The Illustrated Minerals of Australia – Volume 2 – Electronic Edition is now available here. There are more than 1,550 species recorded in Australia, and this publication aims to illustrate more than half of those. Australia also has 191 Type Locality minerals (and counting). There are 277 full-colour pages in...
A short video highlighting some of the minerals included in the first volume of the Illustrated Minerals of Australia. Much gratitude goes to all of the people that have provided specimens and/or photos!
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 and it includes the minerals from acanthite through to cyrilovite....
Crocoite and pyromorphite from the Platt Mine, Dundas, Tasmania revealed in all its glory.
There are many localities where you can find cerussite in Australia, and it is common in many other parts of the world. Cerussite is a lead carbonate mineral which is by and large found in the oxidized zone of lead-zinc ore deposits. Typically colourless to white in colour, cerussite may...
…is on this coming weekend. I will be there demonstrating my mineral artwork.
This video is focussed on the Platt Mine, Dundas, Tasmania, best known for its specimens of crocoite and pyromorphite. It takes me back. I collected underground here at the Platt Mine many many years ago. I was in the pyromorphite zone with my daughter and then leaseholder, Bruce Stark, when...
Last weekend, I headed over to South Australia to visit the Tea Tree Gully Gem and Mineral Club Show. Here is a short video report…
This Collector’s Guide is now available as either an electronic issue or as a printed book. The Lake Boga quarry in northwest Victoria has been known to produce a range of interesting minerals. More than 70 species have been identified, including copper and uranium phosphates amongst others. Three minerals have...
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 done anything to them.“ Mike Harding, “The Armchair Anarchist’s Almanac”...
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 a lava shield with a breached scoria cone. Lava flowed...
Broken Hill Under the Scope is a presentation held on Zoom today, and is now available on YouTube…
I got a Mindat Photo of the Day (again) with this ilmenite specimen from Lethbridge Quarry, Victoria.
I got a Mindat Photo of the Day with this aragonite specimen from Ben Lomond, New South Wales.
Hard to capture jackstraw groups like this, particularly when it is a white or colourless mineral…
An excellent video on crocoite from the Adelaide Mine, Dundas, Tasmania, produced by Blue Cap Productions…
This is a conspicuous deep lead tailings dump on Rodborough Road, Majorca, but I have not been able (so far) to locate any information about it. There are other nearby mines listed by the Victorian Heritage Council, but this one doesn’t appear to be in there.
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 the Central Goldfields Region of Victoria clearly shows shafts dug...
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. Waterloo is a small locality about 9km north of Beaufort....
Regional Guide to Victorian Geology, John McAndrew and Marcus Marsden. Quite a useful publication, and available on the Internet Wayback Machine (archive.org) here.
Video from this week’s presentation on the uranium minerals from Lake Boga, Victoria, to the Micromount Club Zoom meeting, is now available…
Given the current situation, and that face masks are becoming more the norm, I have decided to create a series of mineral-themed face masks via Redbubble. Six designs are currently available, all of which feature the Tasmanian mineral emblem, crocoite. Right now, Redbubble are also offering 20% off if you...
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 and sulphide minerals. I have identified pyrite, galena and sphalerite...
A Sway created sometime back from a presentation that I gave. See also…
Greenockite is fairly common in Australian lead-zinc orebodies, but generally occurs as a bright yellow coating or crust. Woodlawn produced some of the nicest crystals that have been found, if not a little small. Deep red crystals on orange coatings over an even earlier spherical generation in cavities in sulphide...
The Australian Journal of Mineralogy Index for volumes 1-18 is now available.The index is continually updated, and new versions will be released as more volumes are added.
John Cornish outside the Adelaide Mine in 2012. The Adelaide Mine, Dundas, Tasmania, is world-famous for it’s crocoite specimens. But other species also occur. Here’s a few in my collection.
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” is missing. The specimen measures 20mm across and is a...
Shifting into my monochrome phase. A photo of magnetite crystals from the Biggenden Mine, Queensland. Photo width is 5mm. A stack of 158 images processed through Zerene Stacker.
Zeolites of Tasmania, Steve Sorrell, 2003 I need to update this! 15 years ago, my photography skills were not that great, nor was the technology, and there have been many more finds since. Photo: Natrolite, Stanley, Tasmania
Flinders is a well-known collecting locality in southern Victoria, Australia, most notable for its zeolite minerals, particularly gmelinite.This publication explores the minerals that have been found here. You can access here.
Each year, Dehne and Maureen McLaughlin head up to the Northern Territory from Tasmania, to mine for azurite sun specimens. And each year, Dehne writes about the progress and finds on theses ventures. He sends that information through to me to upload to Jordi Fabre’s Friends of Minerals Forum. You...
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. Old workings from the original gold rush, through to the...
A granite quarry in Victoria’s northwest. Featured image: Schorl tourmaline, Pyramid Hill From Mindat – Two quarries, one abandoned, the other operated by E.B. Mawson and Sons, have been excavated on the low granite knolls south of the main Pyramid Hill peak in the Terricks Range, in northern Victoria. The...
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 minerals. Featured image: Smoky Quartz, Mooralla, Victoria The popular smoky quartz...
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 Cambrian Heathcote Greenstone Belt. Featured image: Lake Cooper Quarry from...
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 and associated mineralisation occur in vesicles in basalt along the...
The Duke of Cornwall Mine is just outside Fryerstown on the road to Chewton. There are dumps on one side of the road and the ruins of a Cornish Engine House on the other, registered by the National Trust. Featured image: Cornish Engine House Built in 1865, the only alteration...
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 the distance It is thought that the nodules formed in...
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, then operated again between 1942 and 1944. Featured image: John Carey...
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 century, they have been called the world’s greatest shallow alluvial...
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
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). Featured image: Daisy Hill workings The Gold and Relic Sites...
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 in piles around the subdivision. It is likely that this...
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
The Minerals of the Kara Mine, Tasmania book (Steve Sorrell and Ralph Bottrill) can be purchased in either paperback or hardback versions from Lulu. Featured image: Andradite, Kara Mine, Tasmania The Kara mineral field is a group of mineralised skarn deposits, mostly worked for magnetite and scheelite, with some minor copper,...
Introduction Barite (barium sulphate) is a fairly common heavy mineral that often occurs in Pb-Zn ore deposits as a gangue mineral, in sedimentary deposits, and rarely in basalts. When found in sufficient quantity, it is mined for it’s barium content. It occurs either in crystalline form, as tabular, prismatic, or...
Featured image: Calcite, Avebury Mine The full text and photos of the minerals from Avebury can be found in Issue 2 of the Australian and New Zealand Mineral Collector magazine. The Avebury area is located approximately 8 km west of Zeehan in western Tasmania, where over the last few years, exploration...
The Adelaide Mine, Dundas, Tasmania, is famous for its world’s best crocoite. Adam Wright and his partners have been operating it for mineral specimen removal for a number of years and have had significant finds in recent years. In particular, the 2010 Pocket, and more recently, the Red River Pocket....
