Went out collecting today with good friend Toby Billing. We went up to Mount Cole just outside Raglan, about 66km west north west of Ballarat. Mount Cole is granite country.
The granite at this spot is fairly coarse and if you are lucky, you can find crystals of titanite and allanite-(Ce). All of the rocks pictured have titanite and should also have allanite. It is now a matter of splitting them a bit more gently than using a sledgehammer, to try to get intact, rather than broken, crystals.
Titanite is a calcium titanium silicate and occurs here as red-brown crystals. Allanite is a calcium cerium silicate and forms brown-black crystals. The titanite is generally more reddish. The allanite often has an orange halo caused by radioactivity. We noticed a lot of the biotite mica also had a halo.
It is likely that there are pegmatites in the area too, based on the quartz we were finding. A bit more searching might locate something.
