Sapphires in the rough.

By Karina.

We were heading westward. Into the dust and the wide open spaces. If it weren’t for Jonah and his dinosaur interest we probably would have kept going north, up the coast, but Winton has been on his bucket list for 25 years, apparently, so there we were, heading west. But before the dinosaurs there are the gem fields, and we settled ourselves in Sapphire for a few days, with tall Aussie bush as our backdrop.

We were starting to settle into the groove of life on the road, daylight as the timekeeper, and ‘outside’ as a regular state of being. You notice more things when you’re outside more than you’re in: the brightest stars; the brighter planet; the star shooting north-south on the way back from a 1:30am pee; north-south in general; the largish green spider hanging out on the plant you emptied some water onto; nights with no moon; days with no clouds; cloud shadows patterning the land….those sorts of things. 

So, with our base setup we went a-fossicking. First we went to Miners Cottage in Rubyvale to buy ourselves some buckets of ‘wash’. This is a bucketfull of stone mix that you sieve and sort, looking for the telltale sheen of a sapphire surface. We did this to ‘get our eye in’ so that we would know what a sapphire looked like out in the rough. We found heaps amongst the wash and we quickly felt like we were just about to strike it rich, and I quickly got addicted. I could have gone back for days. Especially when they serve you scones with jam and cream, and especially when jam and cream is the one single combo I’ll eat wheat for. But 3pm came and it was time for them to check our haul and close-up shop. We found a few sapphires big enough and good enough for cutting or polishing and we all left feeling clever and richer. 

We went straight to a nearby dry creek bed and Neil and Jonah took a wander with his pick axe and returned quite pleased with themselves with a sapphire they pulled out of the ground. 

With more blue stones to our name we left Sapphire and began the crawl further west: into the dust and flies and the rust coloured soil. As we passed coal trains so long you couldn’t see the end I thought about the earth and the riches being pulled from it and decided I wouldn’t become a professional sapphire hunter after all, and the few treasures we’d collected were probably enough.