Unique Agate and Silver necklace,  created in Sydney, each bead integrated one to the next with hand-tooled, secure-twist Silver wire work.
All the beads in the above Unique Agate necklace are old, the oldest probably being the superbly-coloured deep orange-red Carnelian, dating back well into the first half of the 1900s. Mined in Gujerat, west India, source of particularly fine Carnelian since Antiquity, these beads were handcut in the native barrel shape,  cut only from the best rough (translucency and vibrancy of colour being paramount), for a particular purpose, namely to transport all the way across India to the far north-east of the country, to Nagaland, for trade with certain Naga tribes. These old fine tribal Carnelians are now rare, and costly, priced in Bangkok, one of the world’s major trading entrepots for rare beads, at the same level as Coral gemstone.
Carnelian, however, is considerably more dense than Coral gemstone, being cryptocrystalline, considerably heavier, and though gemstone Coral of good quality is rare enough, the above old Carnelians are more rare. Thus a strand of these lovely old barrel Carnelians is nowadays approx double the cost of a similarly sized decent Coral strand.
The old creamy bone beads are around the same vintage as the Carnelians, early 1900s. They were old, with the lovely patina of age, when spotted on a dusty rear shelf in an oddball curio shop behind Durbar Square, Kathmandu, in the early 1980s, six of a couple of dozen such beads, remnants of an old Tibetan prayer mala.
The banded Agates, good examples of the type, are of Indian origin, handcut in Old Delhi around 1950 in a pleasing narrow elliptical form.