Sapphire miner

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.” 

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