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joel

Fossicking around Rubyvale

It wasn’t me, I don’t even like sugar……. He did it…..

Ok, these birds have nothing to do with fossicking around the area but I couldn’t start another post with more pictures of rocks. I was going to start with a spider picture but figured I should put that at the end rather than the start. Rubyvale, Sapphire, Anakie, Glenalva, The Willows, they are the small towns that make up the central Queensland gemfields, a mixture of little ramshackle settlements, and public fossicking areas all based around sapphire mining. For most travelers who visit the area the fossicking will consist of sieving the buckets or bags of dirt from one or more of the many different places selling them. Those more intrepid people may go to a fossicking area and work hard trying to find a good stone. Continue Reading

August 22, 2016 by joel

Rubyvale

Oh no, not more bloody rocks…! Yes, it’s more rocks, shiny, colourful and when I’m exceptionally lucky, nice clear rocks like many of the ones in the picture above. This is an assortment of what I’ve found in the central Queensland gemfields around the Rubyvale/Sapphire areas. The variety in colours of the sapphire and zircon up here is far more exciting than down in Inverell where I was a few weeks back. Continue Reading

August 18, 2016 by joel

Yowah

Yowah, a strange name and a strange place, but I love it here. The town is situated over 900kms inland from Brisbane and 130km west of Cunnamulla. Yowah’s population fluctuates markedly with the seasons with a residential population of only about 60 people, this boosts to around 250 during the cooler months. Continue Reading

July 27, 2016 by joel

Lightning ridge

Lighting ridge is a town of contrasts, the worlds largest producer of black opal, it’s known throughout the world as one of the highest quality opals you can buy and as such demands a price. A piece of quality opal the size of your fingernail can cost thousands of dollars, so you might expect that there would be a huge mining industry surrounding it yet the opal mining industry is a little like the wild west, at least it is around Lightning ridge. Continue Reading

July 17, 2016 by joel

Inverell

I thought I’d come back to “7 Oaks” just outside Inverell for a few days to get some more sapphires, but in the end I decided to stay for 10 days. Hey I was getting stones, and who knew if I was ever going to make it back here to get any more. The weather was freezing cold, it rained to the point of almost flooding, it was muddy and dirty and the work was hard and physical. Continue Reading

July 9, 2016 by joel

New South Wales

Unfortunately I’ve been fairly rushed through the state of New South Wales because I needed to get up to Queensland for caravan modifications, the van was booked in and I had to make it here for the appointed date. So here I am now sitting in a hotel room just outside of Brisbane, I’m homeless in a different state, and only just writing up about New South Wales. Continue Reading

June 23, 2016 by joel

Bega floods

Welcome to NSW and to Bega! It started to rain a few days before I hit NSW and my drive into Bega which is in the south of the state was a wet one. Over the first three days in the state it has rained fairly constantly, Bega has received almost 300mm in three days. According to the news it’s the worst low pressure system to hit the east coast of Australia in perhaps 70 years and it was interesting to be here in the middle of it. Continue Reading

June 8, 2016 by joel

Phillip Island to N.S.W.

Seems I’ve hit the start of the holiday coast and towns. Phillip island really has that feel to it, and as I was to find out, so do many towns along this section of Victoria’s coast and heading up into NSW. I quite liked it in the Phillip Island region, rolling green hills and rugged coastlines interspersed with beautiful white beaches. Though I realize my liking the area possibly relates directly to the fact that it was off season, if I was there in the middle of summer I probably wouldn’t have liked it so much. Continue Reading

June 4, 2016 by joel

Melbourne

I wasn’t sure what picture to put up as the Main image for this Melbourne post, none of the hundreds of photos I had taken over the past couple of weeks really jumped out at me as “the one”. I was a little upset with my city scape night shots, I’d spent all day taking photos in the botanic gardens then waited for the sun to set so I could take some night shots only to discover I’d left my tripod back in the caravan. Then after taking perhaps a dozen photos precariously balancing the camera on bollards, signs and anything I could find which was reasonably flay, my camera battery was dead. I walked a couple of kilometres back to my car to find that my spare batteries were also in the caravan rather than where they should be in the car. Continue Reading

May 29, 2016 by joel

Melbourne – Geelong Gardens

I spent 2 weeks just outside Melbourne at Werribee, this gave me plenty of time to visit Melbourne, Geelong and the surrounding areas. As part of this exploring I spent half a day in Geelong looking around the botanic gardens there, then almost a whole day at the Melbourne Royal botanic gardens. Both are well worth a visit if you’re in the area, especially the Melbourne gardens, they are enormous and I really should have perhaps allowed a couple of days to have a good look around them. Continue Reading

May 26, 2016 by joel