Lightning Ridge

Lightning Ridge is an opal mining town in northern New South Wales. It’s surrounded by flat, bare countryside and there are no high-rise buildings so the first warning that you’re approaching the community is a sign that says “Lightning Ridge - Population?”

It’s always been a favourite place for those who just want to disappear, for whatever reason, and there are many in the town living a marginal or non-existent life as far as the authorities are concerned. That’s why the post office receives mail for a couple of thousand more people than are actually registered to live there.

Talk to people in this small, hot, dusty, fly-plagued town and they’ll tell you there’s nowhere else they’d rather live. They value their privacy and their independence and, provided they don’t upset anyone, they live as they want. I suppose if you’ve decided, as many of them have, that you want to spend your time alone, down a narrow shaft in the ground, digging for gemstones, in a town with few facilities, then you’d welcome the fact that few question your motives or lifestyle.

The life of an opal miner looks very hard indeed. Many live in converted vehicles or old shacks on their claims just outside town where everything gets used at least twice. Old vehicle differentials are revived in powered bucket rigs for the shafts and there’s a fashion for painting numbers on old car doors to mark your claim. And everywhere is the spoil from the workings, the mullock heaps, constant reminders of mostly bad luck. But some miners strike lucky? Yes. How lucky? That would be telling.

We stayed at the Black Opal Motel, opposite the Diggers Rest pub, in the centre of town. Outside every room is a board on which the opal buyers post their names when they’re in residence. Inside every room is a small formica table and an angle-poise lamp for viewing the stones. We ate in the vast Lightning Ridge Bowling Club, a curry prepared by the Pakistani cook.

It’s not just Australians evading the authorities who fetch up there. The cook is just one of a large immigrant population, mostly from Eastern Europe and the Balkans and the town has a small, white, immaculate Serbian Orthodox Church.

On the edge of town is the spa, a swimming pool-sized tank of mineral-rich water fed by hot springs. All around is the bush. At 7am on a Sunday, the spa was busy, elderly Slavic-looking men and woman easing their joints in the gently steaming water. We joined them. Apart from greetings, barely a word of English was spoken and we could have been in Warsaw, Prague or Belgrade.

You can see photos of Lightning Ridge at
Photos

Disaster, What Disaster?

I'm puzzled and so is everyone else. I've just had a drive around town and watched the local news and can find no trace of disaster at all. Yes, more than 200 trees came down, the jetty is bent and that lake is still in the back yard (the resident frogs are ecstatic), but, apart from that, the place just looks damp and sprinkled with foliage that used to be on trees and is now lying in the road. What flooding there was, disappeared as quickly as it came. I think we're all right, really.

So quite why the state government is trying to throw all this money at us I'm not sure but it does mean we'll get our jetty straightened.

Disaster Area

I knew I shouldn't have written about welcome rain a few weeks ago. We've just had more than 48 hours of downpours, culminating in thunderstorms and a gale last night that brought down two trees in our street alone.

Yesterday afternoon, I went for a run on the beach - the rain is at least warm - and the sea was mass of white. From the top of the headland, you could see huge white crests, way out to sea, and this morning the streets were littered with debris and there were power cuts all over town.

It's still raining as I write, after a brief lull, and there is a small lake on the patio, between me and the herb garden. Parts of town are flooded and the historic jetty, built shortly after Captain Korff founded the settlement, has been closed after the swells penetrating the harbour bent it. Up in the hills, the hippy haven of Bellingen has been hard hit. And the state government has just declared us a disaster area NSW Gov Press Notice.

There's irony here. Coffs has just won the Enhancement of the Landscape Award at the 2004 finals of the International Awards for Liveable Communities in Niagara Falls, Canada, beating 47 other cities. And the day before the heavens opened, the council tightened our water restrictions, limiting further sprinkling and hosing by gardeners. However, the Karangi Dam, which provides most of our water, remains stubbornly at 66 per cent of capacity. I expect that's because most of the water is in our back yard.

Croc Update

I've been asked whether the croc below was the same one that was despatched by the vitim's 60-year-old wife, wielding a nail scissors to put out its eyes, which is apparently the version that the UK tabloids have been peddling. The answer is yes and no.

I really should have updated the posting but now, having read the most lurid Aussie tabloid I could find and several other sources, I can tell you that yes, it was the same croc. But....what happened was that the man was dragged by the legs from his tent where he was sleeping with his two sons. His wife, and she is 60, was woken by the noise and started struggling with the croc but I can find no mention of a nail scissors being involved. She was then joined by a local with a gun who shot the reptile in the head. He had a mate standing by with an axe in case the bullet didn't finish it off. He sounded quite disappointed he wasn't needed.

