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Bourke & Beyond - Day 3
Sep. 30th, 2020 03:44 pmLightning Ridge & surrounding area
Breakfast at a local enough cafe that we could have walked to, but didn’t, then across the street from there to the John Murray Art Gallery - though it feels like the entire town of Lightning Ridge is the John Murray Art Gallery. His paintings are in just about every building, including our motel room, on a few murals around town & the Bowling Club last night must have had about a dozen of his works on its walls. Anyway, he also has a large shed with plenty more & we have to admit some of the works inside are really good!! Good enough that we bought 2 decent sized prints to take back & frame. And a fridge magnet...
Round the corner, to the Post Office to buy a packing tube for our new artworks, then into the Opal Cave shop to check out the local product. The place is run by an octogenarian jeweller whose sales banter can sail dangerously close to inappropriate, to today’s ears, but he mostly gets away with it... I assume, because he’s still there
We then had 3 more colour-coded car door tours to do. These are tours set up in & around the town & are marked with car doors of a particular colour, with hand-painted directions, or instructions on them. The Visitors Centre had given us an accompanying info sheet yesterday, in case we couldn't read the door, or maybe missed one. Even though Lightning Ridge has turned out to be a much smaller town than we expected - its reputation is probably 10x the size of the town - there's a lot to see, if the car door tours are to be believed... L-SP also pointed out that it must be hard to figure out what the population of the town is, as there seem to be more people living outside the town on their small opal 'claims', than in the houses inside the town itself. So how come Laura still managed to get us lost last night looking for a simple restaurant!!
The coloured door tours certainly seem like an interesting way to see everything the town & area have to offer, given the relative success of the one we did at sunset last night, so we started with the Blue tour, which was mostly spots around town, finishing at the Walk-In Opal Mine, which, as the name suggests, you don a hard hat & can walk into (after paying a modest entry fee, of course). Opal miners are, at least, a little taller than the Cornish silver miners who dug the mine we visited in Silverton a few years back. At least there were parts of the opal mine I could stand up in... though I still banged my hard-hatted head about a dozen times on the sandstone ceiling, or pine roof supports, or light fittings. At the end of the mine, in a little room, there was a video running on a loop which gave the history of the opal discovery, boom & even its gradual decline, though there are still, obviously, plenty of people out here giving it a red-hot go. Apparently, only 1 in 10 miners ever find a decent amount of opals, 1 in 10 of those find the good ones & 1 in 10 of those goes on to make a good living at it... Not great odds for striking it rich
Then onto the Red Tour, which took us a bit further afield & past places of interest like a couple of defunct open-cut mines, which plainly showed the layers of rock & clay the miners go down through to get to the rare opals. L-SP & I both agreed that, even though it was probably worse for the landscape, it was definitely safer than the little tunnels we'd been in an hour or so earlier...
Back into town via the ‘famous’ glass bottle house, which is another entrant in the ‘I Thought It Would Be Bigger’ files. Certainly for what they wanted to charge for entry into the building, you’d want it to be large enough to justify the price. We elected to not pay it, & just took some photos of the outside & drove on...
To the starting point for the Yellow tour, which took us quite a distance outside the town, past a LOT of smaller claim mines, another open-cut mine & eventually to a rustic old church, which turned out to have been built for the movie ‘The Goddess Of 1967’, filmed in the area in 2000. I’d heard of the film, but never seen it. Kudos to the set builders though - it’s still standing... even if its insides could do with a bit of renovation, including a new floor. Tempting as it was, I didn’t leave a business card...
The Yellow tour finished at a giant industrial statue of an emu, about 10 kilometres outside town. We’d driven past it yesterday, but didn’t stop at the time, only wondering what the hell it was. Well, now we know. Back to town via its ‘Entry Gates’ next to a large art installation which someone had decided to be buried next to. Seriously... there’s a grave right next to this big sign welcoming you to the town, with a gravel mixer perched on top of it... which kind of sets the tone for this odd little town - a mixture of desperation, both for opals & the tourist dollar & the oddball kinds of people who are attracted to the extremely long odds of opal mining, as well as the left-field creative thinkers who bring colour & life to the town, not to mention that particular, peculiar sense of humour born of long distance, isolation & hard living in harsh country
A short rest back at our Motel, then we decided to head out to the end point of yesterday’s Green door tour, where you look out west over the plains & the sun sets over the vast, flat terrain. Once again, the area was awash with Grey Nomads & their 4WDs, their camp chairs, picnic tables & Dad jokes. We foraged around the area avoiding the myriad mine holes, & slipping down the slag heaps, looking for good vantage points that were also far from the maddening crowd. Sunset, when it came, wasn’t quite as good as last night, but we came away with some nice images, so the time wasn’t wasted. Julia saw her first kangaroo in the wild (for this trip) on the way back to the main road too...
Back into town & we thought we’d try the bigger of the 2 Italian restaurants we found by incident last night for dinner. Unfortunately, so did everyone else... & they’d all booked ahead, so we contented ourselves with a take-away pizza & a white wine from the nearby ‘Bottle O’ & headed back to our Motel room for a quiet night in
Off to Bourke tomorrow, with fingers crossed that the predicted rain either doesn’t arrive for a few more days, or that it won’t make our planned road to Cameron’s Corner impossibly impassable...
