gems, corundum, Australia.12, Queensland, Rubyvale, Sapphire

Australia has a long and rich sapphire mining history, yet the blue gems from Down Under have rarely been fully appreciated. While they were most desired in the early 1900s, their position has faded to the background. That doesn’t mean that mining stopped; both large and small operations kept operating in the last decades. Recent efforts have cast a new light on the variety of sapphires in Australia, which includes classic blues and yellow, green, and bicolor stones. This suite of colors is also referred to as BGY sapphires, which are classically related to alkali-basalt eruptions. In this study, we take a deeper look at the colors of these sapphires and what caused them, as well as the inclusion scenes observed in these gems.