Love In a Sunburnt Country

by Jo Jackson King

  The restaurant, even though it only opened by prior arrangement, was made more complex by the limitations under which they operated.

  ‘We did the first three years without a stove. I prepped everything on butane burners. We did a wedding for a hundred and twenty on butane burners. Michael’s mother was amazing, she knew people, food, production lines, fast prep. Whenever we had a group bigger than ten she was there helping us—my mum helped, too, and Michael’s dad was the builder. We couldn’t have done it without the support of our family.

  ‘We ended up with a set menu—always golden syrup dumplings for dessert. They’re good, bloody easy and cheap. There’s such a small margin in food so you have to be smart.’

  Rebel and Michael’s restaurant was about much more than food. They employed elders to tell Dreamtime stories, local singers to perform and their staff were eclectic and interesting.

  Listening to Rebel talk about business models is illuminating. She loves the constraints of business as a spur to creativity the way a poet loves the limitations of a ballad or a haiku. I’d understood that running a business meant that you catered to the consumer, but Rebel doesn’t think so. She believes instead in finding a way to locate the consumer who is interested in what it is you can do.

  In terms of business she is bold. She simply commits.

  In 2008, and using all the skills developed at the restaurant, Michael and Rebel carefully designed an enchanting, never-to-be-repeated evening for their loved ones. They married at Never Never Creek in the Promised Land. (So magical are these names I had to look them up: it really is a place.) Rebel was to receive the most meaningful of wedding presents on her return from their honeymoon—what she describes as a ‘deep learning’.

  ‘We decided to surprise the children, and they were so excited to see us and Tori said to me, “I really missed you,” and I just broke down inside. It had never occurred to me that I was much more than someone who cooked food and cleaned up for them. I loved them, but I hadn’t realised that they loved me.’

  Rebel and Michael closed the restaurant just as it was starting to really hit its stride. This was mostly because there were other things they both wanted to do more, but Rebel feels there was another element to her decision as well. She has thought deeply about this as interrupting a pathway to success is not something Rebel wants to ever do again. She talks often about mindsets: that a belief or a story can underpin a set of behaviours that can prevent you gaining something you want. In this case, she suspects she partly closed the restaurant because her mindset was that life was too hard to allow quick success. Their restaurant had been such a swift hit and if she had recognised that at the time, she says, she’d have had to change much of what she believed, to find new stories to tell herself about how life works. (Of course, she’s gone to find and tell those new stories anyway.)

  ‘The restaurant had been closed for a couple of years when we worked out that having it closed broke our hearts. It had a good energy there, everyone had a great time, it was a good little business, it just was that Michael and I had other things to do. And so there was the plan to give someone else a crack.’

  It was a wild plan, giving the restaurant away. It didn’t work out as they had hoped, as a cost-neutral win-win. They lost money. Rebel and Michael say they’ve taken from this an enduring lesson: people are less likely to value something given for free.

  Getting to know Lightning Ridge and Michael went hand in hand for Rebel. ‘Opal is Michael’s passion, his addiction,’ she says. ‘It’s the love story, really: he’s here for the opals and I’m here because he’s here.

  ‘People used to say to me, “What do you live in Lightning Ridge for?”’ She mimics the dismissive, critical tone in which this kind of rhetorical question was asked.

  The risk for people like Rebel, who have stayed in a place or moved because of a loved one, is becoming a martyr to the situation: choosing not to find a solution, and instead taking advantage of the compassion their circumstance can create.

  ‘Lightning Ridge always felt like my home, and I adore Michael and I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else, but there was still a feeling that I should be somewhere else, that I couldn’t just be here and love it. I wasn’t consciously doing it, but I had bought into that “life is hard” mindset—I’d bought into the story the landscape tells. Once I let go of that people stopped asking me why I live here.’

  So many people in rural and remote communities feel like Rebel once did, but not all of them manage to cross over into having meaningful lives in the place life (and love) has planted them. The idea that the worthwhile, important lives can only happen in the big cities—in Sydney, Melbourne, London, New York—so often underlies this. This is counterbalanced by the idea that Australian identity is formed by our wide brown land, with its opal skies. Bush dwellers might not lead the important lives, but it is living in hardship and isolation that creates the culture of place so important to other Australians.

