Anne Schofield is demurely elegant in Issey Miyake silk and understated jewellery, which only reveals its theatrical secrets when she puts one of her rings under a magnifying glass.
"I always wear this little one," she says, smiling as she slides off the gold circle with an intricately engraved stone, or intaglio.
Treasures: Anne Schofield has sold jewellery in her shop in Queen Street, Woollahra for 44 years. Credit: Christopher Pearce/Getty Images
"One of the things I like about intaglios is you can't really see what they are with the naked eye – it's like a hidden message. It's a carving of a little god called Priapus, who was a dwarf in ancient times and a god of fertility, and has a very large penis. He has a set of scales over his shoulder and in one of the dishes he has the harvest and in the other is lying his very large penis. It is too marvellous."
On a middle finger she wears a much larger ring, a Georgian cameo decorated with a Roman emperor's head. Bought at the first jewellery auction she attended at Lawson's in Sydney, it was once stolen from her home but recovered 18 months later after she saw it on a man's hand at another Lawson's auction; police traced it back to a pawnbroker who was charged with receiving stolen goods and now it rarely leaves her hand.
From the book Jewels on Queen.Credit: Richard Gates
Every piece has a story in Schofield's silk-walled Victorian shop, where she has sold antique jewellery for 44 years, making it the oldest business in Queen Street, Woollahra. She intends to stay for another 10 years.
Some of the best stories are collected in her slim but lush new book, Jewels on Queen, which is both a memoir and a catalogue of her passion. Despite her expertise, this is only her second book following an encyclopaedic work on Australian jewellery published in 1990 after 12 years' research and writing.
"I'm interested in all kinds of jewellery," she says, but she focuses on Australian and international jewellery made between 1790 and 1940 – from European settlement in Australia to World War II. The book touches on periods from Georgian to art deco, favourite designers and collectors, oddities such as jewellery made from hair, some contemporary pieces and Indian jewellery including a necklace she bought from the artist Margaret Olley, who wore it reversed to show the enamelled back rather than its gemstones.
"I'm most interested in the history of the piece, the rarity of the piece, the extraordinary techniques used to create the piece," Schofield says. "So I'm interested in jewellery as much more than a fashion accessory; I'm really interested in it as a token of love and an object of historical interest."
From the book Jewels on Queen.Credit: Richard Gates
Her former husband, the arts-world figure Leo Schofield, sparked that interest in 1962 when Anne went to London to marry him and he greeted her at the wharf with flowers and an antique amethyst ring that cost £5.
She already had an eye for design and handicraft, trained by her milliner mother. She met Leo at the Sydney University Dramatic Society, where he was directing plays and took her off the stage to sew costumes. But she studied literature and languages and began her working life as a French and English teacher at Penrith High School.
From the book Jewels on Queen.Credit: Richard Gates
In London they immersed themselves in theatre, opera, and the costume and jewellery collections of the Victoria and Albert and British museums. Back in Sydney they renovated a derelict shop in Queen Street (a few doors from the current shop) and opened Anne Schofield Antiques in 1970.
Some of Schofield's stories are about other love tokens from Leo – a ring with a hand-painted eye for her 40th birthday, a diamond bee brooch for her 50th – and those she has chosen for their daughters, Nell, Tess and Emma. Most of her clients are men buying for women.
From the book Jewels on Queen.Credit: Richard Gates
However, jewellery is a neglected subject in Australia, Schofield says, with only a "handful" of pieces in a few museums and nowhere interested people can go to learn. "I've had an evangelical interest in creating a museum of jewellery," she says, and has donated or sold excellent pieces to the Powerhouse Museum, among others, since it opened in the '70s.
A decade ago she started working with then deputy director, Jennifer Sanders, on an exhibition that was sidelined but has been revived and expanded under director Rose Hiscock and curator Eva Czernis-Ryl. A Fine Possession: Jewellery and Identity will be opened next month by Paul Keating, with 700 pieces from antiquity to the present day and from around the world. As well as lending 70 pieces, Schofield helped source historic objects from museums and private collections.
From the book Jewels on Queen.Credit: Richard Gates
She will be back for the opening after her first trip to Russia, where she is excited to see the treasures of the Hermitage Museum. With unfaded curiosity, she travels once or twice a year to London, where she buys mostly from dealers. The internet is no place to buy jewellery, she says.
"I learnt everything I learnt by going into shops, talking to dealers, becoming friends with dealers, sharing the enthusiasm."
From the book Jewels on Queen.Credit: Richard Gates
From her armoured strong room Schofield brings out a surprisingly modest box of pieces she keeps to wear. She loves earrings but has no taste for large, flashy stones. Her collection includes both diamonds and paste; a 19th-century amethyst copy of an extravagant 18th-century Romanov set; and a quaint Victorian pair cut from bog oak wood.
"I'm always buying things," she says. In Tasmania recently she bought an unusual mourning jewel – a pendant made from woven hair, pearls and gold in the shape of a cross and a dove holding a heart. "I was surprised to find something like that in a shop because it is a museum-quality piece."
What does she yearn to buy? "A really good piece by Rene Lalique", the French designer better known for his glass; he is mostly beyond her price range and that of her clients. One piece from the collection of T.S Eliot's widow recently flew out of reach when it sold at a London auction for £100,000.
As well as buying, she says, "I like to sell. I like to pass it on to somebody who appreciates it." But she doesn't think of jewels as investments, except for rare pieces by designers – the individual not the house – such as Lalique, Faberge, Cartier, Giuliano. Most Australian investors prefer paintings or a big diamond.
Schofield's investment advice: "I always say 'go and buy gold bullion'. I say the investment in jewellery is in a lifetime of pleasure: it's an item of art that can be worn on the body and worn all your life."
Jewels on Queen is published by NewSouth. Anne Schofield will give a talk at Anne Schofield Antiques, 36 Queen Street, Woollahra, on October 9. A Fine Possession opens at the Powerhouse Museum on September 24.