Travel Features

Lightning Ridge: Australia's capital of broken dreams

May 13, 2008, 12:40 GMT

Lightning Ridge, Australia - British writer Ben Rice did very well with Pobby and Dingan, a story about an opal mining family in Lightning Ridge who didn't do all that well. A trip to the Outback town 800 kilometres north-west of Sydney gives an insight into the inspiration he found for a novel published in 2000 and now with French and German translations. It's tempting to think that Rice stood outside the public notice board on the corner of Opal Street and Pandora Street and saw an advertisement like this: Mining gear for sale, truck, Case front-end loader, hoist, bogger, generator, pram, outboard motor. A scrawled note from a mining family giving up hope of striking it rich and wanting to raise the cash for the trip back to the city might well have been his muse. But the people of the Ridge - estimates of the population vary between 2,000 and 5,000 - don't easily give up searching for black opals, which along with diamonds, emeralds, sapphires and rubies are the most valuable of gemstones. Few of them reckon to be living in the Ridge only on the chance of making a fortune in what is the world's biggest repository of black opal. 'It's the lifestyle that makes this place,' says Carol Ramsay, who left Australia's biggest city 13 years ago and now runs a motel in the Ridge. 'The best thing about Sydney is the road out.' It's not a place where there need to be any privations - even in the southern hemisphere summer months when the temperature can pass 40 degrees. There's a supermarket stocking anything from blue cheese to brown rice. There's an outdoor Olympic-size swimming pool for the summer and a heated indoor one being built for the winter. The accommodation for visitors is basic but there's competition to keep prices down. There's a massive bowling club with bistro and, given this is Australia, severe air-condition and the ever-jangling poker machines. Even when mining is not a full-time job it seems to remain a passion. Trevor Hudson, who takes tourists down a spruced up mine site called The Chambers of the Black Hand, still chases the opal on his own claim. Opal mining doesn't lend itself to massive investment and some strike lucky in their first week underground. A few thousand dollars and you can be in business; invest a million and you might lose the lot. A look around the Ridge and there doesn't seem to be a lot of money about: old cars, untended shops, restaurants with most tables empty. But who's to know? Just like farmers never seem to have good harvests, opal miners don't shout about their big finds. Out on the claims it's the same story. Old caravans and even older disused railway carriages suggest some miners are really struggling to make a go of it. There are huge compensations for the backbreaking labour and the meager returns for most miners. Along Pandora Street there's a hot spring, free to all, and where clothing is optional when midnight comes. The therapeutic potassium-rich water bubbles up from the subartesian basin about a kilometre below. The temperature, summer and winter, is a steady 42 degrees. Tour guide Marilyn Miller, the daughter of a miner who has lived in the Ridge all her life, is still entranced by its big sky and wide-open spaces. 'There are so many stars at night it looks untidy, as though someone should come and sweep them up because there are so many,' Miller said.

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