But unfortunately we can't keep them.
Black opal pictured above
(this one alone could fetch up to $20,000, if it had been a red on black probably about $100,000)
We went to visit Happy's site where they were tailing. This is the last process to opal mining.
Once mined the trucks take the load to the agies (agitators) where they run on a conveyor belt into a large cement type mixer.
Water is continually added to this and they are spun round and round for about two hours or until the water is clear and the mud is rinsed off. This is then reversed and what's left comes back out the conveyor and loaded into the "bucket", which is the front end of a loader.
They then go through the loader looking for the opals. We spent a good 3 hours helping them find opals (and no we didn't have big jackets with lots of pockets). We filled a saucepan with opals of all colours with an estimated value of $20,000. Aaron the owner is a 4th generation miner and is only 30 years old. His grandfather was the 7th family to arrive here and within 2 weeks the place was crawling with 3,000 miners!!!! Afterwards we got to drive through his open cut mine, now the largest worked open cut mine around. It was amazing. If you look closely at the pic behind the digger you will see holes in the wall - this was when originally by hand, axe picked their way through a mine shaft.
As a token of good gesture we were given a black nobby (a big black opal but no colour) as a souvenir of our visit. Lightning Ridge is the only place that black nobby's are found. The premium opal to be found is a black nobby with a layer of colour banded through it or on top, red fetching the highest prices.
Time pays off as now Rob has managed to secure 3 weeks work with a local electrician and starts sometime next week.
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