Struck by Lightning: the search for black opals, bizarre adventures and ‘real’ coffee
Visitors to LIGHTNING RIDGE are now frothing over the fact you can get a thoroughly decent LATTE. Of course, that doesn’t mean the BLACK OPAL CAPITAL has lost its edge. It’s still full of many hidden GEMS.
SOME PEOPLE used to say that outback towns this far from ‘civilisation’ only served lacklustre takeaway food and intolerable instant coffee, but there is no trace of that myth today in Lightning Ridge. The northwestern NSW town’s foodie offering is robust, buoyed by a duo of Italian restaurants and a trio of cafes – OPAL STREET, and BUSY BEE GOURMET GECKO – that actually do ‘real’ specialty coffee. While it has all the creature comforts and punches well above its culinary weight for a town with a population of, well, exact population unknown, abandon the notion that the Ridge has ‘sold out’ to become a kind of bush Bondi or outback Fitzroy. No, Lightning Ridge will always be powered by its ragtag collection of colourful, untameable personalities; people who famously came for a week and stayed for a lifetime because the fire of those black opals wedged in their mind’s eye. Their often-inexplicable stories manifest in unlikely ways in this free-range town: an 18-metre-tall VW-Beetle-bodied Stanley the Emu (by artist John Murray) greets you on the outskirts. Browse the artist’s whimsical paintings, which embrace outback hues and human folly, at GALLERY. JOHN MURRAY ART A deeper understanding of Lightning Ridge’s penchant for playing by its own rules can be gained at the CHAMBERS OF THE BLACK HAND. The sandstone walls of Ron Canlin’s opal mine are an unlikely canvas for hundreds of carvings and murals, including an Egyptian chamber with ‘humorous hieroglyphics’. Take a stickybeak around LUNATIC HILL MINE, once one of the richest OPEN CUT sources of black opal ever found, now a fitting monument to its lucky and unlucky miners. To see the finished products, see jeweller Jo Lindsay’s creations at OPALS. LOST SEA runs a THE AUSTRALIAN OPAL CENTRE handful of six-day fossil digs, in conjunction with the Australian Geographic Society, which have uncovered mind-blowing specimens such as 100-million-year-old opalised fossils. The Ridge’s shanty-chic architecture is as colourful as the gemstones that funded it. and BEER CAN HOUSE AMIGO’S CASTLE, made from ironstone boulders, are standouts not to be missed. See if you can strike it lucky with OUTBACK on a full-day jaunt into ‘opalrush’ OPAL TOURS territory. The famous and infamous ‘Pubs in the Scrub’ of GRAWIN OPAL FIELDS are a highlight. And finally, loved by all are the ARTESIAN where you can reflect on a town BORE BATHS where the bizarre soon becomes normal and the normal bizarre – Lightning Ridge. To plan your holiday to Lightning Ridge, visit walgett.nsw.gov.au/tourism