Love In a Sunburnt Country (24 page)

Michael has always wanted to prospect and mine for opal. In the long hours underground, alone in his head, he appears to have developed the ability to care only about the essentials of life: other people to love and help and team up with, places to mine opal, time to sort opal, time to plan and build things for mining more opal, good food on the table, time to garden, places to fish, places to explore. He's a sage, a philosopher, with a dearly bought wisdom, but I'm not sure all of it has been dearly bought. I suspect that early in life he hit upon his recipe for happiness and has returned to it time and again.

Looking out of the window of Rebel's four-wheel drive as we travel through Lightning Ridge, I decide that Michael was remarkably lucky to grow up in such a fairytale place. Not fairytale as in pretty, because it is not, instead it is fantastical: when the rest of Australia legislated out eccentricity, marching to your own crazy beat and the matchless ingenuity of making do, it all moved here. Mullock piles left from opal mining interrupt every streetscape and house yard. Some houses are barely recognisable as houses. Homemade mining machines rust into the rust-coloured land and every day this landscape shifts and morphs to the whims and needs of the people who live here.

There are no street signs and numbered car doors ease you through the labyrinth of the opal fields, where houses appear to have randomly and unsteadily unloaded themselves from trucks and hunkered down next to a dig. Other houses have latched themselves onto something else—a caravan, a tram, a shed. Roofs are of mismatched heights or they are crazily high-domed or flow unsteadily down.

I am particularly struck with the ‘Universe Observatory' or ‘Astronomer's Monument' built by Polish man Alex Szperlak. He changed his name to Robinson Crusoe, and using concrete formed up in twenty- and sixty-litre drums, built this loco rococo structure, which calls to my mind a nest of towering, angular cactus plants. Over every surface he has scribbled arcane symbols that refer to the works of Copernicus, Galileo, Newton and Hoyle, in homage to them, but also to tell those of us with mundane minds that he, Robinson Crusoe, was as visionary and just as misunderstood.

We've left Lightning Ridge behind and are approaching Michael's mine. We must spend some time down there, says Rebel, because underground is the place Michael is most himself. A collar of corrugated iron sits around the top of the mine, a long piece of drill steel is suspended across it, and from that a long ladder descends some eighteen metres. Michael comes up to greet us and to guide us down the ladder, and Rebel gives me a quick smile as I begin to descend—and waves her phone at me to tell me that she's going to be productively occupied above ground while I am below.

In the opal mine the walls and floor are mostly of a whitish-dun clay—stiff, soft, nearly waterless. The occasional red-and-purple shadings are put there by iron. The mine is spacious and balmy: fresh air is pumped in. Michael, from under the cloud of soft light cast by his miner's hat, warmly encourages me to keep digging. I have the awful feeling that if we do find good opal in his mine he would want us to keep it: the expression ‘generous to a fault' springs to mind. Even though Michael has told us a number of million-dollar-day stories of people finding a king's ransom of opals in just a king-size mattress of dirt or happening upon a thick vein of opal or even a large thigh-bone of opalised fossil, he hasn't yet found a fortune in opal. Despite this, his generosity to other miners and in the community is well known, and he ceaselessly presses pieces of opal he insists ‘I'd not get much for' on me.

‘Follow the colour,' he says in his warm, easy drawl, an addict sharing his addiction. ‘Keep on going, you never know.' I want to find opal, and with my screwdriver I keep digging because the opal obsession has me already, and also because, there, in the torchlight, in speckles and trailing dashes, like a guppy flashing past in its tank, I see opal travelling deeper into the clay. This is black opal, and the only place in the world it is being found in volume right now is here.

I keep digging, circling around and behind the sliver of opal before me. Every now and then I slam my hand into the wall—it is painful, but I don't care. And then, it's gone. The play of colour that was living on the wall is no more. Despite all my care it has flaked off and dispersed on the dun-coloured floor. I thought I'd found a nobby—an opal rock—but instead it was a nano-thin layer of opal painted over clay.

