“How could you not love rocks? They’re beautiful,” says Pam Montgomery, holding out a handful of stone beads speckled with striking splashes of colour.

Pam, the current President of the Orange Lapidary and Mineral Club, had invited 'Orange City Life' for a tour of the club’s busy rooms in the Orange Cultural Centre on Sale Street.

Cabinets on the walls contain a wide assortment of rocks, minerals, and fossils, while club members are noisily sorting and counting rocks, or busy with the delicate and precise work of faceting stones and gems. The workshop, or “wet room”, contains banks of machinery for cutting, grinding and polishing stones to dazzling brilliance.

“So, the club has been in existence since… well, the first meeting was in December, 1964, and the first AGM was in 1965, almost to the day February 20,” Pam tells 'OCLife'.

Last year, the club had planned to mark their 60th anniversary in some way, explains Pam, but a generous, if unwieldy, donation has been the more pressing concern for members over the past twelve months.

“We were rather busy because we were donated a whole heap of rock, literally a ton of rock!” Pam says. “And that required a lot of sorting, cleaning, re-sorting, cleaning, re-sorting… we've sold some of that rock, and the rest is to be sorted and sold on to make money for the club.”

The ton of rock was offered by Sydney-based crystals and minerals wholesaler Jeremy Jacobson, of Crystals of the World, and the club jumped at the chance, Pam says.

“We've also donated bits and pieces onto other clubs to help them along because a lot of clubs don't have a variety of rock to use for their members, so we've shared the love,” adds club member Kathy Selwood, who says they have so far identified at least 30 different types of rock in the donated pile.

The donation has come at a timely moment for the club, which has been busy fundraising to replace its aging faceting machines — precise, specialised equipment required to cut facets in gemstones.

“They're a bit worn, they've had their day. Unless you've got somebody who's a machinist to redo everything, few people can fix them,” Kathy says. “So we thought it's time to put some money and effort into upgrading, so that the new member, and the older members, can actually do faceting and they're not pulling your hair out.”

A new, high-quality faceting machine will cost more than $10,000, and the club hopes to buy two.

So far, through raffles, rock sales and donations, they’ve raised $6000, Pam says, but they are also looking at grant opportunities.

“We do get donations from people coming in wanting things fixed or cut. They might have lost a stone out of their great-grandma's teaspoon and they want a stone that is similar so we've cut that and put that in and they've donated money to us,” she says.

“My husband and I have opened our garden for fundraising and we'll also do the Orange Show this year and hopefully the Field Days.

“So fundraising is ongoing, but if anybody would like to donate a working faceting machine, it would be welcome!”

The Orange Lapidary and Mineral Club has a strong, steady membership of about 60 people but welcomes anybody with an interest in rocks, minerals, fossils, or jewellery-making.

“Many people come in with a rock or something that their grandfather or their father, or somebody, has picked up. And they want it polished, or they want it made into something, and we will teach you how to do it,” says Kathy.

The club also organises regular excursions to local caves and further afield to places like the Lightning Ridge opal fields.

“Lightning Ridge was fantastic. We had almost 20 members go up, scrounging through some mullock heaps,” Pam says. “And we've been up to the Cotton Hill fossil site, where they have trilobites. Lots of digging, lots of splitting of rock, but when you open a piece of rock that has a trilobite in it, where you are the first person to see something that's 400-odd million years old, it's pretty special!”

The Orange Lapidary and Mineral Club is located at the Cultural Centre on Sale Street. They open each Wednesday from 9am-12 noon and 7-9pm, and on two Saturdays each month.