There's GOLD in them thar hills...........yip bloody yah....let's go and dig it up.....At the Milparinka Pub, we had already seen the photo's of nuggets found on Mt Browne and we unpacked the Minelab and associated toys and set of for the hills....where else??? Those who find gold will generally associate gold and quartz as sometimes going hand in hand.....well when you drive the tracks on this part of Mt Browne, you are driving through an ocean of quartz that stretches to the horizon....can you feel it yet????

Hills that slope down to gullies where the water runs in the wet and shale outcrops waiting to be plundered.....well we know how hard it is now....you really do have to walk over a piece of gold for the Minelab to sing it's song to you. Not that it didn't sing.....when we found all the junk like wire and old rusty tin from the last couple of hundred years of occupation....Oh did I mention the bullets??? we found more of those too... The head pic on this page is Jack's Shack which really is a must see while you're here....the construction is so simple but yet effective.

Over the next few days we find that a few back at camp have been lucky enough to find a small nugget and even the owner of the property, Ray, used a detector to find a small nugget at the camp just up against the wall of the old homestead. Well, practise does make perfect....

We did find gold of another kind here though....while driving around the paddocks we did notice a pair of rather large commercially built dry blowers which the owners obviously use for their own prospecting and they were sitting above a large dam......Soooo.......I thought I'd try soaking the yabbie traps in it over night.

Ya Need more than one for a feed	Ooops..here's a few more
Always have a big boiler in your kit	Ahhhh........ RED GOLD........

Well, had to move on as there really was a lot more to see and we wanted to see it....so we shot off in the morning and arrived back at Tibooburra to fuel up for the drive to Cameron Corner. Whilst getting fuel and a few things from the shop at the servo, Julie decided to have a chat with the Corella in the cage by the front door. I noticed it on my way in and I'm an animal/bird lover, but the way this bird had gnawed through it's 40mm coolibah branches (perches) and the way it was throwing a coat hanger around in the cage....I decided to give it a wide berth. Well I concluded my business in the shop and made my way to the front door where Julie was talking quietly with the Bird who was hanging on to the side of it's cage listening to Julie's quiet and calm voice pleading with it to let her finger go.

I was amazed to see that this creature....the Bird...not Julie....had a very firm grip of the fleshy bit of Julie's index finger and a fine ring of blood was around the wound.......she said it was increasing the pressure as we spoke and could I help her...PLEEZE.....

Well what do you do in a situation like that??? It's not the type of thing that happens to you every day and I really needed to release Julie from this birds grip before it took her finger off and released her that way.......so.......I remained calm........probably too calm for Julie's liking given the pain she was in and I had an arm full of shopping bits from the shop. I then took my reading glasses from my shirt and started to open the arms and I still think Julie had visions of me inspecting her attacker at closer range with the glasses as she was getting pretty aggravated by now.....whereupon I pushed the arm of my reading glasses into the mouth of the bird as it was wide open and firmly clamped on to Julie's finger. Pushing the arm in further to the birds tongue it instantly released it's grip as it probably gagged...a bit like when the doctor puts a tongue depresser on your tongue to make you gag so he/she can see the back of your throat. The look of relief/surprise/amazement on Julie's face said it all. Yep...it does pay to keep cool and use your head to think with in an emergency.

So...on our way to Cameron Corner...this is where 3 states of Qld - NSW and SA all meet. The grader hasn't been here for a while so it was a leisurely but slow drive to "The Corner".

Hope we make it before Sundown....we wouldn't want to be caught out and have to camp in the bush again....he chuckled......