We’ve spent the past few days in the gem fields of Queensland’s Central Highlands (Gayiri country). With towns named Emerald, Sapphire and Rubyvale I guess we shouldn’t have been surprised that this region is one of the world’s largest producers of sapphires.
Actually, apart from Emerald, these places are communities rather than towns. Full of character and characters who’ve spent decades digging around for precious gems. I got chatting with a local and once we'd established that I don't work for tax office (he spotted my Canberra number plates), he told me he'd lived in the area for over 40 years and still didn't know most people's real names. Like a guy they call Mickey Mouse, who lives in a shack up in the hills with no power, water or phone and only a goat track in and out. Like most of the other fossickers, Mickey lives a simple life, except for the few times a year when he takes himself off for a holiday in his penthouse on the Gold Coast. Or so the story goes.
That aside, prospecting is a tough game and there’s plenty of folk around here that have been forced to run a side hustle while digging for that elusive stone that'll fund a Gold Coast penthouse. They do this by selling buckets of dirt to grey nomads like us (Juddy and me, that is) whose job it is to inject a bit of cash into the communities we pass through.
This is how it works: you purchase a bucket of dirt and rocks from a prospector who’s in possession of a bit of land which may or may not have a gazillion dollars worth of sapphires hiding just below the surface. Then you sieve the contents of the bucket, separating the rocks from the dirt; then you wash the rocks; dump them on a hessian sack and pick out anything that sparkles with a pair of tweezers. Believe me, you need tweezers for this job. After an hour or so of sieving, washing, tweezing and repeating you’re left with a pile of, well, very clean rocks. And a few sparkly things no bigger than a grain of rice that the prospector assures you are in fact very, very small sapphires.
I had a bit of fun doing this yesterday. Hoping for a sapphire large enough to fund my next tank of petrol, I walked away feeling grateful that I have a credit card to pay for fuel. My prospecting friend told me that I’d found some nice little sapphires that could be cut down and used in a piece of jewellery if I so desired. The downside being that the cost of cutting would exceed the value of the sapphires by about 600 percent. It was an enjoyable if not financially rewarding way to spend the morning and I’m glad I did it. But for this little band of travellers, unfortunately the gems remain hidden.
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