Lightning Ridge

Spent two nights in Lightning Ridge and discovered this remote opal mining town has a character all its own. It's rough around the edges in that authentic outback way, but there's genuine community pride and some quirky attractions that make it worth the detour.

The Car Door Tours are Lightning Ridge's signature experience - four self-guided driving routes (Green, Blue, Yellow, and Red) marked by coloured car doors from wrecked vehicles, painted with numbers corresponding to attractions around town. It's quintessential outback ingenuity - using what's available to create something useful and distinctive. We did all four tours across the day, with each route taking about 20 minutes driving time, though you can easily spend hours exploring the various stops. The tours take you to opal fields, quirky local attractions, and give you a proper feel for how this mining community has evolved.

We caught an opal cutting demonstration which was fascinating - watching a skilled cutter turn rough opal into polished gems that reveal those incredible colour patterns. The geology and formation of black opal is extraordinary, and seeing the process of how they're extracted, assessed, and cut gives you real appreciation for why quality Lightning Ridge opals command such high prices. The gamble involved in cutting - one wrong move can destroy a valuable stone - adds to the drama.

The hot artesian pools are an absolute must-do. These bore baths are fed by the Great Artesian Basin, with mineral-rich water coming up at around 40°C. There are several pools around town, and soaking in hot water under the outback sky is genuinely relaxing.

The John Murray Gallery showcases his distinctive outback landscape paintings and whimsical wildlife portraits. Murray's a realist painter working in acrylics who moved to Lightning Ridge as a "city artist" and found inspiration in the seeming simplicity of the landscape. His work captures the harsh beauty of the arid country with attention to light and shadow, while also finding humour in the interplay between human, animal, and plant life out here. The gallery displays original canvases and prints, and his ability to find colour and emotion in what appears to be "nothing there" landscape resonates once you've spent time in this country yourself.

Lightning Ridge has that frontier town feel - a place where people come to chase their fortune, live outside conventional society, and create their own version of community. The combination of opal fever, artesian water, and artists finding inspiration in the isolation makes for an experience you won't find anywhere else in Australia.Læs mere