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