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This was published 3 years ago

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Diamonds aren’t forever: the party’s nearly over for Australia’s most successful luxury export

A geological rarity, pink diamonds are one of our most valuable resources.

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By Amanda Hooton

“Fly to virtually any city on earth, and within an hour you can buy a one-carat white diamond. You could never do that with a pink,” notes one jeweller. Model wears pink and white diamond rings and earrings designed by local jewellers Cerrone.Credit:Peter Brew-Bevan

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Diamonds are the most portable form of wealth on the planet. Yes. I know.” Do they go by private jet with an army of security? By unobtrusive courier on a commercial flight? In a brown paper envelope in the mail? The postage was worth $US2.44, the diamond today is insured for $US250 million. Participants can place only one bid per stone, and only the ultimate buyer knows the selling price. “It’s also nerve-racking and exhausting. Justin’s father’s rationale for buying it? Linney smiles sheepishly. “He just fell in love with it. But despite this – or perhaps because of it – no one in the business will tell you how they’re actually transported.

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Really, we’re waiting for a princess to come along.

In the flesh, you can see why: it’s ridiculously pretty, like something from a fairy tale. As is often the case, the pink diamonds are set in rose gold to bring out their warmth, and contrasted with the whites to show off their colour.” This is one of the real-life characteristics of diamonds that rarely shows in photographs, and with 400 stones massed together, it’s truly startling: as if a million tiny LED lights are blinking on and off.

The tiara’s central stone is a 0.8-carat fancy vivid pink (its official colour designation) pear diamond, which detaches and can be worn as a ring.”

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Despite the Linney family’s love, this tiara is certainly for sale. Indeed, they’ve had the odd offer, but none high enough to sell. “Really,” says director David Fardon, “we’re waiting for a princess to come along.”

Fardon himself is no stranger to the allure of pink diamonds. He managed the Argyle tender for more than a decade. “When you ring people to tell them they’ve won a tender diamond, they always say two things,” he explains.

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” ‘Oh my god, that’s fantastic!’ ” Fardon never gives away the underbidder’s offer and, like everybody else, he’s reluctant to divulge any details about diamond transport. But at the end of our conversation he throws me a very small bone. “There are people who specialise in such things,” he says kindly. “They’re very discreet.” He smiles. “And very expensive.”

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Which is another way of saying that with diamonds, anything is possible.

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The 59.6-carat “Pink Star” fetched $94 million at auction.Credit:Getty Images

Here are some unexpected facts about pink diamonds. Fact one: they are the rarest diamonds in the world. Indeed, Argyle alone produces more than 90 per cent of the world’s annual supply of pink diamonds. Except at Argyle. By some freak of nature, one-tenth of one per cent of this single mine’s production is pink – which is still a truly tiny number, but enormous by world standards. Pink diamonds constitute an infinitesimal percentage of global diamond production: one in a million diamonds discovered worldwide might, in a very good year, be pink.

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This rarity translates directly to consumer sales. As John Calleija, owner of eponymous jewellery boutiques in Australia and London, puts it: “You can fly to virtually any city on earth, and within an hour you can buy a one-carat white diamond. You could never do that with a pink. There might be three or four stores in the world – literally – with a pink of that size.”

The Argyle Pink Diamond Tiara, with 178 pink diamonds and 221 whites, is worth more than $3 million.Credit:Courtesy of Rio Tinto Diamonds

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Fact two: pink diamonds are the most expensive diamonds in the world. A pink diamond is worth between 15 and 50 times as much as an equivalent white. Only 29 fancy red stones have been found at Argyle, and only a handful ever worldwide. Indeed, the most valuable stone per carat ever found at Argyle was a purplish red stone: the Argyle Muse, a 2.28ct fancy purplish red, which lies at the end of the official pink spectrum. Red and blue diamonds, which are also produced at Argyle, are exponentially rarer (and even more valuable) than pinks, but are classified within the same “fancy colour diamond” system – yes, that’s the official term.

