2010/09 Australia trip - O'Brien Creek |
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One of the town’s few shops is the Gem Den. We were planning to look for topaz at the O’Brien Creek public fossicking area, and I wanted to rent a pick, but Paul, the owner, only rented complete sets of gear, so we ended up buying a pick, cheaper, but something else to carry around. He was very helpful, giving us a mud map of the area, and giving us some advice on the best way to drive across 
Elizabeth Creek.
The topaz fields are around O’Brien Creek, which is a tributary of Elizabeth Creek. It was an easy dirt road in and then definitely 4wd and low gear range from there on, with the Troopie cranked over at extreme angles. Sandie got out and walked when she saw what I was going to try to drive up and down.
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O'Brien Creek (6.40) |
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The tributary creeks were dry except for the odd puddle, plenty of places to dig but where to start? We drove up the creek to a 
big junction and started digging, mainly around big rocks, anywhere that a heavy topaz might have settled. It was very hot in the creek bed, probably well over 100. I’m sort of used to it, having worked outside all 
summer, but Sandie burns in the Australian sun so she was wearing too many clothes for hard work and was feeling a bit faint. I continued digging and sifting while she just walked the creeks keeping in the shade looking for anything interesting. She found much more stuff than I did. We had high hopes of a deep water hole and I dug out all the gravel from the hole by hand to no avail, hoping that the blue octopus had no freshwater relatives.
We worked until near dark and then bounced our way out to the edge of the gem field, and camped at the O’Brien Creek fossickers campground. This was very informal: “Just pull off under the trees somewhere”.
We were treated to a gorgeous sunset, and were well into Happy Hour when a young guy showed up on a dirt bike telling us all that his friend had been injured while building a shelter, dropped his ciggy, and started a bush fire about ten miles away from us. They hadn’t been able to put it out, so he was warning us. Luckily the wind was in our favour,
and we weren’t in much danger anyway with the campground’s short grass.
Later, a neighbour stopped by to look at Sandie’s rocks, confirming what we thought: Sandie had found one very nice cluster of smoky quartz crystals, but no topaz.
Monday October 4th
Most of the fossickers were off very early to take advantage of the cooler hours, but we were slow starting. I walked down to Elizabeth Creek, beautiful in the sun, and spotted this egret, one of many.
Back at the campsite, Sandie threw a crust to a passing lorikeet and suddenly she had fifteen lorikeets, a few apostle
birds, and various honey eaters joining her for breakfast. The other bird is a blue-winged kookaburra, a close relative of those we’d seen further south. Although they are prettier, they have less sense of humour and are unable to make the laughing end of the characteristic call. However, in this part of Australia the two species coexist, so we had both in the campground.
Doug stopped by to collect our camping fee; he was the acting campground manager now that most 
sane people had left for the season because of the heat. He gave Sandie another map and suggested that the headwaters of O’Brien Creek would be a good spot for prospecting.
I’d hoped for a simple drive into the area, a couple of hours of digging, and then to be on our way, but this had the feel of an expedition. We crossed Elizabeth Creek again and set off north on a reasonable track. We had some bumps crossing several small creeks, and then we were approaching the mountains. We had to climb up this jumpup according to Sandie’s map. A jumpup is where the track goes up over the mountain, almost vertical, with deep erosion channels in the middle of the track.
We were growling up in low range bottom gear with us looking at the sky through the windscreen. The Troopie seemed 
quite competent at this kind of driving but I wasn’t; I’m used to having more than two wheels on the ground! Then we were on the summit ridge and pointing down into a crevasse on the other side. From there we had stairs to climb, slopes that had Sandie leaning against the door trying to stop us from tipping over, holes that swallowed wheels, and channels that caused the hitch to scrape on the rocks. The picture shows just a small section of the jumpup; some of it was too steep to walk up and photograph! Finally we were there at the beginning of O’Brien Creek.
There were some corrugated iron ruins from the days of the tin miners, and an archaeological stack of stubbies (beer bottles). We had to climb down to the creek, which showed much evidence of fossickological activity, many holes and heaps of tailings. We tried to find a spot to dig that would keep Sandie in the shade, and we tried digging under roots and rocks, anywhere that earlier diggers may have missed but we had no luck finding any topaz. This was difficult country to navigate with piles of boulders to negotiate and some very different vegetation; this is a cycad, a relic of the days when dinosaurs walked across Australia.
By mid afternoon, it was extremely hot and we set off back, and got lost for a while on an even worse track, bending our hitch plate a little with a couple of loud bangs. We found the right track and then we retraced our steps, doing the jump down this time, also in bottom gear low range, like driving off a cliff. Don’t touch the clutch or you drop like a stone!