How Australian Rhodonite Formed in New South Wales

Rhodonite is a manganese silicate — the rose-pink colour comes directly from manganese locked into its crystal structure, and the black veining running through nearly every piece is manganese oxide, laid down over the same slow geological time as the pink around it. Because that veining forms unpredictably, no two pieces ever read quite the same way; we treat every cut as genuinely one of one rather than a repeatable pattern. We source ours from two very different places in New South Wales, and we've never thought they should be treated as interchangeable.

Broken Hill

In September 1883, a boundary rider named Charles Rasp was working the Mt Gipps sheep station when he noticed an odd, jagged outcrop and assumed it was tin. It wasn't — by January 1885, assays on the same ground were returning 2,000 to 3,000 ounces of silver per ton, and the company formed to work it, Broken Hill Proprietary, went on to become BHP. What Rasp had actually found sits on the Willyama Supergroup, rock close to 1.7 billion years old, part of one of the largest and richest silver-lead-zinc ore bodies ever discovered on Earth — well over $100 billion of metal has come out of that hill since. Rhodonite occurs alongside that ore, and by most accounts it's the most striking mineral to come out of Broken Hill's early years: deep red, high lustre, sometimes gemmy enough to see light through, in crystals that have run to ten centimetres across. The rhodonite here runs deeper and redder than the Tamworth stone, with heavier black veining. We use both, and we say which is which.

Tamworth

Tamworth's rhodonite comes from a much smaller operation: the Black and White Mine at Danglemah, about 50 kilometres northeast of the town, which began working its manganese deposits around 1960. In that first year alone it produced seven tonnes of rhodonite — including a particularly fine grade the miners themselves called Imperial Red — most of which was shipped to the United States for use in dress jewellery. Alongside the rhodonite, the same small deposit has turned up hausmannite, tephroite and jasper, all part of the same manganese-rich pocket of ground. It's a quieter story than Broken Hill's, on a much smaller scale, in a part of New South Wales better known for farming than mining. The stone reads rose pink, shot through with fine black veining, so no two cuts look alike.