Michael is quick to commiserate. I know already that his particular dream is to find the mind-blowingly rare red opal and he tells us of the time he'd found a seam of red opal. It was the size of a dinner plate, the pure red of a robin redbreast and it lit their mine like light behind stained glass. He and his father dug around it with excruciating care. Finally it was time to lift it and, just as happened to me, the opal crumbled into tiny pieces like icing sugar and poured away before their horrified eyes.

Michael has been looking for opal nearly all his life. Added to a childhood made extraordinary by his good parents, a fantastical morphing landscape holding good, bad and crazy guys, the myth and legend of the opal fields, he only needed a quest to complete the recipe for a storybook childhood, and he had that, too.

‘I went to the original open cut, where the old timers had been—they'd write on the roof with their candles. A lot of the drives are only a foot wide. You crawl in on your belly. Kids now wouldn't be allowed—bad air and cave-ins,' says Michael.

It is easy to miss opal when you dig. Along with opal dirt, opals are vacuumed up and out of the mine. The day's diggings are then taken to be agitated in cement mixers in a process called ‘winding it down'. The cement mixers are all located together along the banks of a dam (which supplies the water) and reclamation or settlement pond (where the non-toxic opal clay drains to): a shared facility run by the Opal Miners Association.

When he finds opal Michael rubs it down to gauge its quality, and then he sorts it into parcels containing opal of similar quality. The next step is selling.

Many houses in Lightning Ridge have a ‘buying now' shingle out the front, but the local buyers aren't the only people shopping for opal. Opal dealers charter planes to fly in to Lightning Ridge—or they may come in posing as tourists or even students in order to gather information anonymously, and then purchase large quantities of opal.

Opal jewellery has featured high-domed, oval stones, but this is a tradition that the industry is beginning to move away from. I'm yet to see any of the new opal jewellery, but Rebel assures me it is very different to what I might have grown up seeing.

‘About ten years ago they started a design award for free-form opal, to encourage carving and cutting the opal to keep a more natural shape and retain more opal. It was a real catalyst for the industry to change and for the market to adapt,' says Rebel.

At a local shop, I meet Vicki, a friend of Rebel's. Vicki has the opal bug, too: she's a designer and retailer. It is here that I grasp just why high-grade opal is valued as much as diamond and gold. The first tray I see shows carefully matched small stones glowing in a rainbow array. I hadn't realised before that opal can do it all: sapphire, amethyst, aquamarine, emerald, ruby, amber and onyx. It's a chameleon stone, but this copycatting is a piece of dazzling illusion. Opal is not at all like any other gem.

‘Opal doesn't have a crystalline structure like other gemstones. So, for example, under high magnification you'll see that a diamond might have a quadron or a trigon crystal structure,' says Vicki. ‘We call those inclusions—the natural fracture or fissure of that crystal. But opal is amorphous. When you look at an opal under the microscope it has inclusions as well, but they're not fractures or fissures, they're patterns.'

‘It's like the patterns exist in the “headspace” of the opal,' adds Rebel, and I understand. It is almost as if the opal has imagined the colour into being.

And there are other opals which look like no other gemstone: there's the matrix opal, where opal colour flickers in and out of the rock hosting it, and the honey potch, which reminds me of sap bubbling from a tree and glowing in the sun. Potch is opal without a play of colour. It lies discarded on the mullock piles along with the occasional piece of missed opal. It took a while for the jewellers to see the potential of the honey-coloured potch, but they are using it now.

Some of it looks edible, like a candied jelly.

‘It just plops out from the sandstone,' says Rebel.

Some of the most extraordinary pieces look as if they have just been found and lovingly rubbed and then left strictly alone—this is the free-form jewellery which seems to be saved for the biggest of the black opals. Per carat, some are worth more than diamonds. Their colours sparkle out against the natural backing of black-and-grey potch. Had I dollars enough I could purchase an opal holding a night of fireworks, or one containing my very own piece of tropical reef, or a Bollywood-set piece of silk-clad dancers, or a flight of glittering budgerigars, or even an ever-living enchantment of wildflowers shifting on the wind.

