Opal mining, Lightning Ridge, Australia

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Lightning Ridge, home to some of the worlds best reserves of precious materials, black opal...and of course my aunt Ina! And it was Ina's that was my next stop!

After driving for 10 hours and travelling close on 800km north from Sydney we finally landed at her house in tiny little Cumborah, about 50km southwest of Lightning Ridge at about 5 in the evening. Peter, her partner was there with huge welcomes for us both and before long had abandoned the notion that Aidan had ever lived anywhere else. I was part of the family and the house (including his fridge of beer in the back veranda) was at my full disposal! In fact he forgot about Aidan altogether because in the space of the first evening my name had somehow mutated from "Aidan" into "Aid-E" (and later to Eddie for some strange reason) and it was not to revert back to Aidan until i reached Brisbane!

The drive up from Sydney was absolutely beautiful. Nothing of what I had expected Australia to be like. Greener than Ireland for a lot of it with rolling hills stretching off into the distance. I had always wondered where Microsoft take those idyllic country photos that they use as backgrounds for their computers. You know the ones, the ones with the sweeping green hills, the perfect blue skies, the tree perched right on top of the hill and the picket fence with horses peeping their heads out over....ya..that one! Well now I know! It is on the road from Sydney to Dubbo! And as we drove passed I promised myself that before I leave Australia I would be back there with a camera to take some "Microsoft" photos of my own!! From Dubbo on towards Lightning Ridge, things took on a bleaker appearance. Greens turned to browns and the rolling hills turned to vast stretches of flatness. And the winding roads of earlier became flat and straight....straight as far as the eye could see. And soon after Dubbo we left all traffic behind us. For over four hours of a drive we were passed by literally only a handful of cars.

Lightning Ridge. What a lovely place. Against almost everything that I had heard about Lightning Ridge and its "backward" folk, this place turned out to be (excuse the pun) a jewel in the crown. There is no doubt that it is a strange place with a strange story...a story that got stranger the longer I stayed there. The place, small and simple, extremely laid back and full of the most genuinely nice people I have met to date in Australia. Over one of the many conversations I had with Peter (Pete-E as I liked to call him) he told me that there were are at last count 63 nationalities living in the town. The town has a population of only a few thousand. In fact we don’t know because as you enter the town you are greeted with the sign "Welcome to Lightning Ridge. Population ?". With mining and the changes in the price of Opal on the world market along with the extreme temperatures of summer in this part of Australia, people come and go here all the time and so the population can change dramatically from one season to another, one year to the next. Even while I was there, temperatures were forecast up to 45c..I was lucky however and they never got above 40c.

I spent the first day settling in and getting to look around Cumborah and what it had to offer. (bush...kangaroos...more bush and more kangaroos).Though called a village, it is no more than a grouping of houses with the nearest shop in Lightning Ridge some 50km away. In the afternoon we went to visit Peters family and had a bit of a dinner and party at his daughters house. He has two daughters (Diane and Marylyn) and in turn they have their respective family and boyfriend and in no time at all they too had taken me in and were treating me like a long lost member of their family. Mind you I could here alarm bells go off the longer I stayed there. Peter is Croatian and both he and his daughters have that undeniable trait that is so common amongst people from that part of the world. When they feed you...they feed you! And not just large meals...I mean they put on enough food to feed twice as many people than are there.......for a week! And of course you are the guest so you have to eat! And eat....and eat...and then some more. And the trouble with the situation is that because the food tastes so bloody good that you do. You keep eating! Had I stayed with them any longer I think the weight that had left me in Asia would have caught right back up with me again!

After recovering from the food and the beers at Diane’s the next day had already arrived and it was time to go underground and try and make my fortune in the search of "Opal"! It would have been somewhat of a sin to come to "The Ridge" and not go mining so over the space of a few days Ina and Peter had me up early and off to the mine to do a bit of digging. I loved the experience. Large mining companies are not allowed operate in the area...all the mines are privately owned and run in a very small scale. This means that everything runs in that easy going Lightning Ridge sort of way. Why worry if we don't get that done today! Tomorrow is always another day! And I think it is this attitude that has attracted so many of the people that are in The Ridge. Almost everyone has a story to tell, a successful past life that they chose to leave behind for one reason or another. Maybe they were doctors or accountants or lawyers in their previous "lives" but they had decided to leave the stress of their past behind and had come to The Ridge to take life easier and hopefully make it rich. And as well as them you also had a huge influx of people to the area in the late 1950's early 1960's. Almost all of these people (Peter included) were escaping the claws of communism that was laying hold to middle and eastern Europe at the time. As I said, this town has a strange story....and where people came from and what they had left behind was only part of it.

