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What did you do at Xmas? Well I went fossicking of course!

The Monday Xmas Day public holiday was grey and bleak when we left home with the optimistic thought that it’s only raining on the coast. Never mind the weather bureau who had predicted rain for the next 7 days.

Having an agate fetish, I had decided to revisit the Windera area to see if any good agate was still available. No hard work required. Just hoping the farmers had ploughed a paddock and thrown up new treasures. Walk along the furrows and pick up agate nodules like picking apples off a tree, I thought.

The traffic on the Bruce Highway was very light for a Xmas holiday. Possibly the weather put people off travelling. The further north we went the harder it was to see. The rain was pelting down. But not deterred I figured it would ease off once we turned west.

169 Kms. to the Kilkivan turn off and it poured all of the way. You could see fresh water in the Mary River at Bell’s Bridge. Obviously the rain is wide spread. Never mind, it will be fine at Windera.

We stopped at Kilkivan for morning tea where the friendly café owner announced a low pressure system near Cloncurry and moving south east. "We should get some good rain from this", he said cheerily while delivering our tea. I’m convinced that the rain is lighter and that the next 40 kms. will see the rain disappear completely.

The shortcut from Kilkivan to Tansey has 1.5 kms. of gravel twisty road over the mountain. It was greasy but it does save about 20kms. from the trip.

A sign for Boubijan Homestead brought back boyhood memories. Trips from Maryborough to Boubijan on a Saturday were an exciting break from school life. My mother’s cousin lived on Boubijan station and her husband worked for the Lawless family. The best part was always stopping at Kilkivan where Uncle Peter would let my cousin and I spend a penny in the bubble gum machine outside the local store. A gobstopper for a penny! Now there’s a bargain. If my mother knew that I had bubblegum I probably would have been banned from the trip to Boubijan. Anyway the Lawless family are gradually restoring the original slab homestead and welcome visitors to look through their home. It contains a treasure trove of tools that helped make Australia and photos and memorabilia from the turn of the century, even a photo of a large steam ship signed by the touring 1924 Australian cricket team to England. Signatures of Ponsford, Grimett, Richardson (the Chappel brothers’ grandfather) were prominent. Boubijan was selected by 2 Irish brothers in 1847 and consisted of 281 square miles. It stretched from Ban Ban in the north, and covered the whole Windera and Cloyna areas down to near Imbil. At one stage the Lawless family owned Imbil station as well. Stephanie and Michael Lawless are doing a good job of preserving their heritage and the homestead is well worth a look; as is the view from the verandah, which overlooks the lagoon. The lagoon is probably the reason for establishing the homestead where it is. 

Back on the road after a stop of nearly an hour. No need to hurry as we were planning to stop somewhere overnight. The rain is definitely lighter but it is still raining steadily. We stopped in a small park along the Murgon-Gayndah road to eat lunch. What else 2 days after Xmas but ham sandwiches. The park is on the National Heritage horse riding trail and the facilities were built as part of the Bicentennial celebrations with Federal Government grants. The picnic table and seats were wet and Jeanine refused to get out of the car. "Not getting wet to eat. Why can’t we eat in the car?", she asked.

Now replenished and ready for the real fun, we turned into Wilson’s Road down to the farm. "Look for the green sign with 114", I had been told, cross the grid and come up to the house. It was obvious as we approached the farmhouse that it was too wet to do any work today as the sight of 4 men working over an old diesel motor in the equipment shed came into view.

"The best stuff’s over at the piggery, but it’s too wet to go there", I was told by the owner. "Just go down the bottom of this paddock to the creek. There’s plenty there", I was told. Jeanine again refused to leave the car to get wet. In horse jumping 3 refusals are a disqualification and you have to get a new horse so Jeanine was lucky that we were only rock hunting. Anyway armed with a small pick and a bucket I set off for the 2 minute walk to the creek. Through the grass covered paddock rocks appeared plentiful with occasional small chips of black agate.  No good for me I only want top quality cutters!

Evidence of other rock hounds attempts to find the mother lode were obvious. Holes had been dug in the creek banks, rocks had been chipped away and promising looking nodules had been split open. Although there were no huge finds, plenty of tumbling quality (mainly black agate) is lying about on the surface or available by chipping away a soft sedimentary type of stone to expose nodules and seams of agate material. Within an hour I was soaked completely through as the rain continued to fall, but I had found some good stones. The rain helped to wash away the lose dirt and expose just enough colour to make it interesting. I half filled a bucket with some solid nodules and broken pieces that will make interesting polished stones. Some of the agate has small bands in twists and turns that make it appear lace like but the majority is greyish with tinges of purple to black.

Back to the farmhouse where the workers have called it quits for the day. I’m told again that "the good stuff" is over by the piggery but it is too muddy, which does nothing but want to make me go to the piggery.  I thought, well we’ve come all of this way, I’m wet through now what’s a bit of mud, so we drove back down to the gate and down the Windera Road another 1km until we found Dip Road.  Dip Road looks newly surfaced with red soil gravel and a shiny sign saying "Boggy When Wet". No matter. I can smell "the good stuff" so a bit of boggy road won’t stop me. The piggery appeared on the right hand side of the road in a paddock miles from any other building. A funny place to build I thought. But only until I got out of the car and the wind brought a whiff of swine full into my face.

Telling Jeanine (who refused to get out of the car) that I’d only be a few minutes I set off across the paddock to the modern piggery; a place of concrete pens and automated feeders. A couple of hundred pigs snorting and squealing in an area not much bigger than our club house. Rocks cover the surface of this paddock and every now and then a bright colour would glisten in the rain. Agates in orange, pink, red and yellow but again only in small sizes.

And then I found it - Agate heaven! At the back of the piggery a huge dam has been built with walls about 20 feet wide. Where the earth has been bulldozed up to form walls the clay is full of agates. I covered about one third of one side before I found I could no longer walk. A combination of 2 things caused the problem. Having just gone for a walk "to have a look" I didn’t have anything to put my treasures in but having found them there was no way I would leave them behind so I put them into my tee shirt until the weight nearly tore my shirt. Also the dam walls are clay- wet clay. My shoes had disappeared under about 20 pounds of clay. They became that heavy I couldn’t lift my feet.

This area is like picking currants out of a plum pudding. Bright red jaspers, red and yellow splotched jaspers, petrified wood, and agates of all shades were found. Within 10 minutes I had picked up as much as I could carry and headed back to the car. The nodules come in small 50 cent piece size to the size of a clenched fist. They appear to be less cracked than agate I have collected on previous trips to this area, possibly because they have been through the ploughs less.

Instead of staying overnight we decided to head home as the rain showed no signs of relenting. We headed back through Murgon and down the Bunya Highway through Wondai, Kingaroy, Blackbutt and Yarraman. Although this route is shorter ( 280 kms via Kilkivan and 272 kms via Kingaroy) the trip home down the range was completed a lot slower. For about 20 kms. we were in thick cloud where it was almost impossible to see cars in front of you.

Home by 7PM, traveled over 550kms with a treasure trove of goodies. What a day out!

Bring on the dry weather and plan the return trip. Meanwhile tomorrow there’s the saw shed!!!!