It’s these two details – incredible rarity, incredible price point – that Argyle has leveraged in its annual pink diamond tender. “This truly is the world’s only consistent source of pink diamonds. In anyone’s language, these gems are rare. For me, their value is wholly justified, no question.”

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Pink diamonds are not only ridiculously hard to find, they’re also hard to cut, hard to polish and hard to set. But, at bottom, their ultimate allure has never faltered. If you can discover them beneath the earth, endure the hardships of their retrieval, solve the problems of their processing, and wrangle them into their final, joyfully lovely form, they are very, very easy to sell. Their two-billion-year history has been full of complications and crises. They are the “talented problem children” of the diamond world.

“We had a lady in one of our stores the other day,” recalls Calleija, “who was just walking past and saw a pink diamond ring in the window. She came in, she tried it on. We call it the Cinderella moment: it fit perfectly, and 20 minutes later, she bought it. For more than $2 million.

“And at the other end of the spectrum, we’ve got a 14-year-old boy who’s paying off a two-year lay-by on a little stone. There’s no typical pink diamond buyer – everyone loves them. I love them. I regret every single one I’ve ever sold.”

Calleija has only more regret ahead, because the production of Argyle pink diamonds is almost over. Diamonds may be forever, but for the Argyle pinks at least, that will be that. This is Australia’s only operating diamond mine, and it will close at the end of 2020, its economically viable supply of gems exhausted. And then it will end. All Argyle diamonds – the tiny proportion of pinks and other colours, the whites (27 per cent), and the very numerous browns (72 per cent) – come from a single mine: a narrow pit in a gully called Barramundi Gap in WA’s Kimberley region. And so the Argyle Pink Diamond Tender will run this year, next year, and perhaps the year after that.

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The Argyle diamond mine in Western Australia’s far north. Credit:Joe Armao

For most of our post-European history, Australia has been famous for primary production – wool, wheat and minerals. But we’ve never been a powerhouse of luxury exports. Opals were big in the 1970s and ’80s; today we have pearls, sourced from a handful of world-class suppliers, and we have diamonds, sourced from only one. These two have represented the tiny, exclusive tip of our huge natural resources export markets.

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So what does the Argyle closure mean in this context? First, surely, one might expect the prices of pink diamonds to skyrocket, as a function of basic economics.

Demand, after all, has always been high, and the vast majority of supply is about to disappear. Indeed, some have suspected that Argyle, rather like the boy who cried wolf, has used the prospect of potential closure over the years to push prices up.

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Now that it’s actually happening, however, experts are surprisingly sanguine about price rises. “There are the tiny stones, used in pavé and for decoration. And for this work designers will, I think, move over to other materials reasonably easily once Argyle closes: there won’t be a huge hole in the market.

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“Then there are the large, extremely valuable stones [which appear – albeit once in a blue moon – not only at Argyle, but in diamond mines all over the world]. And for them, the reality is that they have always been beyond scarce. If you chart the auction prices of the really serious stones over the past several years, you notice they continue to break records. It’s a question of this extreme scarcity.”

London-based fashion journalist Marion Hume, who writes for titles across the UK, US and here, including the Australian Financial Review Magazine, agrees. “There are so few of these most exquisite diamonds discovered each year,” she says. “We are talking about infinitesimal numbers.” Indeed, Hume believes that serious pink diamonds – those at the top end of the Argyle tender and beyond – are actually too rare and exclusive to even be defined as a “luxury item”.

” ‘Luxury’ now means mass-produced items which sell in the hundreds of thousands from fancy stores around the world,” she explains. The supply chain is too narrow. They are very much the ‘insider’s diamond’: knowledge about them and their reputation exists only among the best jewellers and collectors on earth. They don’t even appeal to those who like a more flashy diamond. Even in the circles I move in professionally, which can include extremely rich people, I see them very rarely.” They represent a highly refined taste.

