Dig into the right creek bed near Inverell and you might come up with a sapphire. The district's gravels are studded with them, along with zircon and the occasional industrial diamond, and the town has built much of its identity on the gem. Commercial sapphire mining in New South Wales began in 1919, when a mine on Frazers Creek near Inverell started production. By the 1970s the New England sapphire rush was in full swing, with more than a hundred separate operations working the fields - Frazers Creek, Swanbrook, Kings Plain and the rest. Prices softened in the 1980s and the richest alluvial sources thinned out, but the appeal never died. Fossickers still arrive with sieves and buckets, hunting the famous royal-blue stones in one of Australia's most productive gem regions.

Sapphires are only part of the wealth. Diamonds were discovered at nearby Copes Creek in 1875 and mined at Copeton from 1883 until 1922 - the Copeton field became one of the most significant diamond sources in the country. The hills gave up tin as well, drawing miners to towns like Tingha just to the south. Wrapped around all this mineral fortune is the steadier wealth of the soil: wheat, barley, oats, sorghum, maize and, more recently, wine grapes grow across the Beardy Plains. The railway arrived in 1902 and connected the boom to the wider colony, though the line eventually closed in 1987. West of town, Copeton Dam now holds the district's water and draws people to its shores for sailing and skiing.

Inverell wears its prosperity in its architecture. The wealth that flowed in during the late nineteenth century left a civic precinct of handsome public buildings - a grand court house, an ornate town hall, and a Federation-era post office among them, designed in the careful styles of their day. Walk the main streets and you read the confidence of a regional centre that mattered, a town sure enough of its future to build in stone and render rather than timber. The result is a streetscape with real coherence, the kind of inland Australian town centre that has held its character while many others were lost. It remains the working heart of the Inverell Shire and the hub for a wide farming and mining hinterland.

This district carries a story that Australia took more than a century to fully face. The Kamilaroi - including the Wirrayaraay - are the original people of this country. In June 1838, at Myall Creek not far from Inverell, a group of stockmen and former convicts murdered at least twenty-eight Wirrayaraay people, most of them women, children and elderly men, in one of the colonial frontier's most infamous massacres. What made it historic was the response: seven of the killers were tried, convicted and hanged in Sydney that December - the first time European Australians were executed for the murder of Aboriginal people. Today a memorial above the site, built with the involvement of Aboriginal and settler descendants alike, marks the loss and the long act of remembering. It is part of what it means to stand on this ground.