“Her stone stays whole.” Why a 73-year-old stone cutter is selling his last 240 butterflies at a special price

His hands can no longer hold the saw. A Brisbane wholesaler offered to buy every slab he has left by the kilo. Laurie Dunstan knocked him back and chose something else.

Herberton, Queensland. On the shelves behind Laurie Dunstan’s rock shop sit flat boxes of small stone butterflies: purple amethyst, blush-pink rose opal, deep blue sodalite, golden tiger’s eye. Each pair of wings was cut by hand from a single slab of stone, so the pattern runs from one wing straight into the other.

There are two hundred and forty of them, and there will never be more. At seventy-three, Laurie’s hands can no longer hold the saw.

This autumn a wholesaler from Brisbane wanted the lot, every finished butterfly and every uncut slab, by the kilo. The plan: slice the stone paper-thin, back it with resin, dye the dull pieces bright and sell them as “crystal butterflies” in gift shops for up to $220.

Laurie said no.

Instead he is selling the butterflies exactly as they came off his bench, straight to the people who will set them in a window. For $89.

The boy who found the creek’s secret

Herberton was one of Queensland’s first tin towns, and its creeks have been worked for well over a century. They still turn up quartz. Laurie grew up here, the son of a timber cutter.

“I was fifteen, walking an old mine track above my grandad’s block with my cousin, and saw a glassy tip sticking out of the creek bank,” he says. “I dug it out with Mum’s garden trowel, and my cousin snapped a picture with his little Kodak. I’ve still got it. Clear as window glass, six sides, a point on the end. Nobody made that. The ground did. I never got over it.”

He learned to cut and polish what he and other fossickers found. In 1985 he opened a small rock shop on the main road, with a corrugated-iron cutting shed out the back. He has been at the saw ever since.

Raelene, and what a butterfly means

His wife, Raelene, taught Year 2 at the state school in Herberton for thirty-one years. She was no fossicker, until the day he held a slice of amethyst up to the kitchen window and the light came through the purple.

From then on, every August, they drove the old ute out to the gem festival on the Sapphire Gemfields. She picked the slabs. He cut them. And she kept a stone book: where every piece came from, and what each stone has stood for over the centuries.

She loved the real thing, too. Every wet season the electric-blue Ulysses butterflies drift through the gardens up here, and they rested in the pink euodia she planted for them. Her nan had taught her the old saying: a butterfly at your window means good news is on its way.

After that she wanted a butterfly from every good stone that came through the shop. Together they set aside the best slabs of eight stones for butterflies and nothing else. Laurie sold a few to regulars and to galleries in Kuranda and Port Douglas, where they went for $129 apiece.

When the house went quiet

In the autumn of 2024, after forty-seven years of marriage, Raelene passed away. For months Laurie did not unlock the shed.

One cold, sleepless August morning he finally went out to the bench. Her stone book still lay there, open at the page where she had listed the slabs saved for butterflies.

“She’d planned every one of them,” he says. “The least I could do was cut them. And she always said a butterfly means starting over. I reckoned if anybody needed one, it was me.”

For a year and a half he cut every morning. Four hundred and eighty wings. Two hundred and forty butterflies, each one different, because no two slabs of stone ever grew the same way.

One slab, one pair, and a test you can do at home

Every butterfly starts as one slice of natural stone. Laurie traced both wings side by side, cut them out together, carved the veins by hand and polished them until the pattern came alive. Once a slab is cut, that pattern exists nowhere else.

Raelene always told customers what each stone stood for, “not as a promise, just as a reminder”: amethyst for a calm, clear head, rose opal for a soft heart, sodalite for honest words, tiger’s eye for courage, agate for new beginnings, red gum flower for warmth, apatite for the push to start something and yellow calcite for a lighter heart.

Telling real stone from a copy is easy. Real stone is cold to the touch and heavier than it looks; resin feels warm and light. Then hold it to a window. On amethyst, red gum flower and yellow calcite, the light glows through the edges of the wings.

“Look at the cut edge,” says Dr Merran Toohey, a retired geology lecturer from James Cook University in Townsville. “In real stone the pattern runs all the way through. A printed or dyed copy stops at the surface.”

“Not one more slab”

This autumn the X-rays came back from the hospital in Atherton. Arthritis has worn through the joints at the base of both thumbs, and a tremor in his right hand has been getting worse for two years. His grip is barely a third of what it once was.

It isn’t only his hands. By ten in the morning he is spent, and by midday he can hardly lift a slab onto the bench.

“A hand that shakes and a diamond blade don’t belong in the same room,” the doctor told him. “Not one more slab.”

The offer from Brisbane

Word of the Dunstan stock had reached a crystal and homewares wholesaler in Brisbane through dealers on the gemfields. A week later the buyer flew up and stood on Laurie’s gravel drive. Nine dollars a kilo, cash. For rough stone, a fair price.

Then Laurie asked what would happen to it. Sliced as thin as it would go, glued to resin, the dull pieces dyed bright, cut into butterflies by machine.

That evening his son Brett had a better idea: sell the butterflies Laurie had already cut, straight from his bench, with no wholesaler and no gift shop taking a cut.

$89 for a butterfly that exists only once

Each butterfly is about 10 to 13 centimetres wide and stands on a slim silver steel stand shaped like a butterfly’s body, packed in a padded box. Choose from eight stones: amethyst, rose opal, sodalite, tiger’s eye, agate, red gum flower, apatite and yellow calcite.

The price is $89: less than a resin copy in a gift shop, and below the $129 the galleries charged. It covers the stand, the box and the postage, with no markup on top.

“I want these in the windows of people who are starting something,” Laurie says. “A new house, a new job, a first year without somebody. That’s what Raelene would have wanted.”

What buyers say

Word got around among fossickers first. Then it reached people who had never owned a stone in their lives.

The present that says “begin again”

Mums buy them for daughters moving out. Friends buy them for friends after a divorce. Grandparents buy them for eighteenths. Widows buy them for themselves. A butterfly says something without a card, and a stone one never fades.

The last 240

Those boxes hold everything that is left from thirty-nine years of slabs Raelene picked. Laurie’s hands and his strength are done, and there is nobody else at the saw. When the last butterfly is packed, it’s over.

Brett packs every order by hand, and every butterfly comes with a 90-day money-back guarantee. “Hold it to the window,” Laurie says. “If it doesn’t make you smile, send it back.”