The Story of Our Sapphires

Ruby Valley em gallery is a unique family run business situated in the heart of the central Queensland gem fields on the Tropic of Capricorn they mine and produce some of the most exquisite sapphire jewellery in Australia today you will follow the story of the mining methods used to retrieve these sapphires and the precise and artistic skills required for the gem cutting and jewelry design over 50 million years ago about the time of the breakup of Gondwana land sapphires will form deep below the Earth's mantle and then blasted to the Earth's surface via volcanoes the sapphires were eroded into ancient riverbeds which are now the alluvial gravels that Peter has mined underground since 1974 so you can see here worked in 2d are workings and the are workings of the tunnels the height of their roof was there and this is the original floor so they took it out the wash and have actually propped it and these are the remains of the old props maybe from 1914 or before the First World War they would be nine backdrops like this and that would completely be composed the old timers have also back stowed so that rock and gravel is where they've thrown the gravel back around the props in the old tunnels are finished so it's obvious they got onto a fairly good patch in that bottom layer 15 inches to 18 inches thick there is quite often a few sapphires in the layer the next layer up and if there are rocks and layers further up as a riverbed sort of washed up on banks there'll be sapphires collected up in high patches as well but the old timers would have gone right under that this is where I started off this set of mining tunnels on the desperado and you can see all the holes in the wall a little from the jackhammer marks so all this was done with a jackhammer and the wheelbarrow with a shovel so quite a myriad of tunnels the travels right along the side of the old workings but we always put the props around the entrance of a shaft around the collar of the shaft because there can be a vulnerable area for separation well up on the top of banks the wave action or scoots away the lights up and the heavy stuff gets lagged behind as long as there's something to catch it so that's what we're looking for so it can be super rich in a place like this and then three or four meters or 10 meters on the side just sandy and light stuff it's amazing in a great big riverbed nor this will it look like this wash with a clay in that in it will it look more like the gravel coming out of the back of a concrete truck it's in the master flood it's just like a muddy sort of mass obviously with the old-timers working with a pick and shovel they have to be on a incredibly enriched ground they nearly needed to see the sapphires as they were digging but with this digger and with the electric gear that we've gotten the amount of dirt that I can move which is up to ten cubic meters a day I can afford to take the edges of the wash that wasn't rich enough for the old-timers so there's still going to be lots of sapphires left in the ground in fact you could take all of this and they'll still be sapphires and also even though it's been worked for a hundred years from the turn of the century I'll work for another twenty years I've been working for 30 years of another 20 years of doing it and somebody will still work this land for 20 or 30 years after I've finished a good days digging sometimes might be a handful of surfers other days to likely only a few and you just gotta save yourself tomorrow it'll be better so the dirt goes up the surface by this half cubic need a bucket because over the hoist dumped all to the grizzly which separates here the huge drops the rest of the gravel goes by the bin and combined into the trommel which screened out the fines and separate out the some of the bigger rocks and all of the gravel to right-size gets washed or sluice over the place we've gathered the sapphires and the Pope's out by bouncing the gravel over those ripples which is separating the sapphires by gravity and water all the eight riverbed did the same thing with the bouncing of the waves and the currents going around so what we don't hear we can see the iron stone and the sapphires at the bottom of the tray mostly in the first tray so this is the heavy concentrate so people take home a little sample bag of this concentrate and hand sort out the last of the little sapphire and zircon the Rooneys bag and quite often is a very loss and Sapphire confess it into a gem that makes a really good souvenir or stud the shop in 1988 because we can we were valuating the best sapphires but we needed somewhere to sell them so the whole operation of the the gem cutting the jewelry making and running the shop is all about being able to to sell the sapphires that I dig out from under in so all of that is so that I can keep up this addiction for digging suppose me and that's the important part and in the 70s we just sold it to the ties and you'd work all week digging out a parcel sapphires so drink a carton a bit on time they go back to work on Monday but it's near the we follow the whole process through and it's quite a major operation people come in here looking for the products that are the genuine product and the grand the jewelry processes lost wax casting the wax models are invested in plaster blending out over night and then the gold is directly cast into plaster Paris mold well we started the Devonshire teas because people would come and we chat to them on the brain and the BIOS a farm would tell them all about it and we'd maybe do some jewelry designs we find that we were often cups of coffee on the brand and people enjoyed it we created a nice garden nice atmosphere to work in and so the different charity aspect was something that people could easily identify with what we and it was simple straightforward and Neddy has been making those beautiful scones for years and you could stay a night now beautiful self-contained unit right next to the gallery with each piece of jewelry so we provide a certificate with all the details plus photograph the highly skilled and dedicated team at Ruby Val gem gallery Peter Eileen Nettie and Mary invites you to come and share this experience

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Views: 62,455

Rating: 4.7980771 out of 5

Keywords: Australian sapphires, gemstones, gem mining, Rubyvale, Central Queensland, Peter Brown, designer jewellery, Rubyvale Gem Gallery, Tourism Awards, Anakie, Emerald, Capricorn

Id: XZLkUOYc7JY

Length: 9min 31sec (571 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 08 2012