Qualla: Millbillillie Meteorite

Millbillillie Meteorite: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jon Taylor, CC BY-SA 2.0. Two station hands were swinging open a gate in a boundary fence when the sky lit up. A fireball ran overhead "with sparks coming off it," they would later say, and it dropped somewhere on the plain to the north. That was October 1960, on a lonely stock track between Millbillillie and Jundee cattle stations near Wiluna. Nobody went looking. The men had stock to move and hundreds of square kilometres of saltbush to cover, and a falling star, however bright, was not a reason to stop work. For ten years, the stones it scattered lay where they landed.

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Image: Jon Taylor | CC BY-SA 2.0

Millbillillie Meteorite: A Visitor From Vesta

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dr. Svend Buhl, Niger Meteorite Recon, CC BY 3.0. What fell that night was not ordinary rock. Millbillillie is a eucrite, a basaltic stone blasted off the surface of 4 Vesta, one of the largest bodies in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Eucrites belong to a family of meteorites known by the acronym HED, and they carry...

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Image: Dr. Svend Buhl, Niger Meteorite Recon | CC BY 3.0

Millbillillie Meteorite: The Stones Wait, Then Are Found

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jon Taylor, CC BY-SA 2.0. The first pieces were not collected until 1970, a full decade after the fall. Over the years that followed, prospectors, station workers, and Aboriginal people walking the country picked up stone after stone, until more than 330 kilograms had been gathered from the plain. The lar...

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Image: Jon Taylor | CC BY-SA 2.0

Millbillillie Meteorite: Black Glass and Red Dust

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit H. Raab (User:Vesta), CC BY-SA 3.0. Hold a fresh Millbillillie specimen and the first thing you notice is the crust. As the stone tore through the atmosphere, its outer skin melted into a glossy black glaze called fusion crust, sometimes rippled with flow lines where molten rock streamed backward against the wind o...

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Image: H. Raab (User:Vesta) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Millbillillie Meteorite: Sky-Stones in a Land of Stories

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jon Taylor, CC BY-SA 2.0. The country around Wiluna belongs to Aboriginal people whose connection to it stretches back tens of thousands of years, far longer than any pastoral lease or museum catalogue. They were among those who found the fallen stones, walking ground their ancestors had read for generati...

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Image: Jon Taylor | CC BY-SA 2.0