#gemtree

I just had to back track a bit to tell you about this special little place - Gemtree on the Plenty Hwy in the Central Australian Gemfields. It’s not 4 star but has power, water, amenities and it totally relaxing. Plus the opportunity to learn about fossicking. A big bonus is the humongous Gemtree pies which are a meal for two. They take a couple of days to prepare and are to die for; the burgers are supposed to be equally as good as are the squishy vanilla slices. And if that wasn’t enough you can phone in an order and they deliver your meal to your site. How good is that? Makes up for the poor internet access.

We were there for 4 days before heading further north in the meantime there’s a roast and bread to be cooked. Have loved having camp fire and being able to bake bread.

While we were staying at Gemtree we went fossicking for zircon - talk about sore back and legs etc!

It was hard work! The natural color of zircon varies between colorless, yellow-golden, red, brown, blue and green so try finding them in a bunch of stones was a challenge. I kept anything remotely possible from our diggings to inspect later. They are not as hard as diamonds but are ancient and precious. Those found in WA from the Yilgan Crator (one of the chunks of original earth crust like the Pilbara) using uranium dating (for they have an element of radioactivity) are dated 4.4 billion years old which they say was the age of crystallisation. This makes them the oldest minerals so far dated on Earth. Not sure about the ones from the Harts Range but they are a wonderful piece of earth’s geological history. They’ve really only come onto my radar recently but evidently Australia leads the world in zircon mining producing about 40% of the worlds total ‘yield’.

Beside the fossicking area was an old mica mine. Now water filled but this was one of the world’s most productive mica areas.

We were aiming to get into WA which meant travelling from Qld to NT then spending 14 days there. The 750 odd Km route was a mixture of good, reasonable and horrendous. The good bit was about 80 odd km at the end of the route, sealed albeit single lane in many spots, and the reasonable bits were your ‘normal’ unsealed road of dirt, gravel, sand. The horrendous was just that! Many many kilometres of very deep ‘bulldust’, extremely fine dust which had our rig, van and car with us clinging on tight, sliding and ploughing into and across deep soft wheel ruts - hence no pix! It was pretty scary but there was no going back or stopping otherwise we would have ground down into a nasty bog-situation as they say; a few days later we found out that a roadtrain had become hopelessly bogged the day after we went through. Lindsay did an amazing job keeping us going in a general forward direction. Poor thing kept getting cramps in his hands holding onto the wheel so that we didn’t slew out of control. We got through it and relaxed a little. Definitely not something I would choose to do again.

Our second overnighter was by the Marshall River near the Jervois Ranges. The river is huge, maybe 200-300m wide. Then it was dry but the debris collected around tree trunks etc told a very different tale.

We walked across its sandy bed chatting with the young cows grazing there. A delightful tranquil spot.

Monstrous termite mountains dotted the sides of the road in places.

The colours of the road and the surrounding soil changed from grey through palest ecru to blood red - fascinating.

Then we were on bitumen approaching Harts Range and the relative quiet after 100s of km of thumps, bumps, rattles etc was almost deafening.

A hundred odd km north of Alice we were heading across the Tropic of Capricorn to the Central Australian Gemfields and beyond.