Maltese Crosses

Hi Again,
Well it's Sunday morning the 9th of September and a good looking day to travel to the Maltese Cross fields with Ray and Gaye. We were looking forward to this little trip as it has a bit of everything, some 4 wheel driving, beautiful rugged landscapes and of course the stones at the end. The Maltese Crosses are actually Staurolite crystals and when they fuse together they form a cross. Maltese Crosses are found at only a few sites around the world in Madagascar, France, Russia and a couple of places in America, Virginia being one. So armed with a mud map and plenty of enthusiasm lets see if we can find some Crosses.

 

After airing down our tyres it was off down the track.
 

The turn off to the Crosses is off the Barkly Highway about 70Km west of Cloncurry.

 



The track drops over the edge here and runs steeply down the gully.

 The fossicking area is about 17km in and took us about 2 hours, after a couple of stops for photos and a detour because I couldn't read the mud map. When we arrived we were straight into it.

While we were fossicking we heard some noises close by and realised there were some people just through the scrub doing the same thing, so we went to investigate.

We came across these people, larger scale fossickers than us, lead by a fella who introduced himself as Mad Mick. Mad Mick was only too happy to show us what to look for and how to go about finding crosses, even let us dig in their hole.

Ray had a go at sieving some dirt and we filled up a number of bags to take home and sort through.

 Mad Mick showed us some of the Maltese Crosses  he had found on the day.

This one he found in the dirt they had thrown out. He cleans them up with a hacksaw blade.

Mad Mick offered to show us a better track home and also a couple of other places along the way. Here we are at a place where you can find Maltese crosses with 6 points very rare. I found a small imperfect one.

Mad Mick, Ray and I with a couple of Micks mates.

The back of Mad Micks Landcruiser is loaded up with bags and buckets of rocks.

Dot, Gaye, Ray and I.

Convoy of trucks on Mad Micks shortcut. He was leading us to a place with some coloured rocks.

 Mad Mick led us to this old Calcite mine, mining operations stopped here in the 1990's.

The rock here is white Calcite, which is the material they wanted. Calcite was mined for fertiliser and cement production.

Mad Mick next to orange Calcite, it gets its colour from the presence of iron. It's amazing how it's layered in this hard rock.

Another piece of orange Calcite.

Plenty of rugged hills and tracks here.

The next place Mick took us to was Rosebud Weir. This would be a great camping spot as there is plenty of grassy shaded areas by the Corella River.

 A waterhole in the Corella River beside the camping area.

Mad Mick and Ray on the weir wall. Mick tells us his father along with some Irish navvies built this wall in the early 1900's. The piece missing out of the wall Mick says is from some over zealous fishermen using gelignite, they threw the charge in upstream in the waterhole and it didn't go off until it floated down to the wall where it went off.

The weir was built about 1914 to service the Rosebud smelter and the township of Bulonga just across the river from here. They mined copper there and the town became a base for Afghan camel operators who carted the ore from the mine to the Rosebud Smelter.The operation closed down about 1918.

Still a bit of water around at the end of the dry season.

Some of the Maltese Crosses we found on the day, the little one at the bottom is one of the rare six pointed crosses.

 

Catch you next time when we go looking for Garnets.