Queensland GemFest 2019 @ ABC online

Prospecting Australia

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I am sitting here with my pockets loaded from purchases but not a sapphire among them; not a lot of sapphire available at the moment; some say the lack of water for washing is a major cause. Hell of a lot of people at the Sapphire markets this morning, a whole lot more than were at Gemfest stalls.
 
Another interesting gemfields yarn is that the Paramahansa sapphire named "autumn glory"

Found by 3 blokes at Washpool in '93, I admired it as a rough stone of around 100ct. (what a colour) and saw it when finally cut to a 32ct. brilliant.
The mystery would be as to where it resides now....... :/
 
'Paramahansa' ???

Do you mean 'padparadsha'?

A lot of the high priced special stones have left the country, the US and the middle east is where most of them went. Arab buyers visit the gemfields occasionally and usually they are looking for the more unique stones. An old mate of mine dug up a 692 ct blue/green parti back in 1990, a nice stone and because he was down on his luck at the time, he let it go to a Cambodian buyer for three grand. I spoke to the buyer after the deal and he said that he knew a rich Arab who would pay him 10 times what he paid for it - don't know if it happened, but that's the gem industry for you. Winners & bigger winners, some make a bit of money out of it and those who are prepared to take a gamble make heaps of money, Ray Richardson is testament to that.
 
Yeah snafu, I reckon your naming is correct.....I just wrote what my memory thought it was :)
But the colour is well remembered, like the sun just as it drops on the horizon.

I still have half a kilo or so of good parti stones, always reckoned they would end up good value with everything becoming synthetic. In the day saw some whopper parti stones come out of Washpool. Met a Kiwi fellow who sniffed out skinny little gutters, knelt on a hessian bag and slowly scraped them out. One day as he was knocking off he showed me an oval parti you could read the newspaper through. About 120ct. it was fairly flat so would have to be cut into several stones.

All this was after the Anakie Marauder had scraped the area.....some real money went came of there :cool:
 
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