The carnelian is particularly lovely! I found a few of those, darker red and much smaller, when walking across a muddy paddock in Blackwater in Queensland. I have several pieces of opal potch, one of which I chipped to give a sharp edge on one side, so I could cut plants that shouldn’t be cut with metal. Those bits are from Mintabie, but I have mined opal at Mintabie, Coober Pedy and Lightning Ridge. Sold all but one of the gems. I have a piece of flint from Copper Hills, and I kept one sapphire from the old claim at Tomahawk Creek in FNQ, which I still wear in a plain silver headband. We sold most of our stones from there, because we left there when my youngest son was born with medical problems that needed big city hospitals and cost everything we had to fix, but I kept that stone because it was the last one I found on that claim, and it was a particolour. Green and gold. Back then particolours were not the fashion, and it is only a small stone, so it likely wouldn’t have sold, but I found it beautiful.
And I sympathise with you about the stolen stones, having also had stolen from my tent at a camp a bag containing not only my money, but several stones, including a couple of Herkimer diamonds and a helenite given to me by an American friend, as well as a couple of good poems I had roughed out but had not yet completed enough to have committed to memory. I managed to reconstruct one of them later, but the other is lost. It’s a strange world.
Lots of other stones, but those are my favourites.
