Big dreams and crazy tales

Lee Atkinson revels in the wacky ways of Lightning Ridge, where the stories get bigger with every beer.

There must be something in the (bore) water at Lightning Ridge that brings out the eccentric in everyone. Or maybe it's just that normal rules don't seem to apply in this place where weird and wacky is commonplace. Whatever the reason, there's no denying that the opal mining town in outback NSW has more than its fair share of the quirky and kooky and more dreamers and schemers than just about anywhere else.

It's the type of place that attracts people who seem more comfortable in a hole in the ground than above it, who build homes out of empty beer cans and bottles, spend a lifetime building magnificent roofless castles stone by stone or erecting crazy crenulated concrete monuments to dead astronomers and call themselves the second Robinson Crusoe.

The type of place where it seems perfectly normal to wear opalised false teeth, plant grand gardens full of plants you can't touch, carve hundreds of cartoon characters into the walls of a tunnel and spend every waking hour in search of a scrap of coloured rock called black opal.

In Lightning Ridge, it's a very, very fine line between peculiar and free spirit. Even trying to get a handle on the local population is hard to do - no one quite knows how many people call the Ridge home and the sign at the town limits says "Lightning Ridge Population ?". It's the type of place where people come and go, setting up camp in a rusty tin shack or clapped-out old bus on the edge of the opal field, disappearing when the weather gets too hot, they run out of cash or they strike it lucky. No one seems to know exactly how many opal miners there are, either; although illegal, we're told there are plenty of dogs, as well as Disney and other fictitious characters, who own mining leases.

One thing that is sure is that everyone has opal fever. Everyone you meet has a story to tell - no one admits to striking it rich but everyone knows plenty of people who have. Like the tourist who picked up a $20,000 stone in the mullock heap outside the visitors centre and One-Bucket Bob, a Victorian who found a million dollars' worth of opal in the first bucket of dirt he dug out of his mine, only to spend it quick, come back and find another million in his next bucket.

The stories and riches get bigger with each beer but there's no doubt the dreams are real; the enticement that keeps otherwise ordinary people working deep underground in stifling heat for 18 hours a day.

Spend any time at all with the locals and you'll soon hear outrageous stories about the ratters, crafty opal thieves armed with machine guns (if you believe the stories) and mining machinery, who go to great lengths to steal opals from the mines while the owners aren't looking, and equally outrageous stories about the rough bush justice that is meted out to the ratters who are caught, many involving deep mine shafts, live pigs or dynamite.

As a visitor, though, you won't see any ratters but you will see plenty of opal. There are almost 20 opal shops and showrooms around town and dozens of miners with card tables selling opals at the Sunday morning markets. There's a walk-in mine where you can get a taste of how opal mining is done and the famous mullock heap beside the information centre where you can fossick free. Beyond the weird stuff, like the hand-made castle-in-progress and castle-like astronomers' monument and bottle houses, there is the very impressive Cactus Garden to visit (they tell me it's the largest display of old and rare cactuses in the southern hemisphere and that they are the only black opal-mining cactus farmers in the world) and two galleries: the John Murray Gallery with its quirky and colourful outback art (look out for the portrait of a budgie-smuggling Tony Abbott) and the Chambers of the Black Hand, a bizarre complex of underground caverns decorated with 400 or so carvings and paintings of everyone from Spider-Man, Homer Simpson, Steve Irwin, Nostradamus and Nefertiti. Children will love it, although I'm not so sure it's worth the $25 entry fee, even if the owner promotes it as a "national treasure in the making".