Sapphire miner

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Sapphires are rarer than diamonds, yet the Lane family finds them every day. Linda Peatling reports.

At first glance, the Lane family’s Lonewood Farm in Glenn Innes, northern NSW, seems like your average, run-of-the-mill Australian cattle and crop farm – the cows graze lazily in the fields, oat crops sway gently in the breeze and grain silos tower above the old farmhouse. But dig a little deeper, as the Lane family does on a daily basis, and a precious secret is revealed in the form of little blue stones otherwise known as sapphires.

6am: It’s a clear, crisp, wintry dawn on the New England farm the family has owned for three generations and the Lanes have already started their day. After a hearty breakfast, Andrew, 40, Leah, 39, Patrick, 10, and Angus, 5, head out into the frosty morning in their jeans and riding boots, looking for all the world like the quintessential Australian farming family. “My grandad bought the farm when my dad was five years old so he grew up here, then I grew up here, and now our boys are growing up here. Leah also grew up on a farm, so I would say we’re a pretty traditional farming lot,” says Andrew. Yet, while they might look and feel ‘traditional’, it’s not cattle or crops that take up most of the Lane family’s time these days, but an activity that, at first glance, flies in the face of everything associated with farming: “We’re going out to start up the mine now,” explains young Patrick as he jumps on a motorbike with his little brother holding tight and rides off towards what looks like ordinary grazing land.

7am: The family arrives at a field of grassland where one of their employees is busily excavating a shallow hole in the ground that looks like it’s being dug for an in-ground pool. “This is it,” Andrew says as he enthusiastically jumps into the two-metre hole and rubs his hand along a 20-centimetre layer of earth at the bottom of the soil wall. “This is what makes us a bit different from most farming families – we’ve got sapphires in our backyard.” To the untrained eye, the layer of soil Andrew is excitedly pointing to looks like a layer of gravelly dirt, but both he and Leah know better. “Millions of years ago a volcanic explosion sprayed various minerals on to the land and some of them crystalised into aluminium oxide, which is also called corundum, which is also known as sapphire,” explains Leah, who has a Masters degree in Rural Science. “Later on, a creek washed them down into this valley and they stayed a couple of metres underground for millions of years until people like us started digging them up.”

It’s the shallow depositing that Leah says makes it possible for small family companies such as theirs to mine sapphires at all. “Sapphires are not hundreds of metres underground like diamonds or gold so you don’t need massive infrastructure or huge machinery to mine them,” she explains. The ease of access, she continues, also means sapphire mining is considered to be one of the most environmentally friendly types of mining in the world. “We only excavate a small field at a time and, once we’ve extracted the sapphire layer, we put the soil back, wait a few months, then plant crops on it. Eventually it will turn back into grazing land and you’d never know anything was mined or farmed here.” 

It was this factor that first convinced Andrew’s father to allow sapphire mining on his property just 30 years ago. “Nobody around here was very excited about sapphires in
my grandfather’s day. The locals used to call them ‘blue rocks’ and Dad played marbles with them as a kid.

When the mining companies started to arrive in the late 1950s neither Grandad nor Dad would let them on to our land because they were more interested in cattle than sapphires,” explains Andrew. “It wasn’t until 1978 that Dad finally allowed a company to build a mine here on the condition that it not destroy the land.”

7.30am: Happy with the new sapphire layer the excavator has revealed, the family moves on to help start up the 30-year-old mine plant that was left by the mining company when it went out of business 10 years ago. “The commercial mines were really only interested in the large, high quality sapphires so a lot of the big companies left when they thought they’d found them all,” explains Andrew, who, by the time this happened, had taken over the farm from his father. “We were busy enough running the cattle and the crops but we wondered whether it would be worthwhile taking on the old mine as well,” he recalls.

Fortunately, Andrew had worked for the mine since he was a teenager and knew what was involved in the process. “I’d come up and do odd jobs at the mine as a kid and I eventually worked here as a contract mechanic. So, when the mine closed down, I went to my old boss to see if he thought we could make a go of it.” Despite being faced with the prospect of there being very little sapphire left in the ground and having to use dilapidated equipment, Andrew and Leah decided to give the mining business a go and they’ve been cranking up the old mine almost every day since. “There’s still plenty of sapphire in this ground; probably not enough to support a big company, but enough for a family business like ours,” says Andrew proudly.

8am: The old plant is in full swing now with the dirt being loaded into one end and raw, washed gravel coming out the other. “You can pick out the big bits of sapphire easily from the red iron stone,” explains Patrick, who, like Angus is on school holidays and relishes the chance to help out at the mine. “We’re not allowed to get in the way but we’re allowed to pick out the sapphires from the gravel mounds.”

9am: Happy that the boys are well out of harm’s way, Leah goes back to the farm office to work on the business end of the sapphire world. “When we took over the mine, we didn’t realise getting the sapphires out of the ground would be the easy part,” she smiles. “We had a lot to learn about the international sapphire market, which can be a pretty scary place if you don’t know what you’re doing.”

