STORY & PHOTOS BY JENNI CLARK AND LEIGH TWINE
The access road to the sapphire field is only accessible by the mining lease owners to the rear of the fossicking grounds. The entrance has a locked gate.
My first experience of Lava Plains (North Queensland, Australia) was around 1985, when a local farmer allowed ‘friends of friends’ to wander around certain areas of his holdings, camp in a rough shelter used for putting out cattle lick in the summer, and randomly pick up bits of sapphire and anything else shiny wherever we saw it.