The History of Mineral Collecting 1530-1799 by Wendell E. Wilson

While this encouraged the search for gold by prospectors, surveys of the State remained preoccupied with the search for water and suitable pastoral land. Observing the impact of the discovery of gold in New South Wales and Victoria in the late 1850s, and encouraged by a number of minor discoveries in Western Australia, in 1872 the Government of the then Swan River Colony offered a reward for the discovery of a payable goldfield within 300 miles of any of the Colony’s established ports.

Reproduced with permission of the Battye Library, Library and Information Service of Western Australia 627P Early collectors The large specimen in the foreground is a mass of quartz with vein of gold from the Orient Mine Murchison Goldfield, collected in 1892. The main gallery at the Western Australian Museum circa 1890. The mineral collection was eventually rescued by Ken McNamara, Curator of Palaeontology, from near-destruction in 1985, and today mineralogy flourishes at the Western Australian Museum. The history of the collection is a salutary lesson in what can happen to a public asset lacking curatorial responsibility.

Placed in storage in the mid-1960s and inaccessible to the public for around twenty years, the collection was badly neglected. Surprisingly, for one of Australia’s premier mining states, the mineral collection of the Western Australian Museum has had a chequered past. A short history of the mineralogy collectionĪrticle | Updated 6 years ago Malachite with associated pyromorphite from the Whim Creek Mine, Pilbara, Western Australia.Ī rich hunting ground for prospectors and collectors, Western Australia has been a prolific source of new minerals and fine mineral specimens.

The History of Mineral Collecting 1530-1799 by Wendell E. Wilson