Susan loves pretty rocks. Everywhere we go – she collects rocks. At some places they really are pretty. Others are average. If we go searching through the car or her bed, we can be sure to find a stash of rocks somewhere … usually lots!
So, this meant that she was really excited about searching for opals at Coober Pedy. She sifted through the dirt and rocks looking for “pretty rocks” that were prettier than usual. Even better, everyone else joined in.
Susan loves pretty rocks. Everywhere we go – she collects rocks. At some places they really are pretty. Others are average. If we go searching through the car or her bed, we can be sure to find a stash of rocks somewhere … usually lots!
So, this meant that she was really excited about searching for opals at Coober Pedy. She sifted through the dirt and rocks looking for “pretty rocks” that were prettier than usual. Even better, everyone else joined in.
Peter and Susan both found quite a few bits of opal though most of it was the colourless stuff called potch. They were so proud of their finds, and wanted them to be cut and polished. There were a few opal shop in the main street that advertised stone cutting and polishing, so we walked along to let the kids ask about it.
The man in the first shop checked Peter’s stones carefully, “You’ve got some lovely rocks, but none of them are worth cutting.” He sorted through Susan’s rocks, then looked at her.
“These two pieces could probably be cut and polished.” So, for $30 he cut and polished her two opals.
Later we went to Gem Tree which is known for garnet and zircon fossicking.
“Sorry, it’s been raining so much that the zircon flats are just mud pits at the moment,” the man there told us, “but the garnet fields are OK.”
So, at 8:30am the next morning we were ready to go fossicking. They demonstrated how to dig down about 30cm and put the soil into the sieve to find the garnets. We all followed the directions for a little bit.
Edmund started wandering off. I was bored, so I just walked around with him. Peter, Susan, and Lucy started to find little bits of garnet lying on or near the top and collected them happily.
“Amy, come and have a look!” Jarrad called to me.
I scooped up a muddy Edmund and walked back over to him. My clothes were already covered in red, sticky mud anyway, so there was no point trying to avoid getting any muddier. I had no idea how I was going to get the mud off everyone’s clothes.
He showed me some larger garnets that he’d found. “I’ve had to go back through the little stones I’d thrown away. Luckily I’d left them all in a pile, because heaps of them were actually garnets.”
Jarrad kept digging and sieving through the dirt, Peter and Susan kept picking garnets off the ground. Lucy wandered off with Edmund and I. It was nearly lunch time before everyone was bored, and we went back to the campervan park. The man there looked at what we had.
“You’ve got three stones that measure a ‘three’, and could be cut,” he told Susan, then turned to Peter and said, “You’ve got 2 that are ‘three’s’. Anything smaller than that, it’s just not worth cutting.” He sorted through Jarrad’s garnets, which included 2 stones that measured up to a ‘seven’. ”The guy who works here cutting and polishing the stones left this morning because it’s getting into the low seasno. I can send them to him if you’re interested, and then we’ll post them back to you. It’s $40 a stone for the ‘three’s, and it goes up from there.”
Peter and Susan looked wistfully at us. They begged and pleaded, but really, how could we justify spending that much money on getting a stone cut? The man said to Peter, “I’ve got these two stones here that are the same size as yours, and they’re already cut and polished. I can swap your two for the two, if you pay $60.”
“No, I want them to be the stones that I found,” Peter answered.
We thanked him and left with our stones. I went back inside to get the campervan ready to leave, while Jarrad went and chatted to some other campers. He came back in later with a torn piece of paper,
“They’ve done a lot of fossicking, they just travel going from gem field to gem field. Anyway, they recommended this company over in Thailand. They send their stones there. They said the first time they sent them there, they thought they had been scammed as it took them 3 months to get them back. They said that this company over in Thailand called Lambert Industries did a good job and they were really cheap. Apparently you organize it from their website. Shall we try it?”
Well, it was a really long wait till the stones came back. Each time we thought we could say good-bye to the idea of ever seeing them again, we reminded ourselves that we’d heard they were slow. When finally we heard the news that they’d come back, we were so excited. Every stone was still in its bag according to who found it; Peter, Susan, or Jarrad. Susan has had her two opals set as necklace pendants.
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