2002/11 Australia trip - Queensland Gemfields |
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Thursday October 10th
We reluctantly left Carnarvon the next morning. Still plenty more things to see on another trip, and Sandie’s feet needed some time for recovery. We went back to the Carnarvon Road, and headed north. There was only one tiny place, Rolleston, on the road, and we stopped there for diesel. Our tanks are good for about 800 miles but with hundreds of miles between towns we tried to keep them full.
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We took the Gregory Highway north to the Capricorn Highway and the town of Emerald, arriving there in early afternoon. The Capricorn Highway runs along the Tropic of Capricorn, so it’s the southerly limit of “The Tropics”. We’d started with warm days in Ballina and had traveled about 500 miles, with the days getting hotter as we moved north and away from the coast.
The people at Emerald’s Visitor Centre were very helpful and we came away with lists of campgrounds and mines. Mines? Well, with place names like Emerald, Sapphire, and Rubyvale, you can guess we weren’t planning on digging for coal. We were at the edge of the Queensland Gemfields. So we stocked up on supplies again, this time at Woolworths. Yes, Woolworths is alive here and “proudly Australian”, ten years after going extinct in our area, and nearly so in England.
The gemfields have been mined for a hundred years, so the bush is a mess of trenches, holes, and slag heaps, some overgrown with brush and trees. The towns are typical boom and bust places, and people who’ve gone bust don’t usually clean up behind them so there’s plenty of ancient mining gear abandoned between the houses.
We ended up in Rubyvale on a very hot afternoon, and thought we’d like to look at the Miner’s Heritage underground (cool) mine, but they’d just closed up for the day. The Bedford Gardens campground was 
nearby, a mass of bougainvillea, and we were their first, and only, visitors of the day. 
The apostle birds came and introduced themselves. They are called apostles as there are always about a dozen of them. I doubt if the original apostles were as hungry as these guys. We walked into town and found that most of the town’s few shops were already closed but 
luckily the pub was open.
Friday October 11th
It had rained a little overnight and that dropped the temperature a bit, which was good as we were planning on doing some mining. The campground owner recommended a couple of places, probably owned by her relatives and friends. We got our required 
“fossicking license” from the State of Queensland at the Trading Post in Sapphire, and 
also some sieves for sorting the gravel.
Sandie called Steve at one of the recommended mining outfits and arranged for us to meet brother Keith at a crossroads outside town. Keith led us out into the gem fields in his ancient Ford and then across the bush into their claim. The area is divided into public zones, claims, and 
industrial mining areas. We, the tourists, have to work in the public zone or pay someone to use his or her claim. Trespassing on someone’s claim is 
hazardous to your health.
Keith and Steve are New Zealanders who’d stopped here 15 years ago and got hooked, and never left. Something for nothing is a powerful attraction, but mining is hard work and a lot of luck is involved. Clearly, Keith hadn’t had much luck or he wouldn’t have been wasting his time with
us.
He showed us the ropes, or more accurately, the pick, shovel, bucket, centrifuge, and sieve. We had to remove the top few inches of topsoil, and then dig out the gravel down to the clay. But not the clay itself, warned Keith. Then take a bucket of the gravel, and put it into a hand-operated centrifuge that removes the big stones and the sand. Take the remaining gravel to a sieve and shake it up and down in water until it’s clean. One last wash and flip the sieve over to reveal the glistening sapphires now on top. Or not. If not, go back and do it all again with another bucket of gravel.
We got a number of blue sapphires but only one of cuttable quality. This wasn’t surprising, or else sapphires would be lot cheaper than they are! Keith gave us tea and cookies, and then headed back to his own underground mine, leaving us to it.
We found most stones by also taking off the top inch or so of the clay, but the clay made it very hard to clean. We should have done more of this though. We wondered if Keith came around after we were done and processed that top layer of clay? We heard a story later about a family that made a lot of money by doing just that for a whole summer. They had enough kids to get a production line going from barrel to barrel, getting the clay separated from the rock.
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Gemfields (5.36) |  |
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It was over 90 by early afternoon, so we quit at about 3 and headed back to the Miners Heritage underground mine. They’d just closed again but the owner was kind enough to take us on a tour anyway. The mine had walls of sapphire-bearing gravel eight feet high rather than the few inches we’d been working with. It had been worked for a hundred years, and they had some tiny tunnels and relics from those early days when people worked down there with candlelight. There were a few sapphires still in the walls, but no digging was allowed! He showed us a tunnel full of wheelbarrows. “Wheelbarrow racing?” I asked. Yes, they have a race each year between Sapphire and Rubyvale, with loaded wheelbarrows. It’s probably like a lot of similar events in Australia, where the instructions begin with “First you get a lot of beer”. Actually they’d say “beeya” which, like “heeya”, rhymes with “idea”. He also had a resin copy of the million-dollar Centenary Stone sapphire, which was found nearby by a 14 year-old boy. We thanked him for the tour, and bought some screened gravel for Sandie to process later when she had time.
She also wanted to buy some rough sapphires to supplement what we’d dug up, but he only sold faceted stones. Again, the only place left open in town was the pub, and the first beer didn’t even touch the sides. Back at the campground, Sandie asked the owner if there was anyone in town who sold rough stones. “I do”, she said, so I left them to haggle over a baggie of expensive rocks.