Ina and Peter are only in the initial stages of opening their mine. They are currently excavating tunnels about 20m underground in an attempt to try and go deeper to where they expect the proper stone to be. So while we did come across some lovely hints of what might lay in store for them, while I was there nothing of any major significance was discovered. But even from the little bit that I did come across I could understand immediately the adrenaline rush that people get out here. How the thought of what might lay ahead can get you up in the morning and keep you digging. While I didn't get to see any gems underground, thanks to Peters family (who have been in the business for years) I got to see some breath taking gemstones. I had never actually seen an opal before so I was not too sure what to expect but when I finally saw a proper "gemstone" I almost had to sit down. It is hard to fathom how nature can create something...well something so artificial looking really! And its even harder to fathom how a small little stone can be worth so much. They say that the price of opal is only half of what it was 12 years ago but even with that been said if you find a good piece of opal that ticks all the right boxes then a piece the size of a thumbnail can fetch you anything from the thousands to the tens of thousands of dollars! With that in mind, I started digging even harder!

In the early to mid 1990's things really shifted up a gear in The Ridge, the price of Opal sky rocketed and people round here just so happened to be pulling it out of the ground by the bucket. For quite a lot of people that search for fortune actually came true. In 1995 there was only one other bank in the entire of Australia that had a larger delivery of cash every week. Now when you see the size of this place and compare it to the huge banks in Sydney and Melbourne etc. that is an amazing fact. But because a lot of people were only ever in The Ridge to get away from there past lives they really did not have a lot to do with the cash. They had money....and lots of money..but were really just happy enough with the stress free life that they had there. So as you can imagine there was a lot of Opals sold and a lot of jars of money buried in the back gardens! And when I say a lot of money....I mean A LOT! How can I explain this so you can get an idea of how much money I actually mean?

Ina lives as I say in the middle of nowhere. But as it turns out one of her neighbours has managed to get broadband pumped right to his front door (not satellite, fibre optic cable straight up from Sydney!). He now lives in a house that is falling down but inside had a computer setup that rivals anything you would see on the deck of the star ship enterprise! Anyway he was good enough to allow me to log onto his wireless network and check my mail whenever I liked. I did this while dodging the Kangaroos that lie in his back yard! Anyway...this man...... drives a very worn out looking 4WD, lives in a falling down old house but has at the same time made his fortune more than once. He owns a plane to get him in and out of The Ridge when he chooses and was going to buy a helicopter instead of the plane. Why I hear you ask??? Because there was more room in the helicopter for the dog to move about!!!!

The dog has since passed away so that idea has been shelved!

Another man I heard them talk about went down to Sydney and paid some huge amount for one of those real old vintage American cars. Being from the country he paid the car dealership to deliver it out of the city and up to him (800km away!). They parked it in his car port and every day he would go out to his car and sit in it for a while. Turns out the man never drove the car one metre, he couldn't even drive, he just always wanted a car like that. He then spent his time doing nothing more than sitting in the car, listening to the radio and taking in the smell of the leather seats!

What started out to be only a few days of a stopover enroute to Brisbane turned out to be the guts of a two week stay, even spending New Years Eve there. You know how we always go out on New Years Eve and complain later that it was such an anti-climax. Well none of that this year because I spent it in the quietest, most remote bar I am ever likely to be in my entire life. "The Club in the Scrub".....and that is literally what it is. A bar in the middle of the Australian scrub surrounded by nothing only flat scrub lands and mines for as far as the eye could see...and pretty much as far as the car could drive. Now I won't say it was a fantastic New Year's. It wasn't! But then again it never proposed to be in the first place. It was quite and it was simple and the highlight of my night was hearing some more bizarre stories about the people that ended up calling this place home!

And do you know what but I wouldn't have swapped the night for anything!

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Photos

The Local Shop
Mind you, it closed down 25 years ago! The nearest is now over 50km away!

The local Damn
and Ina and Peter of course

Cumborah Wind Turbine
(now retired)

Ina's New Place
Notice the clouds......they were like this everyday! Fab!

Lightning Ridge
Many people compare it to the plains of Arica

My New Mate
He was in charge of the internet cafe!

Underground
One of the underground tunnels of the Opal mine

Comments

[James Bonsall]

The great traveller
Jaysus Aiden (sorry, Eddie), I think Bill Bryson should watch out - this blog is turning into a fantastic story. Start making your millions.