Anne Schofield, Australia's best-known antique jewellery expert, unlocks the cabinets in her exclusive Sydney shop in Queen Street, Woollahra and reveals the favourite pieces of jewellery she has bought, sold and collected over 50 years.

I am often asked, ‘What was it that started your interest in antique jewellery?’ 

Jewellery is almost always offered as a token of love – to the betrothed, to a friend, to a son or daughter, as congratulations for an achievement or an academic success, as a memento during a long absence, or as a loving gift to a wife on the birth of a child. It is all about expressing love, which makes it the most personal of gifts and the most treasured. Barring mishap, it endures; for a lifetime, sometimes even for centuries.

The very first jewel I owned was a ring given to me by Leo Schofield. After a year’s romance by correspondence, I was to join him in London. I left Sydney on New Year’s Eve 1961 on the Bretagne, a ship on the Greek line. Leo was at the Southampton Wharf to meet me – looking about five times bigger than I remembered, in a huge tweed coat and with lots of hair! It was February 1962. He presented me with a bunch of violets and an antique amethyst floral cluster ring, for which he had paid the princely sum of £5! I thought it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

And that ring was the beginning of a lifetime’s passion for antique jewellery.

Soon after I arrived in London, Leo and I were married at St Anne’s Church, Notting Hill Gate, on 17 February 1962. We returned to Australia in 1965 and in 1968 we bought a derelict nineteenth-century shop and residence at 46 Queen Street, Woollahra. We restored the living quarters and renovated the building, and eventually, in 1970, opened the shop. I enrolled in a gemmology course at the Gemmological Association of Australia as I had become fascinated by the magic and mystery of gemstones in all their varieties. I had been dealing in antique and vintage costume and jewellery at a shop in Woollahra called Kaleidoscope, but when I opened my own shop I decided it would focus exclusively on jewellery. It was called Anne Schofield Antiques, as it is today, and it was the first shop in Australia to specialise in antique jewellery. 

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In 2004, while cataloguing a collection of intaglios set in fobs and rings, I was examining with my jeweller’s loupe a Georgian gold fob seal with five images carved into the white chalcedony base. I managed to identify them: an hourglass, a few bees or flies, a barrel, a pair of clasped hands and a tiny corset. It was a rebus – a kind of puzzle in which images are substituted for words, often found on seals or rings, where pictures are used to supplement a motto or to send a coded message.

I finally worked out the message on the gold fob: ‘Time flies but love stays’. This wonderful saying expresses the essence of my years as a dealer and collector of antique jewellery, for I am still as passionate about jewels as the day I opened the door to my shop.

This is an edited extract from the Introduction to Jewels on Queen by Anne Schofield, out now from NewSouth.