Girl in love with rocks

It’s not like I’ve lived under a rock (excuse the pun!) but, I have never been outside of Australia in my whole life! While others were travelling Contiki tours, AB and I were married at 21 and having babies at 23! While others were building careers, I was looking after 4 children and juggling a job as a vet nurse. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t change a thing! But to say that at the age of 43 I still didn’t have a passport was somewhat strange……

So, when my Long-Suffering Mentor suggested we go to the AQUA conference (Australasian Quaternary Association) that was being held in Auckland, New Zealand, I said…..”yeah, okay!”……actually……I jumped up and down squealing like a little girl whilst holding my hands between my legs to contain my pee….but that would be setting a rather undignified scenario for you…..so we shall just say I agreed, and applied for my passport!

Here is a picture on the day it arrived…..and no I didn’t wear the shirt on purpose!

And so began our planning for my first EVER trip outside of Australia! The conference was for five days, starting with an ice-breaker on the Sunday night (which my Long-Suffering Mentor ALWAYS insists we go to!) and consisted of a jam packed itinerary including a mid-week field trip! Auckland is known as the city of volcanoes……SQUEEE!

But, what started as a “Let’s go to this conference Bec, it’s, like, really COOL AS!”….slowly became a “You can do a small presentation about your research”…..to then become a “Hey Bec, we’ve booked you in for a 20 minute speaker slot on Thursday morning!” So not only was I travelling outside of Australia for the first time, but I was speaking at an international conference whilst travelling outside of Australia for the first time……man, I was in BIG trouble!

So….our story begins…..

Planes are not a problem for me. I’ve been on them before. No biggie! I’m excited and raring to go! Make it through check in and security. And we wait to board the plane……this is the before shot…..

….it’s all happy and smiles until the turbulence begins……and three sickie bags later and I’m begging for the nice, pretty flight attendant to please take my dirty baggies and then kill me…..you don’t want to see that photo…..

But, we arrived in Auckland safe and sound, made it through the arrivals and customs, only to realise, I didn’t get a stamp in my brand, spanking new passport! So, I did what any 43 year old international travelling virgin would do…..I had a tanty! It didn’t last long though as I was distracted by the fact that New Zealand number plates have no state names on them…..because…..well….New Zealand has no states…..wow……!

We arrived at our accommodation, a great two bedroom apartment that was immediately across the road from the University of Auckland where the conference was being held, in Old Government House to be precise! Old Government House is just beautiful, built in 1856 and restored to it’s natural beauty. We attended the drinks and nibbles ice-breaker event and picked up our fun-bag for the conference (it had the best keyring thingy in it that has a USB key and a bottle opener built into it!), grabbed a glass of wine and made ourselves comfy in the chairs…..when this happened……

I swear I was just sitting there when this cat sauntered into the room and came and sat on my lap……so not wanting to bother the cat (who by the way is called Governor Grey and has his own Facebook page!) I sat and drank wine and watched everyone like some stalker sizing up her prey…….

So, having rubbed my face all over the cat for several hours, my Long-Suffering Mentor finally managed to drag me back to our apartment, being somewhat under the weather having consumed several glasses of wine on top of copious motion sickness medication (which DIDN’T WORK!)…….and I don’t quite remember what happened much after that but I’m sure my first night in New Zealand was somewhat subdued…….

The final day of the dig! We are all tired, sore, a little cranky……and in some ways the last day of the dig is always the longest!

The final day entails filling in all the trenches (with precise excavating!), bagging and cataloguing the artefacts, washing and packing away the equipment, returning the infamous portaloo (the crapper!), and making sure the dig site has been rehabilitated and left in a somewhat better condition than when we started.

There was a flurry of activity trying to get the last of the sieving completed! Directions from the Archeos was to keep sieving buckets until it was tools down and the excavator arrived. This left us with no time to sort through the bone bed pile, and at one stage I looked up from my bathtub of doom, to see Ben elbow deep trying to bag up every last particle of the bone bed into tagged bags. I quickly abandoned the sieving to help as I knew that every bag would offer a treasure trove of bones and teeth, and even as we were scooping the samples into the bags there were exclamations and profanities as we found megafauna teeth and bone.

You can’t see the tears in that photo, but I assure you Ben was crying with desperation. The photo also doesn’t show the shit shirt he is wearing……wait for it……

…..yes…..he is actually wearing a shirt that says “Bieber”……which made us all cry!

