1984 Meekatharra

Collecting minerals with unexpected consequences.

It was 1984 and we were driving up to Meekatharra to gather rocks and minerals along the way for me to use in teaching geology. I was working at Nedlands College of Advanced Education, a fancy name for a teachers’ college, teaching physics and geology for the year.

In the car there was me, my wife, my mother, and our three children aged twelve, ten and eight. Photos of them in 1984 at Mingenew.

The geology teacher I was replacing would not let me near his collection so I had to find my own. I was used to chasing around the countryside after rocks so this was more rock collecting with a purpose. We had picked up quartz crystals earlier on near Dalwallinu and dropped in at the battery at Paynes Find.

Paynes Find is what is left of a gold mining town and all that is left is the pub come store, petrol station and anything else to service travellers, and the battery.

The chap working the battery, which is a large number of big steel rods that go up and down on rocks miners have dropped off to make them dust so gold can be extracted. The noise is enormous. A row of earmuffs was hanging along a wall for you to put on which we did but the chap there was not wearing any; not a sensible boy.

We left and headed towards Mount Magnet. It was later in the afternoon and as I did not have a firm destination in mind for us to stop for the night with the caravan we were towing my wife was being typically bitchy. The tension in the car got to my mother. She was seventy years old. She produced one of those situations you see at the movies where something is said and the room falls silent. In this case it was the car. My mother came out with “I have to go and milk the cows!”
Scary.
She had been brought up on a dairy farm. As a kid she would have milked the cows. Her brain was obviously packing it in.
The attraction at Mt Magnet was the banded jasper. I collected several large pieces to put in the caravan.
When we reached Cue we went looking for the location of an ochre mine the Aborigines used to mine and barter the yellow and red colour to other tribes. We found that there was a tunnel into the hill that the mine was in. It was dark. The mine had also been worked by Europeans with trolleys being wheeled along the tunnel. When we got into the mine we found the roof of the hill had fallen in so it was light. Iron ore was all around the place as well and I collected a bag of the ochre and a number of samples of the mineral. It was just as well we had the caravan as my rock collection was getting heavier with each stop for collecting.
Meekatharra was the place to collect magnetite crystals. I had a large horseshoe magnet on the end of a length of string so I could drag it across the ground. The ground was littered with the crystals. When enough had attached to the magnet I would deposit them in one of the bank bags my brother had given me. The bag was half full before I decided that I had enough.
Meekatharra was also the location of the solar power plant, or what was left of it. They were about to demolish it as it had not been a success. The large curved mirrors are shown in the photos.

The caravan is shown in the photo. It is about twenty feet long or six metres and was ideal for looking for rocks as it provided facilities for the humans and storage for the rocks.