While they knew the international gemstone industry in general had a reputation for being fraught with fraud and corruption, the Lanes had no idea just how tough the sapphire industry would be. “Because sapphires come in various shades and are easier to get out of the ground than diamonds, the industry is full of small operators who can slip through regulations. So it’s difficult to trace where a sapphire has come from, how it was mined or how it’s been treated along the way,” she explains. “A person might think they’re buying a natural stone from Australia that’s been mined under strict environmental and ethical rules when they’re actually buying a treated stone from somewhere else that has no rules.”

With this in mind, Leah and Andrew purposely named their company ‘Aussie Sapphires’, and sell their sapphires direct to wholesalers and the public online. “We offer certificates
of authenticity and people can come to the mine if they want to see exactly what they’re buying,” she says.

1pm: Andrew and the boys return from the mine for lunch, and then it’s on to the next stage of the mining process. “We have to dry the wet, raw gravel on racks overnight, then we feed it through a machine called a Rare Earth Magnet which sorts the red iron stone from the sapphire,” explains Andrew. “The machine picks up about 80 per cent of the sapphire but we pick out the rest by hand, which the boys are experts at nowadays.” 

2pm: While the boys carry on with the sorting, Leah makes a 12 kilometre run into the town of Glenn Innes to drop off a few packages of raw sapphires to the post office. “We send the larger, high quality stones to Australian cutters but we have to send the smaller ones to Thailand because we can’t afford to pay Australian cutters for these,” she explains. “It’s another part of the industry we’re not happy about. The wages are so low in Asia that a lot of very skilled cutters are living in poverty. We try to screen the companies we use and pay more for quality cutting in the hope that the extra money goes to the workers, but we can never be sure. The bad companies keep the price of sapphires low; again it’s all about ethics. Luckily more consumers are starting to demand ethically mined gemstones. I know I wouldn’t want to wear a cheap stone that had been mined through slavery.”

2.15pm: On her way home, Leah drops in to the jewellery store her parents opened in the Glenn Innes main street a few years ago as a new arm of the family’s sapphire business. “We started employing jewellers to make finished pieces for us a while ago and it seemed to take off, so Mum and Dad thought it was fitting to open a local jewellery shop,” explains Leah. “I think the locals and the tourists like the fact they can come in and buy local jewellery made from locally mined sapphires.”  

3.30pm: Leah returns to the farm to relax in her front garden with one of the more creative roles she’s taken on in the business. “I’ve started designing jewellery and I surprised myself and everyone else when I realised I wasn’t bad at it,” she laughs. “It’s a very male environment around here but this is the one feminine part of the whole process and I love it.”

4.30pm: It’s not long before Patrick and Angus have joined their mum with her sketch pad in the garden and Andrew decides it’s time they all took a break to enjoy a hobby he began when he was just a lad. “We love collecting vintage farm equipment, and we’ve set up our own museum in the yard,” he says. “Our pride and joy is this 1929 Crosley motor car – the old girl still goes and every time I get her out the boys’ eyes light up.”

5.30pm: With their sons engrossed in the old car, Andrew and Leah take another quick trip into the fields before sunset to decide where the excavator should start digging next. “It’s pretty much a mixture of technology and guesswork,” says Andrew, as he grabs his trusty ‘divining rods’, which are basically two pieces of stiff metal wire. “When the wires cross I know there’s sapphire in the ground,” he says confidently, and, much to many a sceptic’s chagrin, he’s usually right. “I saw an old chap using a metal handsaw to find sapphire when I was a kid and it would bend in the middle when he hit the spot, so I thought I’d give it a try with divining rods,” he recalls. “The local blokes thought I was mad, but when I started finding the sapphire a couple of them secretly asked me to use the rods on their land.” While nobody knows exactly how divining rods work, Andrew believes they have something to do with magnetic forces. “It only works for me if I hold a piece of sapphire in my hand, so I suppose the rods act like a magnetic conductor which pulls the mineral in my hand towards the mineral in the ground.”

6pm: The couple returns to the farmhouse for a well-earned, home-cooked meal, and then Leah sits down to teach an enthusiastic Angus one of the most important and beautiful parts of the whole sapphire-mining process. “It still impresses me that we can send off these raw, old, ugly rocks and have them come back from the cutters as beautiful gems that royalty would be proud to wear,” says Leah. But before they can be sent to royalty, or anyone else for that matter, each stone must be sorted and graded, which is no mean feat. “It takes hours of sitting with tweezers and an eye glass, so I’m training the boys now because I need all the help I can get,” says Leah.

8.30pm: Patrick and Angus are tucked up in their beds, while Andrew and Leah hope they’re not too far behind. “There’s always something to do at night because we have to photograph the larger stones to sell to the US market, which comes alive right when we’d like to be going to bed,” explains Leah.

“There’s not much about sapphire mining that’s easy and it certainly hasn’t made us rich, but there’s something about it that keeps us going,” adds Andrew. “Maybe it’s because of their beauty; or maybe it’s just because we know they’re there waiting for us to come and find them.”

Photography: Andrew Lehmann. Hair & make-up: Tira Jaye.