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Fundamentally, Hume and Sharma both believe that anyone who can afford a big pink diamond is, essentially, so rich that Argyle’s closure won’t stand in their way. “The market has understood for a while that there’s a looming deadline,” he says, “and prices have reflected that. After that, it’s hard to say. “They’ve gone up between 10 and 15 per cent a year,” he says. “Year on year, they reliably beat the stockmarket. And people do buy them for that reason – after property and art, they might buy a pink diamond to diversify their portfolio.” David Farnon agrees, but also thinks that even for the ‘normal’ purchaser, “someone who’s sold their business or finished the school fees” will still be able to buy a pink diamond – the kind of 0.5- to 0.8-carat stone that might cost $100,000.

Or maybe, in essence, it’s just about glamour. Despite their rarity even among the super rich, pink diamonds do occasionally get a big bling boost: for sheer conspicuous wealth, after all, they’re hard to beat. Jennifer Lopez’s six-carat, $US2. What a relief.

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“These are really difficult stones to saw,” explains Holdsworth. It’s about as big as a pea, octahedral in shape, and the bright pink of cranberry juice. But the pinks – every one is different. In the marketplace, this makes it incredibly valuable: the more vivid the colour, the more sought-after the diamond – perhaps the only moment in fashion where raspberry always trumps rose. The whites are easy, like cutting butter. They all have knots and grooves. They are so different from white diamonds. “They look so soft and gentle,” says Holdsworth, examining the bag, “but it’s a minefield in there. So when you put a laser on it, it can heat up and crack.” She opens the bag and the diamond tumbles into her palm. Its surface is faceted like crystallised sugar. “Polishing one of these,” she says, “is like polishing knotted wood. “You cannot sleep at night. They’re not predictable, you worry all the time.” A single stone might take a week to cut.

People who’ve won a tender diamond always say two things. ‘Oh my god, that’s fantastic!’

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“You can spend two hours for just one facet,” says Richard Visenjoux. “You can’t apply too much pressure. You just have to wait.”

The formation of diamonds – any diamonds – on the other hand, is all about pressure: five gigapascals, or 725,000 pounds per square inch. Which is why all diamonds are formed between 120 and 250 kilometres below the earth’s surface: the only place in nature such pressure exists.

But then they need this craton to fracture or tear, providing a path to the earth’s surface.

And that’s only the beginning. For starters, they need temperatures of 1000°C to 1300°C – hot, but not too hot, because diamonds melt at 1400°C under pressure. But then they need this craton to fracture or tear, providing a path to the earth’s surface. Since most of the earth’s mantle is hotter than this, they also need a particular geological formation, known as a craton, to protect them as they form. And then they need a volcano to pass through the craton, collect the diamond bearing rock, and carry it to the surface without melting it en route.

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At the end of all that, pink diamonds still require one more twist in their creation tale. (It’s this bond that gives diamonds their strength and hardness, and their extraordinary resistance to tarnishing or chemical reaction.) But most fancy coloured diamonds receive their colour from stray atoms, often nitrogen, sometimes boron or hydrogen, being trapped in their lattice. Flawless white diamonds are pure carbon: each atom locked in an incredibly stable four-part bond.

This is not the case with pink diamonds. No one is absolutely certain, but most experts believe that, on their million-to-one journey through the earth, these particular stones have experienced an additional, very specific pressure on their molecular structure. If they miss this window, they can flip from pink to brown, and then there’s no going back. This stress distorts their lattice, changing their colour from white to pink.

In most diamond sample bags, the best you can hope for is a few indicator minerals or micro-diamonds. The next held four. Instead, the first bag contained two actual diamonds. As Russell Madigan, then CRA’s chairman, later recalled, “The system [at Smoke Creek] was that you had a sieve and you would fill it up and go down to the water and jig it up and down and tip a pile of sediment onto the ground, because any diamonds would have sunk to the bottom. The first time I did this, the pile was just covered in diamonds. And this happened wherever you dug a hole … It was like a jewel box.” These bags contained neither. Bag 30 contained five.

