A few words from Nick: Real mining ...

Another blog entry from me.

This morning a miner asked me to go with him and look at the open cut mine he was working that day. I agreed and he picked me up at 0930. When we arrived he went through the way the mine had been worked and what he was going to do in the future. He then started up the excavator and advised I should move up the hill, unless I wanted to try driving the machine. I suggested the car was a bit close and I didn’t want to walk back to town.

He started moving the sand stone and then exposed a layer of large “nuts”.

We climbed into the mine and he explained these nuts have a layer of colour, like an onion's skin, amongst the other layers.

The nuts needed to be broken across the layers to find out if they were any good. Each nut was sized from an orange to about a large watermelon. All were solid ironstone and very hard. To my surprise about half way through the nuts exposed I cracked one and the sunlight was reflected back in a dazzling display of green and red. This was only a thin layer but very impressive.

We worked the excavator and broke many more nuts, before finishing up about 1300.

Fantastic day with a fantastic fellow. He even gave me some souvenir rocks, the very brightly coloured one among them. Rebecca was very impressed.