They say that the area west of Emerald, and compressed by the small townships of Sapphire, Rubyvale, Anakie and Willows are the largest gemfields in the world. And the world is a pretty big place, so I guess this must be quite a special feature.
You know that from this journal we have advocated passionately against the abusive mining of all sorts, stripping stuff from the land from for the sake of the profit you may get. You will be surprised, then, than even I play the game of the sapphire digging. And do you know what? I don’t have a big excuse. I put my principles in some dark corner for a while, and blazing the bad justification “if I don’t do it, somebady else will anyway”, I happily headed for the Sapphire Gemfields with the secret hope of unearthing the biggest stone ever found and retire me and several generations to come.
When you travel between those towns, your hopes kind of vanish a little bit: the land is painfully digged and removed and full of scars everywhere, so you kind of thing that whatever was to be found has been found already. To add some confusion, every two buildings claims to have fossicking licenses and sell buckets, so you don’t really know where to stop.
With some help from the ladies in the local supermarket I headed for a fossicking park in the outskirts of Rubyvale (not that Rubyvale is very big anyway) with a not very welcoming “For Sale” sign at the door.
Not put down for that, I took the easy fossicking option: instead of going yourself and digging from the ground, you already buy a bucket full of dirt, and you carefully wash it to separate the gems from whatever else may be there.
And well, they said it was going to take like half an hour to go through the full bucket, and it took me an hour and a half, but I found 2 sapphires that may be cutted and several small ones that would just be as they are. They told me that the two biggest ones were worth about 60 dollars each, with pretty little surprise or excitement. So for a bucket that costed me 10 dollars I kind of got 120 back. This doesn’t look like a bad business! No wonder people spends all day here buying one bucket after the other! This is better than the pokies!
I finally didn’t cut my sapphires. I will just bring them to my beloved princess Tiffany as a prove of my loyalty and she can decide what to do with them.
And by the way, if you have some spare savings and a jewelry vocation, the fossicking park is called Miner’s Heritage, and maybe you are interested in buying it.