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As it turned out, the prospectors had stumbled upon one of the highest concentrations of diamonds ever found anywhere. “In most diamond deposits, you talk about carats per hundred tonnes,” explains Murray Rayner. “So in a block of rock the size of a bedroom, you might get the equivalent of about three carats’ worth of diamonds, made up of all different sizes. But at Argyle, with some of our high-grade ores, a single tonne of rock [about half the size of a green wheelie bin] contained up to 20 carats. This plant cost $17 million to build, and paid for itself in six weeks. Indeed, in those very first days, the mine was producing 60 carats of diamonds to the tonne. No other diamond deposit in history had ever yielded anything like it.

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“Argyle literally rewrote the geology textbooks,” concludes Rayner. “It was the biggest deposit ever found in the world. It virtually doubled world diamond production overnight.”

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Singer/actor J. Credit:Getty Images

There are no doubt many reasons for this, but only one strikes you when you actually visit the mine itself: it’s so bloody far from anywhere else. The folded red ridgelines are low and rounded, the pale golden grass waves gently in the breeze, and the bright green leaves shimmer on the small boab trees. Perth is one of the most isolated capital cities on earth.

There’s nothing delicate about the open pit, however, which looks, true to cliché, like a great blood-red wound in the surrounding terrain. Instead, eventually, the various communities decided that mining could continue, in exchange for a (confidential) percentage of revenues.

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Which is how hapless journalists end up 400 metres underground, far beneath the great red pit, at the ground zero of diamond extraction.61-carat fancy intense pink diamond, and the most valuable heart-shaped pink diamond ever to come from this mine – would emerge from such a place?

Credit:Courtesy of Rio Tinto Diamonds

And yet the creation myth of the region includes them. The diamonds are the scales that scraped from her belly as she leapt.

Other stories have it that the local people once gathered these glowing pebbles and tossed them into rivers to bring rain. But they look a lot more like fish scales: the same gleam and grain and rainbow sheen. And like fish scales, most of them aren’t pink, or red or even white. Most of them, in fact, are a shade of pale, pearly brown.

These were men well-versed in dealing with diamonds, which arrived in envelopes, small packages or the occasional little satchel. We have no facilities for storing so many diamonds. “Can I have some time to organise secure transport? “You must take them away immediately. Your diamonds have arrived, they said.

This is not quite as dramatic as it sounds, because many of these diamonds were brown. And 35 years ago, nobody wanted a brown diamond. The world’s entire supply of brown diamonds, however, were classified as “industrial”, and used prosaically in drills, saws and machinery. People wanted whites, and blues and violets and pinks – always pinks – and perhaps, occasionally, a yellow.

Argyle set out to change this view via an enormous international marketing drive. And its efforts were successful. “That marketing effort by Argyle opened our eyes to the long-neglected beauty of these stones,” he says. “One thinks of a lovely one-carat chocolate diamond, and how wonderful it might look in a piece of jewellery. Yet three decades ago it would have been a drill bit.” First, it changed the name – abandoning the unfortunate “brown” for the glamorous “champagne” and “cognac”. Over several years, it transformed the perception of darker-coloured diamonds, and made them covetable to the world.

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At the end of the day, of course, diamonds – even pink diamonds – only matter in the world if people want them.

Model wearing a ring featuring pink and white diamonds designed by Musson, retailing for $163,800. But they like their toughness, too.

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“Australian women are very hard on their jewellery,” points out Linney ruefully.’ And they always say, ‘Oh no.’ But you can see the crosshatching on the band where they’ve been picking up the weight bars.” Despite their apparent daintiness, pink diamonds can take this kind of treatment as well as any other diamond on earth.

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Of course, women in other parts of the world go to the gym, too. “Especially now, with the mine closing. Of course there’s the secondary market, and there will be other pinks found in other mines. But a group of diamonds like these? I don’t think so.”

Selling a diamond, ultimately, is about selling a story: in this case of delicacy and strength, of sweat and sparkle, of two billion years under red rock and 20 minutes at a jewellery counter. “What I tell people with these stones is that they’re buying a piece of time,” Calleija concludes. “And not just any time. Australian time.”

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To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times.

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