My sister said I needed to include some context for Lightning Ridge for overseas readers so I will.
Lightning Ridge is well known to Australians as one of the best black opal places. Black opals are lovely and full of fiery colours but, alas, usually embedded in dreary white rock. Processing that stuff needs a lot of hope and work. You can get a claim – a block of land - for three hundred dollars a year and drill a manhole sized shaft to find “colour” or opal embedded in its unpromising rock matrix. Or you can noodle. “Noodling” is something anyone can do around and about opal fields as long as the little mountains of rock don’t belong to anyone anymore. It’s just a case of ferreting and turning over rocks and looking for little flashes. If you succeed, a find can net a thousand dollars or so at a dealer. There were roadside dealers, and one in a motel room in town as well as the big businesses. I didn’t care for noodling. Unlike gold panning it was tough on the hands and I decided to keep mine for quilting.
I’ve described the weird wild quality of the opal fields before, and they have a contradictory reputation for lawlessness and tolerance. People talk of the joy of being able to be as shabby as you like, and being able to do what you feel like and how people support each other, but, as one guy in the pub said, “Any trouble and we deal with it” and I believed him. Three hundred dollars a year for the chance to build a shack and burrow in a holeful of hope is not to be sneezed at however.
We said a sad farewell to Lightning Ridge and the cottage we had there with all its little quirks, a handwritten transcript of a John Lennon song on the wall signed, (or just loved enough to write out and accredit with a frame), a tiny mouse fleeing from the wheat fields beyond the town., everything friendly.
Then a long beautiful drive to Gulgong, a gold rush town that swept a little pastoral community along with it, creating an opera house and three good pubs and a huge spreading department store which now contains a long tunnel-like “variety store” called Stacks where anything can be found. I bought a hula hoop. All the good buildings that came are still cherished alongside funny little shops opened by tree changers and retirees. I got a little teapot in one for two dollars because I was sick of all those teabag issues, take it out, leave it in and where to put the wet one. But I digress.
Gulgong also has a very good Pioneer Museum which focusses on the rugged lives of the settlers before the gold rushers came along – women with ten children and more and no doctor within several days drive, deliveries by bullock cart twice a year followed by frenzies of drying and preserving. It was inclusive rather than selective and had the other half of the doll army and pepper and salt collections we’d seen in Mudgee. My favourite thing, though, was the old printing shop, which showed the extraordinary tediousness and skill of setting up a page of text out of tiny little metal backwards letters. It humbled me – word processing is now so easy that any trivia (even this) can manifest itself effortlessly, and be reproduced too, for better or worse.
Travelling with son Finn has been good. He did the driving for which I was grateful and he taught me a lot about AI, for which he has unbounded enthusiasm. We passed through sleepy towns like Coonamble. Nobody around. Very hot. There was a group of bikies with their bright bikes in Galargambone and a long string of gleaming cattle crossed the road in front of us at one point. I felt sorry for the lonely single trees left on the cleared pasture before it was known that trees like to be at least a bit together.
I felt strange and sad when we got home and everything was just the same. I remember when Mum used to go on exotic trips on her visits to us from England. We were too all right without her. The hole she’d left had been covered over like in the opal fields and she’d be grumpy and suspicious of our love for her. Like her I felt, as they say “out of sorts” for a day. I shared a bottle of special Shiraz with son Eddy only to find that he too was trying to cut down on alcohol. I found I’d lost a little bottle of opal chips I’d got for the grandchildren but a most horrible outback invention of blueberry flavoured honey was a hilarious success just because it tasted so awful.
What is all this exploring for? Usually it sows all sorts of seeds, but at eighty I feel rather like barren ground. But never mind that. I know I need to noodle on with determination as there’s colour out there flashing red and blue and green amongst the black and I can’t stop looking now can I?.
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