Beware of the muggies
Australia's opal hunters never give up the search for nobbies
By Uli Schmetzer
LIGHTNING RIDGE, Australia
The pub at the Glengarry Hilton is open eight days a week. That's what the "gonna-dos" will tell you.
The gonna-dos are the has-been and would-be opal millionaires who guzzle beer from bottles called stubbies while swapping yarns about mine dirt and nobbies (precious opals) dug out in bygone days.
The cobwebs from the old days still hang on at the Hilton, actually an unlicensed open camp. A 44gallon drum serves as heater in the winter. The blokes still butter sandwiches with their fingers, and a kangaroo's carcass strung from a gum tree can last three days. After that, they reckon, the meat goes bad.
The diggers will tell you there is another century's worth of rare black opals in these flat, red limestone fields.
Take the case of Bruce What's-His-Name, who for years had only come up with porch, a worthless and colorless opal.
Only the other day, Bruce walked in with a $650,000 nobby he'd been using for months as a block for his truck wheels. It wasn't until a chunk broke off that he saw the flame-on-black of a harlequin, the kind of gem opal that has turned this remote bush town into a gamblers' Shangri-La.
Lightning Ridge is in the state of New South Wales near the Queensland border. It is that part of Australia that has ignored a massive recession and a national debt, bigger than Brazil's, that haunts the rest of the nation's 17 million residents.
The track to the Glengarry Hilton is not on any map, but you can't miss it: Just follow the trail of empty stubbies. The thicker they get, the closer you are.
Here the curse of unemployment, now 11 to 14 percent in some Australian regions, is someone else's problem. So is the controversy over whether Australia should become a republic and ditch the -queen of England as figurehead. Nobody cares who's prime minister.
This is where men of many origins can stake out a pair of claims 30 yards square and prospect any way they like: with candle, pick and shovel or with a $60,000 mechanical digger.
It is a place where everyone is still con vinced that nature can make them rich overnight, as it has made Australians rich ever since Capt. James Cook arrived 200 years ago.
Here, the true blues (true, dyed in-the-wool Aussies) scoff at urban drongos (fools) who reckon a man's a chauvinist pig if he stares at a sheila's (woman's) legs.
"Romance here is right to the point," admitted Cheryl Hudson, the manager of the Black Opal Motel. "A bloke may change his shirt, though, before he tells you: `Luv, I've borrowed the shagwaggon [van with reclining back seats] and bought a condom. So how about it?' "
Here Crocodile Dundee its still a hero while the restof the country desperately tries to forget him.. Here the world is divided into fair dinkum blokes (cool, honest guys) and mugs. To the mugs you can sell junk potch, known locally as muggies, and make them believe they are buying real gems.
Here a bloke like Harry the Greek became a millionaire five times during his lifetime and gambled it all away on a new claim.
Here whole families live like the first settlers, in tents or corrugated iron sheds in 100-degree or higher temperatures in the bush. The next year the same family may live in a $300,000 home with air conditioning on millionaire's row a few blocks behind the town's famous pub, the Digger's Rest.
And a year later, the whole family may be back in a tent in the bush.
"The miners are gamblers who always see the pot of opal at the end of the rainbow," said Farid Khan, the suave Pakistani opal buyer known here as "the Prince" because the boys at the Hilton suspect he is related to the Aga Khan.
Lightning Ridge had 1,600 registered residents. But 10,000 prospectors with Australian ID cards (not always their own) live on their claims.
It is not unusual to see a batch of miners drinking their way through a stack of 'peer bottles, carving slices off a sheep's carcass and tossing the meat onto an open barbecue while yelling blood-curdling colonial songs. There are half a million open-bore holes here; signs warn not to fall into them.
While the rest of this vast continent talks about law and order vans and trucks plunging
over bush tracks here are unregistered and the drivers often are un-licensed. Gems change hands without names, without questions and only against hard cash. The taxman has a hard time here.
Not so the crooks.
Khan's throat was once slashed, but he fought back hard enough to save the opals stored under his bed. Four robbers smashed the knees of Richard Slip, a former u government meat inspector turned d miner last Christmas. They also an held a shotgun to his head, but he refused to give them the combination of his safe.
Opal buyers from all over the world hang out at the Black Opal Motel and put signs on their doors saying "Buying Now." Miners take their opals down the road to an¬other motel where a volunteer eight-member committee assesses their value in secret.
"In the old days, you bought a candle, a pick and a ladder, tossed your hat in the air and dug a hole where it fell," said Ted Priester, 67. He organizes the Saturday morning valuation sessions and is renowned as a wizard of doublets (semiprecious opals glued on potch).
"Today, blokes come here with university degrees, fast drills, hydraulic trucks, mechanical diggers and satellite surveys," Priester said.
Leon Monck, 49, started off with a pick, graduated to a jackhammer and compressor, and now works with a mechanical digger. The machine allows him to cover 300 feet of tunnel a day-10 times as much as he could dig when he was a 20-year-old rookie.
"In the old days it cost you only time," he said: "Now a good setup costs you $250,000 before you digg your first hole. I have $2,000 a month in diesel expenses. That means if we don't find opal soon, we go broke."
The fortunes of Monck and his wife, Joan, have been up and down many times. There was a time they slept on the ground in the bush, lived out of one suitcase, ate off a barbecue and used a washing machine drum to sift for opals.
"But we also had our own air¬plane parked in the bush to fly us two hours to the nearest town for shopping and a beer," said the irrepressible Joan, who once sat on a boulder to stop her husband from smashing it with a sledgehammer.
She believed it contained opals. It did-$350y000 worth. (ends)
