Beginning in the Australian Outback

I was one of the lucky ones! I got to live in the Australian Outback for an entire year when I was a child of just ten years old. Oh, I do appreciate that experience. YES, I DO . . . It is called the 'Red Centre' where I lived. You have to see it to believe it, not red, but dark orange and extremely exciting to the senses. The beautiful rocks there 'turned me on' forever, it seems. Now I'm talking about the landscape in the vicinity of Alice Springs, almost one thousand miles from any other major city! These rocks are some of the oldest on the Earth, and the native aboriginal inhabitants very primitive in their culture, a perfect match.

You have to understand that not only was I ten years old, but I viewed that year of 1969 from the perspective of a ten and then an eleven year old girl, and all the experiences that go along with that age. I did not share my parents forty five year old eyes and experiences, I somehow viewed them from afar. They were in their world, I was in mine!

Alice Springs wasn't like a small U.S. town of 10,000 inhabitants. This was a town completely surrounded by the Simpson Desert and nothing but the Outback and natural wonders and mountains and rocks and very large lizards, elusive kangaroos and aborigines sitting near ghost gum trees in dry river beds, as far as the eyes could see. There was NO television there in 1969, no modern distractions for children like cartoons, and Thank God no video games, so we took to the road and to the trails, as far as our adventurous minds led us! You wouldn't believe all that I experienced! I think I can remember almost every day! Those were the days when children could be miles and miles away, and their parents wouldn't worry. So with my strong sense of adventure I was off and running with the pack of Aussie kids that led me who knows where, with my borrowed Aussie accent, and oh yes, I led them as well.

But was it really the attraction of those red rocks that kept me interested in ROCKS all these years? Could one influential year of traveling the roads less traveled out in 'the bush' with parents each and every weekend to new and exciting landscapes have given me this sense of needing to always be finding paths less followed? Maybe that bus full of rock hounding tourists I viewed looking for GOLD and GEMS near the ghost town of Arltunga did this to me? Was it my Mother's fault and her rock collecting and buying that Opal ring that did it? Or was it that ride through the Outback in a bumpy pickup truck, laying in the back with my head hanging over the tail gate and watching the gravel go by on the road below me, and KNOWING I spotted my first blood red Garnet, and begging my Daddy to go back so that I could find it, but he wouldn't? I think I've been looking for that Garnet ever since!