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. 

Clem Walton Park & Amethyst at Kuridala

Hi Again,
As I mentioned in our previous post we have had friends visiting here from Jimboomba, Ray and Gaye are on their way home from a stint working in a caravan park at Gemtree near Alice Springs. They are staying in their caravan at Gaye's sister and brother in law, Robyn and Brad's house in Cloncurry. It has been great to see them and we did some fantastic day trips with them while they were here. Our first trip was on Sunday the 26th August to Clem Walton Park and Corella Dam, we have driven past the turn off to this place many times on our way to and from Mt Isa and have always been in too much of a rush to call in. A lot of people from Cloncurry camp there and they have said it is a good place to camp and they are right as you will see.
Corella Dam is located approximately 54km west of Cloncurry on the Barkly Highway and was constructed as a water supply for the nearby Mary Kathleen uranium mine and township, nowadays it serves no water supply role and is purely for recreational purposes.

I have read where they say the dam was built in 1959 but I'll go with the sign.

The dam wall has a hole in it and it leaks , so it doesn't get much more full than this. But that's OK because it keeps water in the river below the wall at Clem Walton Park. 

There is plenty of camping around the waters edge but there are no facilities and not a lot of shade.

Follow the road on past the lake you enter Timburu Station and an excellent campground by the river downstream of the dam.

At Clem Walton Park there are a couple of shelters and behind them is a toilet block at this campground.

The track past the shelter sheds runs along Corella River to more campsites just around the bend.

 Looking from the shelter,campers along the water.

Ray doing a great job cooking lunch.

Looking back towards the wall.

 

Heading back to the cars the river on the left and plenty of  campsites.

 

The Corella River flows into the Cloncurry river which in turn flows into the Flinders  River and then into the Gulf of Carpenteria.

Sunday the 2nd of September saw us off to Kuridala and the Amethyst Fields. We have been there and covered this in a previous post but we were so fascinated by this interesting place we wanted to show Ray and Gaye. We won't go into the smelter again here but we wanted to share some photos of the day with you.

Heading out on the Dajarra road we came across these feral Camels, they are every where around here.

Stopping for morning tea at Malbon. Wonder if we can get her goin Ray.

The Cloncurry River just south of Malbon.

Even Pelicans in the river.

Causeway across the Cloncurry River. Not a bad camp here either.

 Looking out over the track into the old Consols mine.

Looking up the stack at the Kuridala Smelter.

Ray and Gaye getting ready to dig for Amethyst.

Ray hard at it.

Think they may have lost something.

You can often find pieces in the rubble other people have thrown out of the diggings.

Ray got some pieces from in the hole.

The track to the Amethyst Fields.

Some of the pieces we found.

Next weekend we head off to the Maltese Crosses, see you then.