You are a little off track with your beach mineral sands story....

You are a little off track with your beach mineral sands story. I started my full time working life in a chemical laboratory associated with a mineral sands operation. Up to that time, I'm referring to 1947, beach minerals were skimmed from beaches. As processing expanded the older deposits in the dunes and behind the dunes were exploited. These were deposits made over time.
Monazite was only a small part of the mineral content. The valuable part was the rutile, containing Titanium and the Zircon. The firm I worked for was called Zircon Rutile Limited because of that fact. A large portion of the mineral was Ilmenite. Ilmenite contained Titanium but in a form not as readily available as the Titanium contained in Rutile. The Ilmenite was separated magnetically and used as landfill around the town.

There was a small amount of Cassiterite, an oxide of tin, valuable but not in a quantity that it was an important part of the mining target. The Cassiterite also had a small amount of gold extracted with it in the separation process. So small in fact that we had a small extraction plant in the back room of the laboratory extracting the gold extracted with in in the separation process.

Because the Monazite contained Thorium the Commonwealth Government took possession of it and had dump storage. We had to get permission to retain some for experimental purposes and the chemist in charge worked out the method using hot sulphuric acid to extract the Cerium. A pilot plant was built and Cerium Oxide was commercially produced. The market was a specialist one with the product being used for polishing magnifying lenses.

Beach sands world wide differ in their mineral content. For instance those in New Zealand are mainly ferric. On my first trip to New Zealand in 1955 I saw all this black sand on the beaches that was not being mined. I thought this was a great opportunity going begging until I put some under a microscope and realised it was not rutile. Beach sands are an accumulation of the local minerals washed, separated and deposited by river flow and wave action. Usually they give an indication of the minerals inland but this does not mean that there is large deposits inland. Iluka Resources in Australia is one company that exploited inland deposits after a start mining beaches. Just as there is a small gold content in beach sands it comes from larger deposits inland. Chinaman's Beach at Evans Head, NSW is an example where a chinaman mined the beach sands in the early days for its small gold content not realising there was a fortune in Rutile and Zircon associated with that minute gold content.

There is another story associated with the mining there. My step father operated a dragline that excavated behind the dunes to establish a water hole to accommodate a mining dredge. The dredge mined the whole area putting waste sand behind it and ending up at the other end of the area. The dredge was removed and taken to another site. The water hole left behind has since been claimed by the local aborigines as a sacred site with a sacred waterhole. Beach mining not only produces rare earths but also rare sacred sites.