Lightning Ridge

Lightning Ridge – what a cool place! Where to even start?

Black Opals

I guess we should start with Black Opals. Lightning Ridge is the only place in the world where you can find black opals. I think it’s fair to say that this town is crazy about black opals – pretty much everyone who lives here, no matter what their current job is, came here originally to find a black opal.

So, what is a black opal you ask? Well, it refers to the “potch” that is backing the opal. Most opals have white potch, but the opals in Lightning Ridge have both white and black. The black potch makes the opal colours “pop” so they are worth more than white ones. It’s on a liner scale:

N1-N4 is only found in Lightning Ridge (within 70 km of the town). The town is small but has everything you would need – a supermarket, a pharmacy, a medical centre (brand new) and a hospital (apparently mining is dangerous work and there are a lot of accidents). There are also some opal buyers and sellers, a couple of cafes, a museum and a tourist info centre. And, a cute little shack, “Coopers Cottage”, right in the middle of town.

Opal Museum

The opal museum has received a bunch of money from the government to build a very big museum just out of town. At the moment, it is quite small and most of their stuff is stored in a warehouse someplace or on display at other museums. Lightning Ridge is the only place in NSW that also has opalised dinosaur (and other) fossils – very cool!

They had a display with a bunch of different stuff people have made with their opals. Check out the teeth this guy made!

At the end of our visit to the museum, the kids got a bag of opals for $5.

For those of you who want to know a bit more about why they’re here on how made, you can read this:

Mine Fields

The tourist info centre sells you these self-drive tour maps for $1 which takes you around various bits of the town. They’re called Car Door Tours and have different colours and car doors sprayed in those colours to identify the road (not so easy – everything looks the same!) and the sites. Only a few roads in the town centre are paved – all the rest are dirt. And with all the rain while we were there, we got to try out some 4 wheel driving.

All around the town are the active mining villages areas. You can “stake a claim” for a site (50 x 50 m) for 2 years. You are allowed to have 2 claims as an individual and each company can also have 2 claims. Each year you have to pay a $300 fee to keep your claim. (I should mention that in order to get the claim in the first place, you have to pay a fee and undertake 3 mining & safety courses).

This is what the claims look like and the active mine fields. The middle and right picture are both really typical of the landscaping here. You can see the machinery they use to bring the opals up from the mines, and they use re-purposed cement mixers to sort and wash the rock to find opal. You can also see the type of typical accommodation people live in here.

People live in all sorts of accommodation around the fields – caravans, shacks, buses, and there are even houses made our of wine bottles and beer cans! One guy from Italy came out and built himself a castle (actually there are two castles in town):

Art Galleries

There are two really good art galleries in town: The Chambers of the Black Hand and the John Murray gallery. The Chambers of the Black Hand is one of the coolest art galleries I’ve ever been to! Essentially, this English guy moved to Australia and came out to Lightning Ridge to opal mine. He bought an old mine called the Black Hand. Unfortunately, he wasn’t overly successful finding opal, and one day decided to carve the sandstone using a butter knife and a spoon. (Apparently, he had never carved anything before but had some innate talent as a kid drawing.) 20 years later, there are about 800+ sculptures on the walls and the ceilings of this old mine – all carved with a butter knife and spoon! Many of them are huge, and some of them he has painted. He’s got everything in there – religious items (buddha, christ on the cross, the last supper), a lot of the Star Wars characters, superheroes, actors and politicians. Here’s a little taste of it – if you want to see more, you can see their website here.

The John Murray gallery was also really good. He particularly has a knack for drawing emus. The downtown has a big mural on a building of some of his emus and we saw another emu mural in another town outside of Lightning Ridge. He’s sort of known as an outback hero and has done tons of murals all around the outback. His museum had lots of drawings on Aussie life in the outback, and also “The Ghan” railway. I wasn’t allowed to take pictures of his work, but if you’re interested, you can see it on his website here.

The Walk-In Mine

Unfortunately you can’t go into a working mine (you need to take those mining safety courses first), but there is another old mine that you can go into and see some videos on opal mining. It was pretty interesting.

The Grawin, Glengerry and the Sheepyard Inn

This was the Orange Car Door Tour. It takes you about an hour outside of Lightning Ridge to 3 active mining “towns” (each with a pub). The tour takes you to the golf course and pub first:

Next stop was the Glengerry “Hilton” (they have a good sense of humour around here). Here’s a picture of the pub, the “downtown” (there’s even a phone both!) and the Hilton accommodation showers!

And then on to our favourite pub, the Sheepyard in:

Artesian Baths

This area of Australia is very close to the Artesian basin. So, they have capitalized on this and created several artesian “spas”. The water stays around a constant 40C (104F). We went each night to the Lightning Ridge spa to soak in a hot bath – It was only 200 m from the caravan park. It was wonderful!

We had heard really good things about another one in a small town called Goodooga about an hour away. One day the kids and I drove out there to check it out. It was lovely! The town had absolutely nothing to it, but this spa had nice facilities including an outdoor gym and BBQs. The only downside was all the frogs (many of them dead – see Plagues and Floods post). We spent a couple of hours there until these two Russian families with 9 kids showed up and it destroyed our peaceful experience (sigh).

Sunsets

Finally, I should talk about the sunsets – incredible! Especially from the (green?) car door tour to the first shaft. You get an amazing view over a valley and there’s a little maze and buddist pillars to look at (and also the house made of beer cans). I’ll let the photos speak for themselves:

The feedback I received from one of my friends (you know who you are) is for more pictures of me and my hubby. As you can tell, I’m normally the photographer for all these shots, and I haven’t mastered the selfie (showing my age?). But this one is for you Edo: