Day 53 (March 24) - Lightning Ridge to St George (Qld)

We know from our noodling times in Coober Pedy that morning and afternoon light are best for catching glimpses of colour amidst the mullock heaps, so we got up about 6:30am.

The lighting at this time of morning was magnificent! The gorgeous sunrises and sunsets, added to the new arrival of red earth, was a reminder how far north we'd come in the past couple of days.

Unfortunately the flies were as bad as ever here! This is
before sunrise!

We shovelled down some breakfast, broke camp and headed to the Grawin opal fields. These are located some distance from Lightning Ridge, but we had learned there were two very large mullock heaps which are probably the best places to find opal, whereas the small heaps in the town of Lightning Ridge itself are very well dug over by tourists.


After getting some directions from the local store, we let our car and van tyres down to about 25psi and headed out to the mullock heaps. The roads were pretty corrugated so the lower tyre pressures helped absorb some of the lumps and bumps.

There were two mullock heaps and they were simply enormous! I'm not great at estimating height, but they would have to have been about 100m in each direction and at least 15m high! This is the rubbish which has been discarded from the opal mines, and the idea is that there's a chance you can find little bits of opal which made it through the processing. Occasionally people have found fist-sized opals here but we had no such luck.

A panorama of one of the mullock heaps

We didn't really find a lot of opal there. Mim and Bek probably had the best finds but the pickings were fairly slim. The obvious difference here compared to Coober Pedy was the presence of some black potch. Potch is the glassy substance in which the different colours form, so when you're looking for opal the first thing to look for is potch. The only difference between white opal and black opal is the colour of the potch - white potch is a milky white, whereas black potch is a dark smoky blue / grey / black. The black background does make the colours pop more than on white potch, which is why we wanted to come here on our way through, as Lightning Ridge is the only place in Australia you can find black opal.

Fancy living here??

We certainly found a number of bits of black potch, but only found a few bits of opal. It was a bit of fun, though hot and lots of flies, but it's certainly not what you'd want to be relying on to put food on the table! There were various little tin shanties on the drive from Grawin out to the noodling heaps where miners evidently live - it is a very desolate and harsh lifestyle and one for which they must have a singular focus on opal!

After we'd done our dash at the mullock heaps we drove into Lightning Ridge. There wasn't actually a lot available here - there was only one small noodling area by the tourist information centre, and Bek did find a couple of small scraps of white opal, but most of it was nothing. Unsurprising given how many people would have been there. We went into a jewellery store which had a sign only allowing 9 people at a time due to the Coronavirus restrictions. They had some gorgeous pieces, some not particularly large, e.g. 10cm long, which were commanding $50,000+! No wonder people are investing so much in trying to find riches in the soil! What a shame they aren't turning their mind to the true 'pearl of great price' of eternal salvation, which surpasses all worldly goods.

Given there wasn't a lot else to do in Lightning Ridge as so much was closed, we decided to head to the Qld border. We'd since found out the closure was intended to be at the end of Wednesday 12am, not at the end of Tuesday, but we figured we may as well be comfortably across in time. So about 3:30pm we crossed into Queensland!

The rest of the afternoon was driving to the town of St George, about 100km north of the border, where we'd booked a caravan park for the night. After all our dusty noodling we were keen for a shower and a swim so made the push to get to this park.

At Kamarooka Tourist Park

Bug Splatter City :(

Cooling off after a hot day's work!

After we'd all cooled off I did a bit of work on the van. One of the nuts on the end of the chains of one of the weight distribution hitch bars had come off during the bumpy road so I replaced that, as well as trying to stop the towbar rattling. Despite the good work of the chap at Pedders in Melbourne, the shims he'd put in had started to rub through and come loose. It's amazing the forces which exist on a towbar when towing 2 tonnes of van! The Pajero had used about half a litre of engine oil since I did the oil change in Adelaide, that's after about 7000km, so that got a top-up too.

 -- Greg