The excavator arrived, much to our disappointment and began returning the piles of sediment into the trenches in the same order that it was removed in an effort to maintain the stratigraphy somewhat. In no time, all our wonderful piles of treasure had been returned to it’s original places…..and we began to pack up and say our goodbyes……

I have to say, I loved working with everyone involved in this dig. I loved getting to know them, their different backgrounds, their diverse interests and specialties, but above all, their patience, their great senses of humour, and their passion for Geology and Palaeontology. I loved getting to know James with his really, really interesting dress sense, Jamie who was one of the kindest people I have ever met, “Not Amy” (aka Jess) who complained about never having a nickname and was awarded with “Not Amy” as she carried around a cup with Amy written on it (her girlfriend!) and managed to confuse the hell out of everyone for the first few days! The amazing Sophie and the quiet Lorraine, who never once complained about the hard work but always seemed to be working hard! Finn and Tim who were so very patient with Elliott and always seemed willing to engage in somewhat erratic conversations with an 11 year old! And of course, Ben, who provided an endless cascade of knowledge, laughter and encouragement – his passion for palaeontology was so inspiring!

We started as strangers and we left as colleagues and friends…..and thanks to Tim for ceremoniously tagging Elliott into the Paeontology fold!

….and the bloody smiley face you drew on my car window with mud is still there, you bastard!

We eventually departed tired, sore and somewhat bewildered, to go home and start washing……and washing…..and washing……!

After a very late night (hic!) and a VERY early morning (hello keep cup with very strong tea bag!) we travelled back to Lancefield to help prepare for the big event of the Lancefield Megafauna Festival.

Every year the township of Lancefield embraces it’s unique history and celebrates the fact that, basically, the town is one big treasure trove of Paleontological artefacts and wherever you dig you are likely to find bone from animals that have been extinct for thousands of years! It’s great! They transform the main township into a market festival with performances, food, and all sorts of treasures to buy!

One of the features of this years festival was tours of the dig site. So with everyone prepared to watch out for all sorts of OHS issues regarding the public and what is technically a mining site, we conducted tours of the dig site, allowing the public to see up close and personal what it’s like to dig trenches, sit in pits, and sieve through buckets of sludge. They loved it!

And so did the media! Interviews with SBS news, local print media and various radio talkshows gave us more exposure than we had dreamed of! At one stage I looked up from the bathtubs to see a sea of people, at least 100 members of the public in one tour group alone (of which we had at least 6 tour groups come through – one an hour!), all fixated on the lecture Sanja was giving regarding the process of what we do. It was so inspirational to see their interest and their support in our work.

One of the big drawcards for the Lancefield Megafauna Festival was it’s guest speaker, Tim Flannery. Flannery is a Palaeontologist who has heaps of knowledge regarding megafauna and many different interpretations and hypotheses regarding how the megafauna became extinct. So at 4pm we all trudged over to the main hall, dressed in our dirty flannels and still wearing more than half the swamp, and listened to a great lecture about the history of the Lancefield Megafauna….

……an hour later Andrew, Tim and Cam woke me up……..!

We cleaned up a bit (read tried to scrub the dirt away but gave up when I realised I was taking skin with it!) and did some socialising with some nice wine and canapés…….and then escaped to bed by 8.30pm. I’m such a Nana!

Today, I could only spend half a day in the field, as my second eldest son, Jason, graduated from Secondary School. Apparently that’s a big deal, so big that a graduation ceremony and dinner had been planned. But there was an open bar so I was partially sated…..

So, thinking I would be having to shower before the big Shindig anyway, I decided to try my hand at sieving! Now sieving is what we geos refer to as a “Right of Passage”. Most fieldies will have known the pain of being bent over a bucket trying to push rocks through a mesh! The purpose of sieving is to make sure every tiny artefact is removed from the soil sample, and usually we use a 5mm sieve which means the grid lines are about 5mm square. This usually will sort out very small pieces of bone or rock – which is what Palaeontologists and Geologists look for.

But apparently Archeologists require a 1mm sieve to be used. And these are painful! Trying to push almost lithified clay through a 1mm square is just plain nasty! I akin it to cheese grating a piece of clay. I’m not sure what kind of artefact can actually survive such treatment, but hey! We were told to do it – so while the Archeos were in the pits taking measurements (sipping lattes!) the Paleos and Geos were elbow deep over old bath tubs full of the dirtiest, muddiest, sludgiest, SMELLIEST water you can imagine! The end result was a bunch of pebbles that were bagged, tagged and catalogued.

We sieved buckets and buckets and buckets of clay from the pits! Back breaking, finger grating, dirty, wet, cold work! It was wonderful!

