Monthly Mineral Chronicles vol 4 issue 1 is now available. For the start of a new year, one full of hope(!), we have a new look. This month, in this 58 page full-colour issue, we have the following articles: Cutting...
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...
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...
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....
Monthly Mineral Chronicles Volume 3 Issue 12 is now available. This month, in this 77 page full-colour issue, we have the following articles:* Collector’s Guide to the Minerals of Lake Boga Part 5* Preserving Provenance – every specimen has a...
Monthly Mineral Chronicles vol 3 issue 11 is now available. This month, in this 71 page full-colour issue, we have the following articles: Show News Franklin Gem & Mineral Show NY-NJ Gem Show Collector’s Guide to the Minerals of Lake...
Regional Guide to Victorian Geology, John McAndrew and Marcus Marsden. Quite a useful publication, and available on the Internet Wayback Machine (archive.org) here.
Monthly Mineral Chronicles vol 3 issue 10 is now available. This month, in this 53 page full-colour issue, we have the following articles: 2020 – the year that keeps on giving! Collector’s Guide to the Minerals of Lake Boga Part...
Video from this week’s presentation on the uranium minerals from Lake Boga, Victoria, to the Micromount Club Zoom meeting, is now available…
I have created another six mineral-themed face masks via Redbubble. These are of a variety of minerals from around the world. So far, there are masks containing crocoite (some with other species) from the Adelaide Mine (2), Red Lead Mine,...
…is now available on Sorrell Publications.
…is now available on Sorrell Publications.
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....
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...
Planning a trip to the Land of the Long White Cloud? Want to know where to go to see geological features, museums, etc.? The Geoscience Society of New Zealand has a website with information about GeoTrips that you can make...
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...
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.
Due to poor technical performance and under-whelming technical support at bluehost.com, I have moved all of my websites to a new hosting provider. The same domain, crocoite.com applies, but the performance is much much better (as I have already noticed)....
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 second one created tonight. This time, one that hasn’t been published anywhere before. The idea just popped into my head!
I first created geology themed cartoons back in the late 1990s in a series called The Fault Line, published in the Mineralogical Society of Tasmania newsletters. Time to bring them into the 21st Century! Intro and exit created through Viddyoze,...
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”...
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.
Issue 5 of the Monthly Mineral Chronicles is now available on Sorrell Publications.
Issue 4 of the Monthly Mineral Chronicles is now available on Sorrell Publications.
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.
Issue 2 and Issue 3 of the Monthly Mineral Chronicles are now available on Sorrell Publications.
Issue 1 of the Monthly Mineral Chronicles is now available on Sorrell Publications.
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...
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....
This is the download page for issues of the Australia and New Zealand Micromineral News, a publication for those interested in micromounting or microminerals, and particularly in minerals from this region. In April 2011, a meeting of people interested in...
Henderson’s Quarry is a major excavation in volcanic rock on the eastern side of Mount Ngongotaha, near Rotorua on the North Island of New Zealand. Featured image: Henderson’s Quarry, Ngongotaha The quarry is made up of several rock types including pumice,...
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...
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 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 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...
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...
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 (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,...
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, 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)....
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...
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,...
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....
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...