Breakfast at a local enough cafe that we could have walked to, but didn’t, then across the street from there to the John Murray Art Gallery - though it feels like the entire town of Lightning Ridge is the John Murray Art Gallery. His paintings are in just about every building, including our motel room, on a few murals around town & the Bowling Club last night must have had about a dozen of his works on its walls. Anyway, he also has a large shed with plenty more & we have to admit some of the works inside are really good!! Good enough that we bought 2 decent sized prints to take back & frame. And a fridge magnet...
Round the corner, to the Post Office to buy a packing tube for our new artworks, then into the Opal Cave shop to check out the local product. The place is run by an octogenarian jeweller whose sales banter can sail dangerously close to inappropriate, to today’s ears, but he mostly gets away with it... I assume, because he’s still there
We then had 3 more colour-coded car door tours to do. These are tours set up in & around the town & are marked with car doors of a particular colour, with hand-painted directions, or instructions on them. The Visitors Centre had given us an accompanying info sheet yesterday, in case we couldn't read the door, or maybe missed one. Even though Lightning Ridge has turned out to be a much smaller town than we expected - its reputation is probably 10x the size of the town - there's a lot to see, if the car door tours are to be believed... L-SP also pointed out that it must be hard to figure out what the population of the town is, as there seem to be more people living outside the town on their small opal 'claims', than in the houses inside the town itself. So how come Laura still managed to get us lost last night looking for a simple restaurant!!
The coloured door tours certainly seem like an interesting way to see everything the town & area have to offer, given the relative success of the one we did at sunset last night, so we started with the Blue tour, which was mostly spots around town, finishing at the Walk-In Opal Mine, which, as the name suggests, you don a hard hat & can walk into (after paying a modest entry fee, of course). Opal miners are, at least, a little taller than the Cornish silver miners who dug the mine we visited in Silverton a few years back. At least there were parts of the opal mine I could stand up in... though I still banged my hard-hatted head about a dozen times on the sandstone ceiling, or pine roof supports, or light fittings. At the end of the mine, in a little room, there was a video running on a loop which gave the history of the opal discovery, boom & even its gradual decline, though there are still, obviously, plenty of people out here giving it a red-hot go. Apparently, only 1 in 10 miners ever find a decent amount of opals, 1 in 10 of those find the good ones & 1 in 10 of those goes on to make a good living at it... Not great odds for striking it rich
Then onto the Red Tour, which took us a bit further afield & past places of interest like a couple of defunct open-cut mines, which plainly showed the layers of rock & clay the miners go down through to get to the rare opals. L-SP & I both agreed that, even though it was probably worse for the landscape, it was definitely safer than the little tunnels we'd been in an hour or so earlier...
Back into town via the ‘famous’ glass bottle house, which is another entrant in the ‘I Thought It Would Be Bigger’ files. Certainly for what they wanted to charge for entry into the building, you’d want it to be large enough to justify the price. We elected to not pay it, & just took some photos of the outside & drove on...
To the starting point for the Yellow tour, which took us quite a distance outside the town, past a LOT of smaller claim mines, another open-cut mine & eventually to a rustic old church, which turned out to have been built for the movie ‘The Goddess Of 1967’, filmed in the area in 2000. I’d heard of the film, but never seen it. Kudos to the set builders though - it’s still standing... even if its insides could do with a bit of renovation, including a new floor. Tempting as it was, I didn’t leave a business card...
The Yellow tour finished at a giant industrial statue of an emu, about 10 kilometres outside town. We’d driven past it yesterday, but didn’t stop at the time, only wondering what the hell it was. Well, now we know. Back to town via its ‘Entry Gates’ next to a large art installation which someone had decided to be buried next to. Seriously... there’s a grave right next to this big sign welcoming you to the town, with a gravel mixer perched on top of it... which kind of sets the tone for this odd little town - a mixture of desperation, both for opals & the tourist dollar & the oddball kinds of people who are attracted to the extremely long odds of opal mining, as well as the left-field creative thinkers who bring colour & life to the town, not to mention that particular, peculiar sense of humour born of long distance, isolation & hard living in harsh country
A short rest back at our Motel, then we decided to head out to the end point of yesterday’s Green door tour, where you look out west over the plains & the sun sets over the vast, flat terrain. Once again, the area was awash with Grey Nomads & their 4WDs, their camp chairs, picnic tables & Dad jokes. We foraged around the area avoiding the myriad mine holes, & slipping down the slag heaps, looking for good vantage points that were also far from the maddening crowd. Sunset, when it came, wasn’t quite as good as last night, but we came away with some nice images, so the time wasn’t wasted. Julia saw her first kangaroo in the wild (for this trip) on the way back to the main road too...
Back into town & we thought we’d try the bigger of the 2 Italian restaurants we found by incident last night for dinner. Unfortunately, so did everyone else... & they’d all booked ahead, so we contented ourselves with a take-away pizza & a white wine from the nearby ‘Bottle O’ & headed back to our Motel room for a quiet night in
Off to Bourke tomorrow, with fingers crossed that the predicted rain either doesn’t arrive for a few more days, or that it won’t make our planned road to Cameron’s Corner impossibly impassable...