So there we are. But I quite like the idea of a 60-year-old grandmother who goes camping with a manicure kit, can find the scissors in the dark, and is then willing to set about a crocodile with them to save her husband. By the way, which Richard posted the comment? Was it one of the two I know, or someone else entirely?

More Wildlife...

No sooner were the words about below about wildlife packed off into cyber-space, than I turned on the lunchtime radio news to hear that two men and a woman had been airlifted to hospital in Cairns after they were attacked by a crocodile while sleeping in their tent in a Queensland national park. Their injuries, a jaunty hospital spokesman said "were mostly fractures."

Feeling grateful we didn't end up living in Queensland, I took my sandwiches into the garden to witness a fly-past by a huge, lumbering insect, its long, ginger wings slowly beating the air, and with something like a skewer dangling beneath it. I don't know what it was.

Kath and Kim

I seem to have written a lot about wildlife. My defence is that it's quite a preoccupation here as there is so much of it and it's so undaunted by human beings. However, I thought a cultural interlude might be welcome so it's time to meet Kath and Kim....




They are the main characters in a long-running television comedy show that will soon be coming to the screens of the BBC. It's inspired in me (if that's the word) the same terrible combination of disbelief and familiarity that the The Office achieved. So it's well worth watching.

It's set in the Melbourne suburbs, the sort of place where you have to move the Pajero to get at the Holden to move the Toyota with the supermarket shopping near the door. I hope you're keeping up. Kath Day spent a long time bringing up daughter Kim as a single mum after her first husband, a swimming pool salesman, went off to Hong Kong to strike a deal and never came back. She's now married to Kel Knight and, always one to keep up with the times and something of a closet feminist, now bears the name Kath Day-Knight, and sees absolutely nothing odd in that.

Kim is a spoilt monster, recently married to Brett, who works in an electrical goods store, and has just given birth to little Ebboney Rae (can't help you there, I'm afraid). One of her recent career moves was to try to become a trophy wife. She has boundless self-confidence. Being pregnant, in her words "really got up my goat."

The final character is Sharon, hapless, love-lorn, massively over-weight and Kim's "second-best friend."

Expect lines like:

Kath: "...and then I met you Kel, and I've been living high with the hog ever since."

Kim: "...it's hard being a horn-bag when you've got a small baby."

Kath, after her new joint exercise regime has left Kel too tired for sex: "...never mind, I'm hardly Mrs Carmen Sutra myself tonight."

And you thought this was a cultural desert.....

Hungry Head

We went to Hungry Head yesterday, which is a short drive south on the highway from Coffs. If nothing else, the drive soon reminds you that Coffs is something of an urban oasis; once you're through the retail area and past our base hospital (for base, read "basic" - anything major is handled in Sydney),it's fields and forest all the way.

You turn off the highway toward the coast and head down a forest road, edged with yellow signs bearing the black silhouette of a kangaroo, and eventually reach a small car park and path that leads to the headland, overlooking the Pacific. It apparently got its name because the early settlers used to gather there to watch for ships when supplies were low.

And you can see for miles up and down the coast, miles of beaches which are usually empty. Because this is a holiday weekend, three lifeguards had set up shop just below us, sticking their flags in the sand, and a handful of people were bathing, with three surfers just outside the flags.

We made our way down the side of the headland and walked north. You always get flayed on these beach walks from the sun, the steady wind, the blown sand and the spray. There were two body boarders, enjoying the isolation, but I always think it takes real nerve to surf on these huge, empty beaches.


Surfers at Hungry Head

We reached the breakwater where the Bellinger river meets the sea. Peter Carey describes a shipwreck here in his novel, Oscar and Lucinda, and it is up this river that the couple's glass church is shipped. I re-read the book recently and its descriptions of the early days of European settlement in Sydney and this area and its scenery really came to life. No shipwrecks or glass churches yesterday, though, just a solitary fisherman picking his way over the boulders to the end of the breakwater.

Back in the car park, a kangaroo was grazing, with a joey in her pouch. You always expect the youngsters to sit in the pouch with their head poking out, but they don't; they just crawl in headfirst and usually leave a leg or two flopping out. It looks quite alarming, as though the mother has some terrible deformity. But neither of them seem to mind.