Sixty years ago before the Copeton Dam covered the diamonds.

[Diamondted]

I carried out some electrical work for and old miner named Joe. He paid me off with a few diamonds. My friends mined for alluvial tin and uncovered a lot of sapphires and a few good diamonds. One of the sapphires was a 54 carat star sapphire.
There was also a small crater which there was an attempt to locate diamonds but the water beat them, no big enough pumps in those days. I have seen the blue coloured clay from this crater and there was also plenty of tourmaline present. It's a shame that it's all under water now.

We used to pick up Sapphires off the ground at Sapphire after rain sixty years ago and some of the sapphires which I later fasceted were hexagonal crystals, hardly water worn.

It's been a long time but I am going to try to locate a couple of areas which I was taken too all those years ago where there were lots of diamonds found. At that time no one had been to the site for more than 100 years. Interesting isn't it!

 

[KEZZ]

Would be nice just picking up gems straight off the ground rather than digging into ground that is like concrete

 

[kawman]

In the early days there was diamonds found in some of the ancient wash that was being worked for gold.. BUT.. the guys placed one on a anvil and hit it with a hammer.. It smashed so it was not a diamond they thought.. Not hard enough... they looked great so they fitted them into their pick handles if big anough to be worth the effort..... the rest was thrown out with the left overs from their sluicing.. find those concentrated and tossed old cons sites and you will be in a great position to pull back some very good stones without much digging... this happened on the east coast of Australia well away from the usual kimberlite / diamond pipe theory as in Africa or west Australia..

 

[Diamondted]

When we were at the old site, we checked some of the sieve tailings and my friend found a beautiful white diamond sitting on top around 2 carats from what I remember.
One that they missed. Probably the rain over the years had revealed the stone from the sieve tailings.
Another interesting thing to me is that on the inverell side of the range between Inverell and Glen Innes, the sapphires are predominately blue and on the Glen Innes side they are more green/gold. Somewhere in that range is the sources of both sapphires I think.