Victoria

The Illustrated Minerals of Australia – Volume 1 – Electronic Edition

Now available here. There are more than 1,500 species recorded in Australia, and this publication aims to illustrate more than half of those. Australia also has 186 Type Locality minerals (and counting). There are 715 full-colour pages in this first volume...

Gold in Victoria

Gold, n.:“A soft malleable metal relatively scarce in distribution. It is mined deep in the earth by poor men who then give it to rich men who immediately bury it back in the earth in great prisons, although gold hasn’t...

Byaduk Caves, Western Victoria

Went out for a drive today to see the Byaduk Caves on the western slope of Mount Napier, western Victoria. Mount Napier is thought to have erupted around 40,000 years ago, so geologically is still young. The volcano is mainly...

Google Maps Satellite View…

Google Maps Satellite View (or Google Earth) is a technology that can be very helpful in locating places of interest with a view to potentially visiting (subject, of course, to having the necessary permission). This image of an area in...

New Victoria Mine, Waterloo

With the kids away, we went for a picnic Xmas lunch today. Came across this mine dump in our travels. The New Victoria Mine, Waterloo, Victoria. Sunk to access the Waterloo Lead, one of the deep leads in the area....

Central Goldfields Region, Victoria

Yesterday I was fortunate to be able to visit, and go underground in, a couple of gold mines in the Central Goldfields region of Victoria. One is predominantly slate and the other sandstone. Both have quartz veins rich in gold...

Calcite, Portland, Victoria

A nice little spiky calcite specimen from the Portland Harbour Trust Quarry, Cape Sir William Grant, Portland, Glenelg Shire, Victoria. There are two generations of calcite as can be seen on some of the terminations where the outer calcite “coat”...

Main Lead, Victoria

Main Lead is an area north of Beaufort, Victoria. It was the subject of an early gold rush (Fiery Creek) in the mid 1850s. I was fortunate to be able to visit the area today, with the Ballarat Field Naturalists....

Mooralla, Victoria

Mooralla has long been a famous collecting area, mainly in lapidary circles, and is renowned for its spectacular specimens of smoky quartz. Lesser known is the occurrence of other forms of quartz, including epimorphs, and a small number of other...

Lake Cooper Quarry, Corop, Victoria

Lake Cooper Quarry is situated on the western side of the Corop-Heathcote Road, near to the township of Corop in central Victoria. It is a working quarry producing “road metal” from a metabasite (a subaqueous lava flow), part of the...

Flinders, Victoria

Flinders is a Dana locality southeast of Melbourne, Victoria, best known for producing large crystals of gmelinite. The basalts are part of the Older Volcanics with a flow near the top of the sequence dated at 42 million years. Zeolites...

Demon’s Bluff, Anglesea, Victoria

Vivianite nodules up to 20cm across have been found on the beach west of Anglesea on Victoria’s south coast. These are usually water-rounded dark blue nodules that sometimes have crystal-lined cavities. Featured image: Anglesea Beach, looking towards Demon’s Bluff in...

Coimadai Antimony Mine, Victoria

Coimadai (pronounced come-ida) Antimony mine is on Pyrete Creek, a tributary of Goodman’s Creek, about 15 km NNE of Bacchus Marsh. It consists of two lodes, Draper’s and Bondison’s. The deposits were discovered in 1887 and worked intermittently until 1915,...

Castlemaine, Victoria

The Mount Alexander diggings were located in the central goldfields region of Victoria, in and around the present day city of Castlemaine. The site of one of the earliest significant alluvial gold rushes that occurred in Australia during the mid-nineteenth...

Camperdown, Victoria

Camperdown, in Victoria’s Western Districts, is best known for it’s volcanoes and farming. But not for gold. However, the 1900 article below indicates that gold was found in scoria and basalt! Featured image: Zircon, Lake Bullenmerri, Camperdown

Bonney Jean Track, Daisy Hill, Victoria

According to Wikipedia, gold was reported at Daisy Hill in 1849, two years before the official finding of gold (at Clunes and Warrandyte). There is no mention of Daisy Hill in Brough-Smythe’s “The Gold Fields and Mineral Districts of Victoria” (1869)....

Alfredton, Ballarat, Victoria

Alfredton is a suburb on the western side of Ballarat. In June 2013, a new housing subdivision was under development on the western side of Learmonth Street. Excavation had unearthed quite a lot of fresh basalt which had been gathered...

Miscellaneous Victorian Deposits

This is where you can find miscellaneous external articles on Victorian localities… Featured image: Ryan Eagle Pegmatite dykes of the Mount Wills district, northeastern Victoria, Australia, Ryan Eagle