Tell us a little bit about your gemstone sourcing business and how it was founded?

The Gem Monarchy itself is a relatively new business, which I run part-time, but its beginnings go back a few decades to our first generation. As with every story, there are two ways to tell it: the ‘romanticised’ version and the ‘hard work and dedication’ version. We’ll start off with the former.

My dad, Uchitha, and mum, Thilani, were highschool sweethearts. They did everything together, from studying to extra-curricular activities. Both were smart, dad was always study averse. One day, on his way to an after-hours class by bus, he wasn’t in the mood to study and faked a headache and upset stomach and stayed on while mum got off and went to class. Out of sheer boredom, he fell asleep on the bus and only woke up when the driver was shaking him awake at the last stop. Getting off the bus, dad looked around and realised that he had been dropped off at a gemstone mining site and lapidary, and from that point, his curiosity about the world of gemstones was piqued.

Sri Lanka has the population of Australia but packed into a land-mass smaller than Tasmania. Of those, there are only a select few who get to mine, touch, facet, and be involved in the gemstone trade professionally. So, for dad to have stumbled upon the “trade of the gods” had to be some sort of divine intervention. The next day, dad brought mum along to show her what he’d found. At first, in Sri Lanka, it all started as a collector’s hobby — the profits mum and dad made from other businesses went towards collecting gemstones for themselves. On the rare occasion, they did sell stones, but their main ambition was to revel in the beauty of gemstones.

What started as a hobby became a fully-fledged business in a few years time — this is where the hard work and dedication aspect of the story comes in. For years, they trained in the art of gemstones, mastering their cutting and polishing technique, their materials, and their equipment, all through trial and error. Next came building the foundation of our business, which included the mining itself and the hiring of our full-time mining team and employees. Because we manage our business from our base over here in Adelaide, we’ve built a trustworthy team who’ve now been working with us for the past two decades. This allows us to seamlessly integrate our quality in cutting with our philanthropic business.

We find we’re more involved in our team’s lives than other suppliers. We purchase land for housing, provide vehicles to our team, we pay for health insurance for our team — this is unheard of in Sri Lanka — and for the schooling and education of our team’s children. This stems from the fact that we are Buddhists, and we believe that giving to those who are less fortunate than us is a part of our daily lives. That’s why we are committed to our team, who are paid irrespective of whether we make a gemstone sale or not.

As a certified gemologist and a member of the GAA and International Colored Gemstone Association, you clearly have a passion that runs deep for this unique industry. Tell us about your pathway into the industry and what sparked your interest in working with precious gemstones?

My journey to the gemstones trade started from birth — I was playing with stones when I was three-years-old. Family is always a good foundation for work, and having parents who are hard workers set-up a good foundation. Our family belief is that in anything we do, we must be educated and perform to the best of our ability. In the gemstone trade, this naturally meant becoming a GAA gemologist and a member of the International Colored Gemstone Association. And because of our production line and philanthropic approach to gemstones, we became the only gemstone supplier in Australia who hold an internationally-recognised ethical accreditation.

However, my main motivation when it comes to the gemstone business is helping my mother, who finances our whole gemstone operation through her work as a doctor, making ours a true family business which is funded by us and only us, and gives us autonomy in our gemstone production process.

We are so proud to have you custom cutting some of your beautiful Ceylon Sapphires for our pieces, can you talk about what makes these sapphires so special?

Sapphires in themselves are very special gemstones, in that they encapsulate a variety of hues, tones and saturations. In raw material, they are no different to most of the beautiful sapphire rough material which Sri Lanka yields. It is what happens after that makes the gemstones that we cut so special. Each small calibrated sapphire goes through the same meticulous process as any large center-stone sapphire. We grind away all the included material, precision cut to perfection the individual stones so that there is no windowing, and polish the gemstones with a proprietary premium polish, in a technique which is a closely guarded secret. Thus the process elevates our small calibrated sapphires to an even higher level than what is already out there in the market for hand-cut gemstones.

Tell us about the communities that you work directly with. What frameworks do you have in place to ensure that the mining communities feel supported?

As mentioned earlier, there are quite a few benefits we provide to our team locally that no-one else does:

For our Miners and Lapidary Facility, we provide comprehensive health coverage, including Optometry and Podiatry.

We realise that some communities in Sri Lanka are living in sub-optimal housing, so we provide our mining and lapidary team with housing upgrades which allow them to live safer.

Most communities live in remote and village areas and require vehicles to travel to the city, so we supply vehicles, from motorbikes to vans, to our team.

Ultimately, children are the only reason why our team works as hard as they do. So we feel, as their employers, that we have the responsibility to help take care of their children, particularly through education. We provide everything from yearly stationary to tutoring funds. And if those children want to work with us in the future, we also help them to further their studies in the field of gemmology through educational funding.

During COVID, we bought extra farming land and got to the point where we and our team were essentially self-sufficient and didn’t have to rely on supermarkets for food.

We are so inspired by your passion for environmental stewardship, and ensuring that within your supply chain practices, regeneration is at the forefront. Can you tell us about the practices that you have in place to minimise the environmental impact, as well as any initiatives that focus on regeneration of the land?

Our key strategy for mining is rotational small scale artisanal mining. Despite also having access to bigger mines as well, more than 90% of our production comes from mines which are based in rice-fields, where we only dig down to a depth of one metre and within a surface area of approximately 10 to 15 square metres. This allows us to keep our initial environmental impact low, and sees us limit the turn-around time of a mine of a maximum of seven days. Not digging more than a metre down makes the job of refilling the mine much easier, and allows not only more time for vegetation to grow, but also ensures we’re mining sustainability for the generations to come. After we complete our work on a single mining site, we move onto the next area, utilising the land which we’d already mined once again for either farming or replanting trees and greenery. We brought this concept of rotational farming over to Sri Lanka from Australia, which sees us steering away from the use of big power tools and machinery, and also allows us to keep our environmental impact to a minimum.

What are your hopes for the future of gemstone mining?

For us, our mining techniques won’t change much in future, but rather the approach to everything surrounding it, from the repurposing of land to the sustainability of the mines themselves. Our hope for the future of gemstone mining is that more mining companies employ such techniques — unfortunately it takes a lot more money to maintain such practices, but when it comes to the environment, it’s a cost that is not wasted.