It all starts on the Queensland gemfields, circa 1992…

Between the end of Year 6 (Primary School), and starting Year 7 (High School), my family went on an epic road trip from Sydney up to Airlie Beach in Queensland over the summer holidays. This was essentially three weeks spent in a Camry station wagon, staying at a different Youth Hostel every night, and visiting any number of attractions along the way - the Big Banana, Mount Warning, the Glasshouse Mountains, ——— Observatory, Brisbane Riverside Parklands, Rockhampton, the Great Barrier Reef, etc.

Somewhere in amongst this, we spent a few nights on the Queensland Gemfields, a small group of towns all fittingly given names like Sapphire, Emerald, and my favourite (in a pre-punk foreshadowing kind of way), Anakie. We stayed in an excessively rustic billy-boulder shack on the edge of town, with a family of friendly raindow lorikeets and a not-so-friendly possum that bit my big sister on the toe.

We fossicked for sapphires, and I brought home a little sachet of raw sapphires and rubies as well as one ethereal blue cut sapphire, won in a $5 lucky dip at one of the gem shops in town. I was only 12 years old, but I felt like a millionaire when we left that place!

You may well be thinking, what does a 12-year-old actually do with a cut sapphire and a baggie full of gently tumbled natural gems? Well the answer to that is… keep them in a drawer, gaze at them lovingly every now and then, and start making dreams to someday become a jeweller and be able to make them into jewellery.