Today I travelled from Dubbo to Lightning Ridge. It started being quite foggy, but after a while the fog cleared. By this time I was definitely going through the western plains. Not a hill to be seen, and I was in sheep and wheat country.
One of the reasons I’m taking the route I am is to see places I’ve heard of through folk music over the years. Australia has lots of songs about drovers and shearers moving from place to place. The western plains figured in several, as did Gilgandra, which I came across soon after leaving Dubbo. It’s very flat.
I came across Gulargambone shortly after leaving Gilgandra. For many years there has been a radio program called Australia All Over (also known as Maccas on a Sunday morning). The host rocked up to a country town that no one bar the inhabitants has ever heard of, and they all line up to talk to him, or tell stories or play music… People also ring in from all around Australia to report on strange stuff, like leaches. I was in Narrandera one weekend for their annual parade. Everyone in the town and for miles around seemed to be in the parade - the primary schools, the sports teams, the police, fire brigade, … That was on the Saturday. Then, bright and early on Sunday morning, when everyone should have been bleary eyed from everything on Saturday, there was macca on stage in the park with this enormous queue of people waiting to talk to him for a few seconds. This started before 7am (the show goes live at 7:30am). It was a tremendously popular show.
You may wonder what this has to do with Gulargumbone. Somehow, the town featured more often than you’d expect on the show when I used to listen to it. It also came first in NSW in the tidy towns competition in 2004.
This century quite a few towns have been painting pictures on their silos. I passed my first one for this trip at Coonamble and I didn’t see any others, although many properties had silos, and there were the massive piles of wheat covered with blue tarpaulins that you see in wheatbelts at this time of year all around Australia.
I also passed a memorial to John Oxley’s 1818 expedition. But the best thing I passed was the giant emu near Lightning Ridge. It’s astoundingly tall and is made out of several satellite dishes and two Volkswagens amongst other pieces of metal.
Then I arrived in Lightning Ridge. They mine black opals. I think it’s the only place in the world that has black opals, which are more impressive than any other opals. Way back when I was a child, in the middle of summer, my grandparents took me from Melbourne to Brisbane, and we visited Lightning Ridge. I had never seen a place so poor. It would have been very hot - probably over 40C. People were living in hessian tents. Someone had made their home from beer bottles. Everyone lived among mullock heaps. The roads meandered between the dwellings which were all on claims, so there were lots of holes in the ground.
Today Lightning Ridge is a proper town, with houses with fences and gardens. There are all sorts of facilities. There are some outstanding tourist attractions (one of which was voted the second best tourist attraction in Australia). It’s better than either of the other opal mining towns I’ve visited. Unfortunately, the mines here have to be braced with timbers. In Cooper Pedy the rock doesn’t need to be braced and they have lots of underground buildings, including a hotel, so the people can avoid hot summer weather. I went around the workings, and saw the Lunatic Hill open cut, which shows the rock strata and where the opals are found.
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