White Cliffs - New South Wales

[rodrex]

So, some of you may have heard of the small outback opal mining town of White Cliffs, New South Wales Australia. For many who read this post, I suspect that you have never even heard of it, or even know that it produces opal fossils.

 

White Cliffs is a 12 hour drive from Sydney, traveling north west (towards Broken Hill), you travel over the Blue Mountains, through the farms of the central-west, the gold and copper town of Cobar and then hitting the historical town of Wilcannia and then traveling north to White Cliffs.

 

White Cliffs claim to fame is an opalised replacement of ikalite - known as a pineapple - presumably cause if its spikey appearance. 

 

Not much in the town... A post office come grocery store, a pub and petrol station opposite.

 

Geology: 

The Wallumbilla Formation (Doncaster Member) crops out as mesa overlaying palaeozoic conglomerates.  It represents a near-shore costal setting based on size fraction of the rock (sandstones - claystone) and the invertebrate / vertebrate fossil assemblage (gastropods, bivalves, crinoids, belemnites, ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs). 

 

Low-lying hills (mesas) in the distance - white dirt representing the the Wallumbilla Formation (Doncaster Member).

 

I was really hopeful that because of its long history of opal mining, its remoteness and the fact that fossils had been found here in the past, that finding fossils here would be really easy and plentiful. I was proven so wrong.

 

101 holes and none of them had fossils... This is all that remains of the opal rush that took place in 1889.

 

So in the four days that we were there I found lots of opalised wood, a few shells and that was about it. 

 

Top left and bottom left - partial shells. Middle - a really nice example of a cut and polished slice of opal wood, and right one of the bits of wood found. 

 

Overall if you are prepared to put in the time, you can find fossils, but from my experience it was very hard to find material from just specking.

[Tidgy's Dad]

Interesting. 

Incredible landscape, shame about the lack of fossils.

Thanks for sharing.