TUESDAY 11/06/13 - GEMSTONE HUNTING [GARNETS]

 Gemtree is in the Central Gemstone Fields where one can fossick for garnets and zircons.  We came here to do some fossiking so we booked in for the gemstone tour.  We are doing the garnets fields, we won't go to the zircons, the guide for that does not work today.

We met three other parties [ 2 couples & 1 family of 6] at the park's assembly point to collect our gemstone finding equipment - pick, spade, [4] sieves, [2] buckets, 20 ltr of water and most important a collection tin.  These tours happen nearly every day.

 At 8:30am we set of to the Garnet gemstone fields some 28 klm further up the Plenty Highway, passing  wandering dingoes on the way.   The area resembles a bit of a war zone with "fox holes" everywhere from previous diggings.

Our laconic guide Lynton, claims he knew all our names -  "Bloke" for the men, "Sheila" for the ladies and "Kids" for the children.

Lynton demonstrated what we had to do -

• dig over a section of the undisturbed ground with the pick;
• shovel loose material  into a bucket and then transfer to;
• [2] sieves were for dry sieving to get rid of the dirt and obvious rubbish;
• [2] sieves for wet sieving;
• holding up the wet sieve to the sunlight and picking out anything that shines red!!!

Then it was off to work, which was very dusty and dirty......old clothes being the order of the day.

All parties were very excited by their first finds.   All parties tended to work as their own team, with me doing the digging and dry sieving and Dot doing the wet sieving and garnet detecting.   After a while I started to pick up a few garnets at the dry sieving stage.

Unlike a couple of experienced gemstone hunters from Qld, who had their own equipment to ensure that they were not bending over and straining their back, I was bending over sieving and Dot was sitting on the ground getting covered in dust and water from the wet sieving.  The family of [6] had all the children actively involved and the kids young eyes were picking up garnets just by walking over previously worked areas.

We all packed it in around 1.15pm as it was getting too hot and then went back to the Caravan Park where a gemstone cutter inspected our finds and graded them.
Dot picked up the find of the day....a solid tear drop shaped garnet 8mm x 6mm, along with a number of solids between 7mm and 3.5mm.

We then found out that they could not only polish the gemstones, but they could also cut and convert the stones into various forms of jewellery.   Dot has commissioned the large find for a pendant (the stone will not be large once cut) and a couple of other garnets into ear rings.

Back to the tent and onto the showers for a good clean up and fresh clothes.

An enjoyable day, but not one I would like to do every day to make a living!!!!

The night sky is so clear up here without any background reflective light, with a brand new moon.