Beneath the hills behind Cowell lies one of the largest known deposits of nephrite jade on earth - a green secret in an unassuming gulf town.
Drive into Cowell and you find what looks like any other small gulf town - a jetty, an oyster shed, a wide quiet main street. But in the low hills behind it lies a geological surprise: one of the largest known deposits of nephrite jade in the world.
The jade was identified in the mid-1960s, and for a time there were grand hopes of a thriving industry carving and exporting the stone. Reality proved more modest. Much of the jade is what's known as black jade, dense and dark, and the global market is fickle, but the deposit remains vast - measured in tens of thousands of tonnes.
A stone with a long story
Nephrite is the tougher of the two minerals the world calls jade, prized for millennia in China and among Maori and First Nations peoples for tools and treasures. To find it here, in the saltbush country of the eastern Eyre Peninsula, is a reminder of how much lies beneath the surface of even the quietest places.
Today Cowell wears its jade lightly. You can see worked pieces in town and learn the story locally, but the deposit itself is mostly undisturbed in the hills. Pair it with a feed of the town's famous oysters, and Cowell becomes a study in hidden riches - green stone in the ground, white shells in the bay.
