The Big Miner

The Central Queensland gemfields around Rubyvale, Sapphire and Anakie are among the largest sapphire-producing areas in the world, worked since the 1870s and still worked now. What makes them unusual is who does the work: alongside commercial operations, the fields run on small-scale fossickers and independent miners on individual claims, many of whom have been there for decades. It is one of the very few places in Australia where an ordinary person can still take out a permit, dig, and keep what they find.

That is why a figure of a miner is the right monument here, rather than a giant sapphire. The gemfields' story is about the people, and the specific type – a solitary operator with a shovel and a sieve – has almost vanished from Australian mining everywhere else.

Current regional tourism material still promotes the Big Miner as one of Rubyvale's oversized photo opportunities.

The catalogue's other mining figures work differently: the Kelso gold panner commemorates a historical rush, the Glenden bucket commemorates industrial equipment. This one commemorates a job people are still doing a few hundred metres away.

No maker, size or date is on record, and no approved source text is attached.