  Rebel once bought into these concepts, but no longer. She says instead that rural and remote people can live deeply connected lives, where things work out well, where it doesn’t have to be hard, and also that those lives can be every bit as important as a life of making it big in a city. In support of this belief, Rebel co-developed an online community called THE (Thriving Healing Evolving) Rural Woman, in which rural women from around Australia find friendship, inspiring conversations and life and business coaching; it’s a place to grow, to thrive—to ‘bloom where you are planted’.

  ‘My involvement with the Australian Opal Centre is a big way of blooming where I’m planted, and it is also about creating a catalyst for change out here. Through the work I do with rural women I see two very strong beliefs embedded in rural people: “life is hard” and “there’s not enough”. And that belief in scarcity means people feel like they’re in competition. So the Australian Opal Centre is also about calling out that scarcity culture in a very big way. We can cooperate rather than compete (and there are genuine win-wins) and we are worthy of this investment.’

  Rebel is trying to secure the government funding and private sponsorship required for the Australian Opal Centre.

  ‘From just about every level of government what I hear is, “Your biggest problem is that all the players in your industry don’t work together.” And when I workshop that afterwards I think: “What does working together look like? It’s showing up, it’s investing time and money, having everyone in the room, everyone standing certain in what we’re trying to do and contributing. That’s exactly what we’re doing! What the heck more do they want?” And I realised I’d been telling all levels of government they need to sit around that table with us, yet they tell us that is not how it works. They say that each department works on its own. So while they say, “You must work together,” and we are doing that, they don’t know how to work together themselves. So they can’t recognise it when we are!’

  While Rebel and the rest of the committee are trying to find a new way of communicating ‘working together’ with government, they are not stopping there.

  ‘The community raised the funds to dig the hole for the building. If we could get two or three wealthy individuals to fund the centre, to take the gamble with us, to share the excitement of that part of the opal story …’

  Michael also grew up in a culture of giving when you had something to give, helping out when you had time and supporting other people’s dreams. Indeed, it is hard to imagine many other places where a character like his could have been formed.

  Michael’s parents, Lindsay and Heather, moved to Lightning Ridge after Lindsay, then a builder, asked his boss for a pay rise. The answer was no—someone else would take his job for that same wage, so there was no need to pay Lindsay more. This answer struck Lindsay as deeply wrong, so revealing of a society that had stopped valuing the individual that he quit in disgust. This revulsion propelled him to leave not just his job, but Melbourne. He and Heather hit the wide, open road hoping to find
black opal and make their fortune, or if not that, then to live life on their terms.

  Putting down a mine is hard work now, but it was even harder work then. With Lindsay on the crowbar and Heather on the shovel, they were hand-sinking shafts, down through the soil and shincracker rock laid down in the last few million years on their way to the much older opal dirt, six to eighteen metres below the surface. These days, miners use an auger for this work.

  ‘There’s such hardship that sits around that story at that time in history, but also incredible mateship and camaraderie,’ says Rebel.

  This was balanced by the darker side of Lightning Ridge: rumours rushing like wildfire from claim to claim, the thieving ‘opal ratters’ and the need to protect your find and equipment against their depredations.

  That’s the thing about Lightning Ridge. It’s a place where people have made fortunes and will continue to do so.

  ‘Anyone can come put a hole down and maybe become a millionaire. People do it, they do the mining course and register a claim and sometimes they’re rich and sometimes they’re not. It’s the last frontier for entrepreneurs,’ says Rebel.

  Opal mining does make some people rich, but it makes others patient, persistent and philosophical. It makes you these things, or it does your head in or breaks your heart. It is purely the province of the small miner: large industrial methods don’t work in opal mining. Added to that, the rules stop empire building, because no-one can hold more than two mineral claims in their name.

  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.

  ‘Ab
out 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.