My arrival is as indirect as the pub crawl that’s carried me there. Bill bypasses town and drives to a rocky slope facing west into the MacDonnell Ranges. No verdant Blue Mountains here, just eroded ridges of red rock, winding into the desert. But it isn’t the scenery Bill’s after. Unable to be a mining engineer by profession, he has taken up mining as a hobby. And this arid hillside is one of the best places in the Territory to scrape for amethyst. “In my country, every inch of earth has been turned,” he says, sinking his pickaxe into the stony red earth. “Here, who knows what is still buried beneath the ground?” His passion for precious stones is contagious, particularly after a dozen beers. So for several hours we take turns with the pickaxe, then sift through the upturned dirt for the purple-black shimmer of amethyst. All we find are tiny shards, nice enough to keep but not of any value. “Some day,” Bill says, cracking our final tube of blue, “some day I hit it big.
