KEY POINTS:
"I want opal. I want opal."
Old Clarrie coaxes the divining rods as he slow-dances with them in the white dust. One twitches and the other dutifully nods for him to slow. A shift of the foot and they twirl with excitement.
"There's opal here. The wires know it," he says as he sidles up to the rock and runs his fingers over its contours as if it was the face of a lover. The "wires" may know it, but the wall of white rock in front of us isn't giving much away.
In the harsh tungsten light some 10m underground, it's as if the old man's face has been cut from the rock itself. With a thick mop of grey hair licked back and random outcrops of salt-and-pepper stubble, he looks like a Dorothea Lange portrait of a prospector.
I came to Lightning Ridge expecting to find a plastic reproduction of Australia's most famous opal mining town, but to my surprise found a living frontier where you can still experience the life of an opal miner much as it has been since the first shaft was sunk back in 1901.
After nearly 20 years working claims around The Ridge, the wires are a relatively new thing for Clarrie. Opal, particularly the highly-prized black variety endemic to The Ridge, is an elusive and demanding master, so any hint to the inside running is more than welcome.
This particular claim in the Sheep Yard opal field 80km west of The Ridge has been Clarrie's life for the best part of 13 years, chipped away with no more than a jack hammer, brute strength and a blinding faith. What it has yielded barely covers the yearly registration fee.
For many in the fields, spending much of the day underground is unexceptional. But 20 minutes is enough for me to feel the dusty tailings eating into my throat and my heart pound as if I'm breathing underwater. Clarrie reinforces the impression.
"Aw, Christ yeah, it's a bastard of a place; blokes get lung cancer all the time. Worse is the snakes. They get pretty snakey when they fall down the shaft."
"So what do you do?" I ask.
"Ya grab a shovel and beat the shit out of it." Of course.
Locals will tell you that The Ridge's northern-most opal fields of Sheep Yard, Grawin and Glengarry are how Lightning Ridge used to be.
At first sight, Sheep Yard looks like the colony of giant mutant ants. Scrubby clumps of stunted cypress pines, box gums and Mitchell grass are separated by the ubiquitous mullock heaps.
From a couple of feet to several metres high, these mounds of grey-white rock and soil are the by-product of excavation and the reason everything is covered in a dusty film. Rusting hulks of abandoned machinery dot the landscape like the left-over shells of insects.
Among all this sit the miners' camps. Clarrie's is typical of many. The basic structure of corrugated iron and unfinished logs seems to be held together more by disused mining equipment, odd sticks of crumbling furniture and the detritus of life than actual walls and roofs.
Although opal was first found around the fields as early as 1906, little happened until the discovery of an opal the size of a man's fist. Called The Light of The World and weighing in at almost 450g, it started the rush of 1928.
The area slowly fell into decline again until the discovery of a rich seam in Glengarry in 1970 at a spot now known as Millionaires' Gully.
Fittingly, the Sheep Yard rush began on Melbourne Cup Day, 1985, when a wandering couple found opal near some old sheepyards.
Lightning Ridge now supplies nearly all the world's black opal, the most rare and valuable form of the gem.
Maps of the fields are more of a loose guide than a definitive depiction. The rough-hewn tracks skirt around claims and between mullock heaps. Then there are the open shafts - only recently fenced to prevent wayward drunks from coming a cropper.
That evening, I joined the local mining fraternity at the Glengarry Hilton. As the name suggests, the Hilton is the most opulent of the fields' "pubs in the scrub". In effect, it's a more impressive collection of unfinished logs and corrugated iron than the camps.
At the Hilton, ZZ Top-style beards and beaten-up Akubras are de rigueur - teeth optional.
I'm soon embraced by a group of locals keen to share a yarn. Gisella, one of the co-owners of the Hilton, happily pulls out a pack of opals she's selling for a friend. The half-dozen or so gems range in size from a pea to a 10c coin.
"There's more than $10,000 worth here," she tells me.
The term "black opal" can be deceptive. Black refers to the underlying body colour that makes overlaying colours more vivid. Some contain only blues and greens, like a tropical lagoon. Others blaze with fiery reds and oranges. Others mix every colour.
The famous stones have names like Picasso's Palette, Halley's Comet and The Fire of Gidgea.
On the surface, the town of Lightning Ridge looks much like any outback town. But there's an eccentric side to this miners' paradise. Ever since Charlie Nettleton first gathered saleable quantities of opal in the early 1900s, the Ridge has attracted a veritable United Nations of prospectors, drifters and gamblers: the lucky and the lost.
Nobody really knows how many people live in the town. Officially it's around 1800, but some say it's 10 times that and eight out of 10 are said to be born outside Australia.
To taste the eccentric, take a guided tour or one of the four car-door tours - self-drive tours where numbered car doors act as signposts - and you'll find Amigo's Castle, a private home built single-handedly from ironstone in the style of Roman ruins near the builder's birthplace in Northern Italy.
Just up the road is a strange concrete monument to the world's famous astronomers. Why astronomers? Why here? Beats me.
The car doors will also lead you to one of the town's better tourist attractions - The Walk-In Mine. Here you can take a self-guided tour of what was once a working mine. It's one of the easier mines to access, but still not recommended for the claustrophobic.
To the west of town is the Three-Mile opal field and Lunatic Hill. In 1986, an opal valued at $2.5 million and named Halley's Comet was found at the open-cut mine here.
However, for me, it is the names of the claims and the history behind them that is more interesting. With names like The Black Hand, Dead Bird and Blind Freddie's, you can image the stories.
The Leaning Tree claim, for example, got its name back in 1921 when claim owners Jack Souter and his brother discovered a ratter (thief) in their mine.
Being pragmatic folk, the brothers put a rope around his neck and hung the man from a nearby leaning tree.
The good-hearted Souters didn't leave the hapless ratter there for long, however, and as soon as he was released, he lost no time leaving town.
Frankly, if you chose a place called Lunatic Hill to rob a mine, you were never going to make it as a ratter anyway.
If you prefer to get your hands dirty, there are plenty of places around town to go for a noodle (local parlance for scouring discarded mine tailings for opal).
I heard several stories of tourists who found opal worth hundreds and even thousands of dollars this way.
But for my money, prospecting is best left to the professionals like old Clarrie, because it's the people and stories of the Ridge that are far more colourful than anything pulled from the ground.
GETTING THERE: Lightning Ridge is 359km from Dubbo. Qantas Link and Rex fly to Dubbo from Sydney daily, with a Rex connection to Lightning Ridge daily except Saturday.
ACCOMMODATION: The Glengarry Hilton has backpacker-style accommodation in rooms for two or four for $16 per person. Ph +61 2 6829 3983. The Lightning Ridge Hotel Motel has camping from $18 for two, cabins $63 and $5 per extra person, double rooms $85. Ph +61 2 6829 0304, www.ridgehotelmotel.com.
FURTHER INFORMATION: The Visitor Information Centre has tour maps for $1. Ph +61 2 6829 1670; www.lightningridge.net.au. Town tours for $25 a head by Black Opal Tours and Outback Opal Tours.
