Ghan: Coober Pedy … Opal Mining

Australia isn’t the only place in the world where opals are found. But it has become pretty much the only source of opals since the 1880s … producing some 95% of the precious gem.

Our day started at the Manguri rail siding where we detrained onto buses for our off-train experience in and around Coober Pedy … which produces more opal by mass than anywhere else.

I’m not sure how long it usually takes to get into town when the dirt road leading from the siding in the middle of nowhere has been graded. Today it took us about 40 minutes to reach the Stuart Highway. Despite our driver’s skills, it felt like we were driving over onduline-clad roads. The noise so loud that at times he had to stop his narration.

Nonetheless, the drive was interesting because it took us through the opal fields of the area. Distant, conical piles of dirt that we thought at first were natural land formations turned out to be piles of dirt … marking the location of some 1.5 million mine shafts that dot the landscape … many of them abandoned or played-out.

Opal mining here dates back to 1915 when the first opal claim was staked out. But it wasn’t until after WWI that opal mining took off … when returning soldiers started to seek their fortune here. After WWII, a batch of Europeans arrived to join them. By the 1970s, the opal rush was well underway.

In general, opal mining is done by individual miners rather than large corporations. Early miners dug their shafts by hand … 3- to 10-meters deep. They reinforced the walls with timber and then lowered themselves into the shafts to dig tunnels.

In modern times, the digging has become mechanized. The excavated dirt is transported to a drum mounted on a truck and shot out into a pile near the shaft … those tepee-like mounds we saw today. We also saw a few open-cut mining operations, but they were few and far between.

Luck is a huge factor in finding opals. There is no scientific way of determining where there might be an opal vein. In this respect, opal mining is different from searching for gold or diamonds. The whole endeavor is very much hit and miss … with the latter being the case more often not.

In any event, if a miner is lucky, he finds veins of common opal (the white, non-refractive stuff), following them in hopes of finding precious opal … which then has to be extracted very carefully as the silica-based gem is very fragile. Sometimes the miner found opalized fossils of prehistoric animals and plants, many of which have been donated to museums around Australia.

Definitely not an easy way of making one’s fortune!Baca selengkapnya