Behind me Vicki and Rebel have started talking marketing, and this is clearly a conversation that has been going for years. Without a big player (such as De Beers) and big dollars, marketing opal requires an ingenious approach. Once Vicki contributed black opal to adorn a tall and beautiful hat that was on display at all the big fashion shows around the world. Opal mining and selling is a cottage industry in some ways, albeit the most glamorous cottage industry I have ever heard of.

None of the challenges deter Michael—not the mines barren of opal, the opal ratters, poor opal prices nor the built-in barriers to its marketing. To him all opals have an intrinsic value, but for Rebel they are opportunities waiting to be taken in rural repair and regeneration. She's another kind of true believer altogether: she believes in the power of the human spirit and is always looking for ways to give it wings.

In addition to her involvement with opal and her online community, Rebel has two new enterprises underway. As I write she has just featured on national television in a piece looking at food security in the Australian outback. This passion for production methods that heal the land is another heritage from her farming childhood—and she's expressed it by establishing a hub for social entrepreneurs in Lightning Ridge.

On the two-hectare site that once housed their restaurant, Rebel is inviting entrepreneurs to establish a business connected to food or land or community. In this venue she is holding permaculture, sustainability and food-security workshops.

‘Three years ago people said to me you should bring people to Lightning Ridge to learn gardening and traditional wisdom. I was saying, “Who would drive that far?” I couldn't see it then, but now I see that anyone who sees the value in those things for their own lives will drive. And they are. The marketplace hasn't changed, I have.'

She's increasingly feeling that the word ‘sustainability' is the wrong one—her permaculture teacher suggested an alternative. ‘If we just sustain, we run the risk of staying the same,' she says. ‘We need to regenerate and evolve. Regeneration implies improvement and revitalisation and evolution is moving—that's what we need, not more of the same.'

The other enterprise Rebel is adding to her stable is a healing practice. This was born of her own experience of ill-health. For many years Rebel's health had been in decline.

‘I thought, what is wrong with me? That had been the quest from when I'd been about twenty-one or twenty-two, to find out what was wrong with me. And I'd gone to everyone, I'd seen gastroenterologists and had allergy tests. And I started using food as a way of trying to fix it, and I did that for about a decade. I was gluten-free, sugar-free, lactose-free. I didn't eat red meat, watermelon … there was a long list.' By the time she had been on this quest for a decade she was sick and depressed.

‘Finally I found a GP who actually listened. She said, “I think there's something psychosocial going on—have you ever looked at emotional freedom technique or NLP?”' These words unlocked in Rebel a life-changing insight.

‘I realised I'd been searching for what was wrong with me. I'd seen myself as a problem to be fixed. It was a light-bulb moment, and I thought: “Start looking for what is right with you!” I'd spent years thinking that food would fix the problem and it didn't. I had to be open to the emotional and the spiritual—to living and healing the whole. This was really the gateway to self-love.'

As Rebel began answering this question for herself she noticed a new beauty and depth in the love between her and Michael.

‘When you love yourself you can allow others to love you. Any sort of resistance that Michael's and my relationship had over the years was not in the context of the relationship we had, but in the context of the relationship I had with myself. So while I could not like myself, or love myself, for many days, how the heck could he? How could I even see that he loved me like that? Whereas now I can see how much he loves me, and he hasn't changed: I look back over the years and his expression of love to me has not changed—my willingness and ability to receive it has.'

Rebel's new quest has transformed her life. She reminds me of a choose-your-own-adventure character, writing her own book, and finding herself at a dead end. Perhaps in the back of a cave or deep in a forest, with the way she has come closed behind her and all alone. And then comes that light-bulb moment where she ‘flips' the problem and looks not for what is wrong, but what is right. And now there are pathways everywhere and companions beside her.

‘We're not taught this in school. No-one teaches you how to feel love or be loved. And if you don't have people in your life who will sit you down and say, “Here's what love is—this is how you receive it and give it,” then you'll just go on to model what's around you. People pattern their own relationships on what they've seen and witnessed. You have your parents' marriage essentially: good, bad or indifferent. It's monkey see, monkey do, unless you decide your own pathway.'