'I'm over sapphire hunting! Why didn't I go after zircon?'
In a find that should put a renewed spring in the step of every grey nomad fossicker, a Melbourne couple has just stumbled across the ‘big one’ at a popular fossicking area in Central Australia.
Lucky grey nomads, Graeme and Sue McDonald, found a huge zircon at the Mud Tank Zircon fields, about 150kms north-east of Alice Springs. At around $100 a carat, the monster rock is worth around $15,000.
Kate McMaster has been the manager of the Gemtree Caravan Park for more than seven years and ran the tour to the fossicking fields. She says she has probably only seen about four stones of the same magnitude.
“The top of the stone has got some layered cracks … but the bottom of the stone is fine and we think we can get about 150 carats out of the good bit,” she told the ABC. “Graeme came in with this big grin on his face… he was very calm about it, but you could see as we were starting to explain to him how special it was, his skin slowly got redder and redder with excitement!”
Geologist and mineral collector Dehne McLaughlin has been a regular fossicker at the gemfield since the ’80s and says there’s been a decline in gem-quality discoveries in recent years.
However, he says some of the larger cuttable pieces found may go unreported.
“Many pensioners dig there and go about mining/fossicking their own business,” he told the ABC. “So to speak of a high value stone can affect pension asset tests.”
What’s the biggest most valuable find you’ve ever made? Has this news got you reaching for the spade and the sieve? Comment below.
Towards the end of our ‘Big Trip’ around Oz in 2008/9 we spent a couple of weeks in the Sapphire area of Queensland. We spent a lot of the time in Rubyvale at ‘Willy’s Wash’. We found loads of sapphire chips, and some small zircons, but our best find was a sapphire ‘Bomb’ of around 130 carats. We had it cut and polished in Rubyvale and the 2 halves mounted as pendants, one of which I wear all the time now. We found several smaller bombs as well. Nothing we found has much intrinsic value, but to us they are priceless!
Well 13 years latter I am back on the field camping in 2023 in my tent joining long term digger Ivan Dainis who has a passion about putting Mudtank on the map in science publications. See Mineralogical Record about 2022 for his first paper on Mudtank.
It was a miserable dig with no big finds but did dig down to the carbonatite weathered bedrock and dug some twinned zircon xtyls. But the joy is in the doing and the great people you meet on the field.