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Trip to Australia, 2004
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Here
In Emerald the man from the information
office tells us that Barry, the miner which
who we developed such a friendly
relationship 2 years ago, did quit the
business.
We went further to
Rubyvale and looked for a possibility to buy
sapphires. There were lots of shops, so we
called at a wholesaler, an old man, who
explained how the market was, nowadays. He
had a nice collection of high-quality
sapphires, He advised not to buy at the
first shop but get a good picture of others.
So we stopped at another who appeared to
be a miner. He was Jim Varak, a friendly man,
Austrian who was here some 25 years. We
bought blue sapphires from his own mine to
complement the collection we bought 2 years
ago here.
Then he invited us in his mine
next day, to be there at 06.15. We can work
there to select the sapphires and other
precious stones. We will see how that goes
and look forward for another nice and
challenging day.
Well, we
were there at 06.15 at the mine and we could
start right the way. The process for mining
is the following here. The seam containing
sapphires is here some 7 meters below
surface.
You descend down with a steel
ladder. Down there the sapphire containing
layer is drilled with a pneumatic drill. The
material is manually put in metal buckets
and hoisted to the surface. Then the
material is fed in a slant tubular revolving
sieve, which removes the sand. The remaining
stones are collected in the buckets. Then
the washing starts.
The machine is a
kind of drum, with a flexible tire rubber
bottom, operated by an electric motor, so it
jitters. The stones are fed in through a
funnel at the top and continuous the stones
are jittered in the water.
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