Lightning Ridge

left on march 6th and returned march 20 After packing up all of the sardines, instant coffee, dog food, and jackhammers it was off to the ridge! Dan's neighbor Malcolm came with us for the ride as he also has a claim out in the ridge. Dan Hopkins (my cousin) his dog Punky and Malcolm and I started out at 9am and arrived in the ridge around 7pm. A bit of a ride.

Driving west from coffs harbour the terrain changes from lush subtropical banana,avocado farms and palm trees to great expanses of wide open spaces marked by cotton plantations, sheep, cattle and horse farms. 1000 miles of eastern australian coast is bound by the ocean and the great dividing range. As you climb into the dividing range higher and higher the temperatures drop sharply and then slowly gets hotter and hotter as you pass Glen Innes and Inverell. Most of the towns we passed through were very small. 10-15000 at the very most. Collarenabri, Walgett, Moree, all cotton and beef rearing towns.

We landed at cousin sam hopkins in the evening around 7. Hugs all around and he was a site for sore eyes. I've only seen Sam twice in 10 years. His house is a simple ranch style flat roof jobbby with plenty of space for guests. we had a coffee and a meal then watched tv on his flashy lcd tv replete with satellite tv. Most nights we would grill some meat, microwave some potatoes and I would make a salad or we'd buy a tub of tabouleh for roughage.

After the first day of decrompressing from the ride the work really began. We had to pull out all of the tools and equipment from the claim sam was working in lightning ridge. There were 6 main modules that made up the gear

1)a 6 cylinder generator on an enclosed trailer with electric powered hydraulic setup, air compressor and welding equipment
2) dirt hoist (20 ft of triangular metal framing) odd looking contraption!
3) DIGGER (claws the dirt off the walls like a massive robotic arm)
4)bogger (carts the dirt out of the shaft)
5)dump truck (for taking all the dirt from 50 feet below the ground and away to the dirt dump)
6) pop up camper

and a 100 other things including 200 feet of massive hyrdaulic cables and thousands of feet of extension cords, jackhammers, shovels, pick axes, and assorted other tools for fixing mechanical equipment.

It all had to be moved and then re-set at the Grawin where the new claim is. We actually were not mining in lightning ridge proper rather we were in a mining area called "the grawin". Over the past 100 years of mining in the area lots of surrounding area has proved fertile opal mining with boom after boom in many separate areas making a 50km circle around lighting ridge. The area we were in was famous for seam opal deposits in sandstone. Black Opal is king here and its the reason most of the people are out there.

The ride from the ridge to the grawin was over an hour. Sam lives in the downtown area of lightning ridge near the library and grocery store on Opal st. The town lives and dies by opals and the business they bring. The town consists of a few main types of businesses: opal dealers and opal buyers. Some of the opal sellers had big murals of caricturesque pictures of the owners or of giant black opals. Names of sellers were quite demonstrative "the Black Hand" and "Parched Earth Opals"
Barbara Mccondra has a blog about life in the australian opal mines of yowah, koroit and lightning ridge. check it out for more in depthness about the day to day life of a miner and the storied characters contained there in.
http://parchedearthopals.blogspot.com/2008_01_01_archive.html


SO... The gear all got moved. We setup camp and got to it. Dan worked like a demon in the mine shaft and sam facilitated all of the fixing of gear that kept breaking. It was a team effort. I would help out when they needed an extra hand or someone to do grunt work. I was just trying not to get in the way as space is always precious underground and around the mine shaft.

2 weeks flew by. every night I slept out in the grawin with dan in the pop up camper we would light a camp fire, stargaze, shoot the shit, smoke champion ruby tobacco, cook dinner with a butane stove and top off with a bit of boxed red wine.
The pop up camper was comfortable and the mosquitoes kept away... well they stayed away because we had some rather toxic mozzy coils to keep them at bay. they call mosquitoes Mozzy's here. They have different words for everything here.

I'm writing this post from a town called byron bay and all of this seems very far away. I can hear hip hop pumping, germans and danish tourists chatting noisily and the weather is sub 90 degrees. The ridge was a different world. Byron bay is too. Im not sure I would want to live in eaither but they are nice places to visit. Byron bay is a rather resorty little spot with great beaches, nightlife, and currently a bluesfest featuring Buddy Guy, John Fogerty, John Butler Trio etc etc. The town is jam packed because of this festival and last night I slept in the front seat of some characters car. Lets just say there was late night swimming, a hike to the lighthouse overlooking the most eastern point in australia, lots of tooheys and jameson, and lots swearing. Even an encounter with friendly undercover police officers!