SAPPHIRE

We had heard about Sapphire months ago and have been looking forward since then to visiting and doing some fossicking. After staying the night in Emerald we drove an hour down the road to the very strange little place that is Sapphire, which contains not many permanent structures, mostly caravans set up on brick pillars, with rough extensions tacked on here and there. There is a feeling of temporary permanence, caravans, buses and motorhomes that were only meant to stay for a week or so are now rusting and weathered, surrounded by long, dry grass and rusty old mining equipment, and of course the familiar piles of dirt that are commonplace in every plot. You can just imagine people visiting years ago, finding a small sapphire and catching the bug, it is quite addictive really. Many small claims have been set up around the place, one with a sign that states “Anybody caught digging on this claim will be shot”, although the people we met were all very welcoming and full of advice. Sapphire supplies 80% of the worlds sapphire demand. It is very hard work sifting through all the clay and gravel to find the precious stones that a volcano spewed out millions of years ago. There are a couple of ways to go about finding sapphires. You can buy buckets of “wash” at many places and sift it with their equipment on site, or hire the picks, shovels, sieves and willoughbys (a mechanical dooverlackie that cleans your wash in a 44 gallon drum of water) and go for it in one of the places open to the public. Being 200kms inland means that it is very hot around here, and needing sunlight to find the sapphires in the piles of gravel makes for hot and thirsty work. So we bought a few of the $8 buckets at Pat’s Gems and had lunch and a beer or two while we searched for our fortune. We did find a few stones that are of a cuttable size and it was good fun, but we did not find the million dollar stone.