cattle, goats and kangaroos have taken ownership of the bitumen road, they’re probably sick of the white dust too.

This brings us to serious mining and geology, ah, rocks and minerals…

Note: We’re laid up for repairs at present, both batteries in the caravan have died, we did get 8 years out of them so we can’t complain, the car battery went out in sympathy, along with Woody’s phone. Of course, at this age standing still means that doctors start sticking needles and things into you (which is a ruse to see how much money is in your pockets). We can’t wait to get the hell out of here!