Romancing Capricornia's precious stone industry
Published on 29 January, 2009
A CQUniversity trio has received a $10,000 grant to produce a documentary which explores the history of the small, independent opal and sapphire miners along the Tropic of Capricorn and the building of a heritage tourism industry...
CQUniversity's Dr Daniel Teghe, Jeni Richardson and Dr Liz Huf were successful in their application for a Queensland Government Q150 Community Funding grant, which has enabled work on the documentary to begin.
Dr Liz Huf said the documentary will draw on the experiences of the miners who fossicked for gemstones from Withersfield and Sapphire in the Central Highlands to Yaraka and Winton in the far west of Central Queensland - an area which experts say was an inland sea and home to terrestrial dinosaurs some millions of years ago.
The filmmakers believe the unearthing of 2 remarkable gems in the region is an important element of the region's cultural heritage.
"The Queensland boulder opal, found by an old gold digger near Blackall in 1869 and the unique blue sapphire, discovered by railway surveyors on the western line in 1894 are important milestones in Capricornia's history," explained Dr Huf.
These 2 incidents along with the life stories of iconic prospectors, gemcutter May Bradford (a pioneering commercial pilot) and today's industry entrepreneurs will feature in the documentary.
The filmmakers will also discuss the drive to sell the gem industry in a new way - as part of an upcoming geo-tourism campaign 'To Dig the Tropic of Capricorn from the Coast to the Outback', planned for 2009.
"We will argue that local entrepreneurs are turning to tourist enterprises which still have their basis in the sapphire and opal deposits but now repackage their ‘cultural capital' accumulated by the long history of small-scale mining to sell it to tourists as an authentic miner experience," Dr Daniel Teghe said.
Professor John Rolfe congratulated the research team and said the project would form part of CQUniversity's focus on resource industries in Queensland.
The team plan to publish a small book to accompany the documentary, which they hope to show at Central Queensland schools, cultural centres and tourist information shopfronts as part of Queensland's 150 Years celebrations.