National gemstone loses its attraction

SYDNEY - It is Australia's national gemstone, mined in the deserts of the Outback and prized worldwide for its brilliant plays of light and colour.

But the opal industry is struggling, with the market flooded with synthetic stones and demand plunging thanks to the global recession.

The situation is so dire that the world's only tertiary-level course in opal cutting, in the South Australian mining town of Coober Pedy, has just been scrapped. Stuart Jackson, who founded the course 20 years ago, said yesterday: "Opal is a luxury item and times are tough. You can't eat it, you don't need it, so people aren't buying it."

Coober Pedy calls itself the "Opal Capital of the World", but even there, shops in the dusty main street are selling synthetic stones, made from plastic and silica and imported into Australia, mainly from Japan.

The same is true of some of the large showrooms in Sydney, which market their "genuine Australian opal" to tourists in quest of a shimmering memento.

It is not illegal to sell man-made opal, provided it is labelled as such. And there lies the problem, according to Boro Rapaic, of the Opal Industry Alliance. "Most of the time it's not properly labelled," Rapaic said. "It's sold as genuine stuff, and the vast majority of people can't tell the difference.

"They go into a shop to buy the real thing and end up with a piece of synthetic junk that's almost worthless. Unless you're an expert, you can't be sure. They make it so good now, the colours are even better than genuine opal. Even some miners are fooled."

Dealers say man-made stones - sold all over the world as Australian opal - are eating into their market and driving down the price of precious gems. But like other luxury goods and products, opals are also suffering as a result of global belt-tightening.

About 97 per cent of the world's authentic stones come from the Outback, most of them from the opal fields of South Australia. In Coober Pedy, a rough and ready frontier town where the locals live underground to escape the searing desert heat, nearly everybody is involved in the trade.

At the town's TAFE college, Jackson has taught hundreds of people the art of opal cutting and polishing. But in recent years, student numbers have dwindled.

Many came from interstate or overseas, and the course, combined with travel and accommodation costs, had become too expensive. Last week TAFE South Australia closed it down.

Jackson said that, in addition to the other pressures on the industry, the cost of mining had gone up dramatically. "Fuel has gone up, explosives have gone up, licences have gone up. So there are far fewer people mining and there's less opal coming out of the ground.

"It's very hard to attract young males into the industry now, because it's hard work and it costs a lot of money. There are very few boys going up there with a sense of adventure. It's only the sons of miners that are sticking it out."

During his year-long course, students learned how to transform a rough stone into a carved, polished gem. They were also taught some geology, gemology, history and jewellery-making. Nearly three-quarters were women, often miners' wives who would prise a few stones out of a chunk of opal-encrusted rock before their husbands sold it.

"It's quite a soft stone, so you can work with it easily and it takes a very high shine very quickly."

Cut and polished, opal is worth three to four times more than in its rough state. But that differential is dwarfed by the relative value of real and synthetic stone. Genuine opal costs up to A$50,000 ($62,549) a kilo. A kilo of the plastic stuff can be had for A$1500. Rapaic said: "Every synthetic stone that is sold is one less of our genuine opals sold. That's what's killing the market slowly."

John Dustan, a Coober Pedy miner who runs a shop in the town, said opal prices had been stagnant for years.

"A lot of factories overseas that used to buy our opal for inlay work have switched to synthetic opal ... 20 years ago in Coober Pedy there would always be at least 20 to 30 buyers ready to buy opal on the fields. Now you're lucky to find three or four of them."