The Big Sapphire Ring

Jewellery is a rare Big Thing subject and a difficult one. Almost everything in this catalogue enlarges something already reasonably large – a fruit, an animal, a tool. A ring is small, precise and made of materials whose entire appeal is that they catch light at close range. Scale it up and the sapphire becomes an opaque blue lump, which is a genuine design problem rather than a simple multiplication.

The Central Queensland gemfields around Sapphire, Rubyvale and Anakie are among the world's largest sapphire-producing areas, worked since the 1870s and still worked now – partly by commercial operations, largely by small-scale fossickers on individual claims. Sapphires from here run to deep blues, greens, yellows and the parti-coloured stones the fields are known for.

A ring is the right end of that story. It is what the dirt eventually becomes, which is a different statement from the Big Miner at Rubyvale – a figure doing the digging – or the oversized pick, shovel and sieve down the road at the Blue Gem precinct.

Three Big Things across two tiny gemfields settlements, covering the worker, the tools and the product, is a more complete industrial portrait than most large towns manage.

Nothing found establishes the maker, the size or a date beyond the 1980s.