Having covered myself totally in nasty smelling sludge I finally decided I had better head off home to clean up before the graduation. I must admit sitting in the car with the heater blasting was bliss! I don’t think I felt my fingers until we hit Leopold!

But the end result was this! I’m so proud of my baby boy! Graduating Year 12 and completing his VCE. And isn’t he handsome?!

Oh….my……gawd!

I had the BEST day in the many BESTEST days I’ve ever had since falling in love with rocks! After rushing around and doing all my jobs to ensure the welfare and comfort of all my volunteers (I take my job very seriously with chocolate zucchini cake – the green bits are NOT those kind of green bits – and giant Anzac cookies), I made my way over to the dig site. Immediately I launched myself upon the mounds that have yielded bone and teeth and began scrambling through dirt, clay and who knows what (could be million year old shit for all I know!) and with sterile rubber gloves, I began plucking bits of bone and teeth. I was happy as a proverbial geologist/paleontologist in mud!

With me elbow deep in mud, my walkie talkie went off with my Long-Suffering Mentor needing help in showing a reporter around the site. After cleaning myself off I deftly managed to try and look as professional as I could while wearing flannel and being covered head to toe in mud, and as Sanja showed the reporter to the mound I had just been working on, I looked down……

Right in front of my toe was a half mandible complete with teeth sticking out of the dirt! The timing was perfect as the reporter watched me lose my shit and yell at everyone to get a bag, don’t touch it without gloves, and back off – in a very professional manner of course! Overall we made such a great impression we made it on to the channel seven news. Now I’m famous!

Yeah…..she wasn’t that happy about walking around a swamp…….

Anyhoo, when we had managed to dispatch all the reporters, children, and spectators, I again fell arse up into the pile of dirt looking for more bone and teeth. I was in my element pulling out more shards of bone, metatarsals, intact jaw fragments, and some beautiful samples of quartz, feldspar, and even jasper.

At around 1pm I realised if I didn’t hurry back to camp and eat and take my drugs my Dad would be storming over to yell at me in front of all the other paleos and geos and embarrassing me at the age of 43 years old……so I went and rested for a while (read….10 minutes)…..and then I was back on site continuing my search for really cool stuff.  Zoe was in her element and Elliott was working hard!

So, here are some examples of what we found today……

This bone, we think is a bone from a Macropus titan – the Andre The Giant of the kangaroo world! In situ, this bone was about the size of my arm. It was too fragmented to dig out and we are still trying to figure out exactly what to do with it.

We are bit excited about this one as the scratch marks that you can see in the middle of the bone are cut marks, indicating animal bite marks. We bone people find that interesting!

So, we are all very tired, extremely dirty and the aroma of something untoward may be hanging in the air of the common room, but we are all happy and excited about all the findings from this dig. On a final note……here is a photo of my Long-Suffering mentor holding a sthenurus skull which was a very large, robust kangaroo-like animal. She looks happy because she’s just made a joke that the skull looks like Strop from the Paul Hogan Show……only she would make that kind of joke……perhaps I am the long-suffering one!

So, I went to the Doctor and after being pumped full of drugs I got the all clear to come back to the dig site…..(actually I begged and pleaded and made promises of resting lots and making sure I didn’t overdo it…..yeah right!).

Upon arriving back on site the weather was so inclement that the crew had called it a day. It was cold, wet and bitter – to the point people’s fingers didn’t work anymore. So instead of an active dig site, I walked into the common room full of scientists all doing their second most favourite thing! Drinking!

So, when Cam and Tim (when I grow up I want to be like Cam and Tim – or marry their brains!) asked me to go and help them do something on the dig site I assumed they were just going to show me around. Five trenches have been opened up and two of them are yielding a lot of bone and teeth. I was desperate to see! We walked over to the dig site and approached a tarp that was covering three heaps of dirt. When we pulled back the tarp the dirt was full of clay and was quite wet and heavy.

And then I nearly wet my pants! We began to pluck pieces of bone and teeth from the clay. Macropus titan teeth, incisors, an intact metatarsal, bone fragments, half mandibles…….oh my f$%^$#@ gawd! And this was just on the surface of the mound. I can only imagine what was in the centre clumps.

Yes folks…..that is a pretty big incisor……and I found it!

So now I am the Girl Who Fell In Love With Rocks But Also May Want To Be A Palaeontologist because today was too much fun to even BEGIN to describe! And tomorrow I get to spend THE WHOLE DAY doing this!