Tonight we’ve moved back to the Queensland coast, and we’re grateful to be on the lands of the Darumbal people in what’s now known as Rockhampton. We acknowledge this has always been their land, and we pay our respects to the Darumbal elders past, present and emerging.
It was a long day of driving today. And not the greatest night’s sleep last night made it a very tiring day! But as far as travel days goes, it was an excellent one. We decided to get on the road nice and early today to give us a bit of time to do some things along the way, without arriving in Rockhampton too late. We were on the road just after 7am, picking up a few goodies from the Barcaldine Bakery before we left for afternoon tea. We headed east through a bunch of cute little towns, that we really would’ve loved to be able to stop and learn more about – places like Jericho and Alpha.
At about 10am, we turned north off the Capricorn Hwy and up into the Gemfields area, and into Rubyvale. A friend had let us know that they did some gem fossicking at a place called the Rubyvale Miners Cottage a couple of years ago on their trip, and they had so much fun. So with a bit of time built into our day by leaving early, and given how much the kids loved gold panning, we thought we’d give it a go. It was a huge amount of fun, and we ended up spending a good two hours there! It was $25 per bucket of rubble, and they taught us how to get all the dust out in a two-layered sieve, then wash the stones, and then dump them onto our table to start sorting through. After we washed each set and laid them on the table, all 5 of us would be quick to dive all over them looking for the nicest looking gems! (We each had our own little buckets for our collections.) But in reality, we didn’t really have an exact idea what we were looking for – we just wanted to find the shiny rocks that weren’t quartz.
Once we finished going through the two buckets worth of rubble, we were each pretty satisfied with what we’d found. By now we’d watched quite a few other people over at the counter getting their rocks checked to get an idea on what goodies they found – so we were pretty keen to see just how good or bad we’d done at this! We took our little containers over to Gae (the incredibly friendly lady who owns the place and makes you feel very much at home!) who took each collection, and very quickly sorted through it, creating a few groups of stones – big ones that could possibly be cut, a few that could be polished, and then all the smaller ones for “show and tell” (ie, they’ll clean up really nicely and be colourful, but they’re too small to be used for anything). But essentially, each of us had found a pretty decent collection of sapphires of varying colour! It was incredibly exciting.
Our highlight was in Eliza’s collection (technically Debbie found it) – a 22g piece of dark green sapphire! It was big enough to get our names added to the “high scores” they have running for the last few weeks, which was very cool. We also bought a few beautiful little glass jars from Gae which we can put all our stones in once we get home and wash them properly. All of us left basically wishing we could go back and do it all again tomorrow!
While we were in the area, we had a few big things to tick off our list: the Big Sapphire and the Big Miner were planned, but then on the drive into Rubyvale, we also saw the Big Spanner! Once we got those photos, we headed on into Emerald for the last big thing of the day: the Big Easel. And it was there we found a picnic table and had a quick lunch.
From there, it was one big long stretch of three hours across to Rockhampton. Debbie shared the driving a bit, which I was hugely grateful for, and we arrived here about 5:30pm. The Capricorn Hwy brings you in just to the south of Rockhampton, so we essentially drove through the whole city to get to the north side this evening where we’re staying, just in a simple, but really nice motel. I think I always knew Rockhampton was a decent sized city, but I don’t think I realised quite how big!
