Opal Truth is stranger than fiction

Australian opal history is full of grand tales, superstitions and hard yakka (hard work). Read about it all here, or submit your own!

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mick
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Opal Truth is stranger than fiction

Post by mick »

KIM Botfield says there's something about mining opal that gets under your skin, like a tattoo that can never be erased.

"Some people are addicted to alcohol and some people are addicted to drugs," he says. "When you get the opal bug, mate, it's very hard to get away from the bloody thing. It's like being a hunter and the opal is your prey." You can track it and stalk it for years, always thinking it's in the next bucket load. And then one day, when all hope seems lost, you'll spot a flash of colour in the dull, brown clay. "There's nothing like it on this Earth."

Woe betide anyone who gets between a hunter and his prey, a junkie and his stash. The consequences for these thieves, these ratters, can be dire.

We sit chatting in the "Club in the Scrub" at Grawin, a drinking shed built from poles of bush pine and tin in the opal fields an hour's drive west of Lightning Ridge, in NSW's far northwest. When tourists arrive here, even Australian tourists, they feel they've discovered the real Outback - car bodies, old mining equipment and white mullock heaps sit in the arid, rocky landscape. It's like Mad Max without the highway. Old-timers lament that this is what Lightning Ridge was like 40 years ago.

The previous night we'd gone to another man's camp. After many drinks, we were invited to go pigsticking. The man, who would not be named - he'd done time - had a giant dog with crooked teeth and he explained how he'd attach a GPS tracker to the dog's collar and we'd drive off into night, looking for pigs. The dog would smell the pigs long before he could see them and jump off in pursuit. The bloke would then stop the vehicle and, presumably with us in tow, follow on foot with a large knife. A green arrow on a monitor would lead us to where the dog had the pig pinned to the ground by the ear. He'd then stab it to death and "bingo, bacon for breakfast". When the time came, though, it was too windy to go stickin'. It's that kind of place.

Today the heat is relentless, a punishing 50 degrees, and almost the entire community, about 100 people, has driven in from their bush camps in unloved and unregistered vehicles. They are here to escape the heat and for the club's Sunday badge draw, which has hit $1500. Botfield's girlfriend, Tammy Jakitsch, is the manager of the club. When she was a kid, living in Lightning Ridge, she and four friends set about raising money to build an Olympic-size swimming pool for the town - they got so far with cake stalls and raffles and then flew to Canberra to see Bob Hawke, who asked: "Ahhh, how much did you say you wanted, love?" About $400,000, she replied. "I'll see what I can do." He came through. They eventually raised $1.5 million and built the pool. Her father came to Australia as a 21-year-old from Austria, lured by opals; her mum is an Aboriginal woman from Walgett. "Opal," someone tells me, "takes in all comers - it doesn't give a f..k what colour you are."

Botfield, 42, grew up on a farm at Coonabarabran in central NSW. He was halfway through Year 11 in 1987 when he came out to the opal fields in the school holidays to visit his brother, who had a mine. He loved it and never went home. Young Kim staked his own claim, sinking a shaft 10m into the earth where gemstones lurk in a thick layer of clay laid down about 100 million years ago; silica oozed into cracks in the clay and coagulated and compressed to form opal. One man showed me an opal he'd found where the silica had leached into a space in the clay left by a prehistoric snail - the stone was perfectly formed in the shape of the mollusc.

Botfield struck some of this ancient ooze almost immediately - and the opal usually runs in a lucrative seam. He's wary of saying just how well he did all those years ago but reveals that in just one small load he found four stones, "all four of them 10 carats at $6000 a carat - that's $240,000 worth of opals," he says, content with the memory. He made a fortune and then for seven years he didn't find a single opal and he whittled it away.

That's the thing about opal, he explains. A man may dig thousands and thousands of tonnes of dirt for years and find nothing. And then, in a single bucket, he'll unearth stones that will pay for a big house down the coast, a boat and enough beer to last him the rest of his lifetime. These rare finds are enough to sustain the dreams of all the other bustedarse miners who toil day after day, turning over nothing but dirt and existing on the dole.

Inevitably, there are those who'd like the takings without the toil. The ratters are reviled. Ratters, as the name implies, are cunning. Some work in teams, others alone. They'll watch for the signs that a man is onto a seam of opal. It might be the new vehicle he's bought, or they may have spotted a miner's wife on a spending spree at the shops in Dubbo. He may be taking his tailings home at night or have been spied with a certain opal buyer at the Ridge. Sometimes, after years of poverty, the excitement gets too much and at the pub the secret will dribble out of him like beer onto his shirt. "The c..ts, they break in at night," says Botfield. "You arrive in the morning and you find that you've been ratted. You don't know if they got anything or if they got the mother load."

It's no ordinary crime; if someone steals your generator battery or your truck tyres, you know what you've lost. Ratting is the theft of hope - and hope out here often trumps reality. Retribution can be fierce, as one man discovered just before Christmas last year. He lost his fingers after being caught ratting down someone else's mine. Allegedly.

I had come through here five years ago on an odyssey around Australia with my family to write a book. A local promised me that when he came across a good ratting yarn he'd let me know. This is it.

No one knows his real name; they all just call him Coober Pedy. That's where he came from. The police say he is 46. I glean that he has red hair and pale skin, walks with a bit of a limp and is a loner. He is described variously as a "queer f..k", "not the full quid" and a "thieving, ratting c..t".

"It's not as if he wasn't warned," says Botfield. "I mean, a couple of months before all this, lightning struck his caravan out in the scrub and it burnt to the ground. Most unfortunate. You'd think he would have got the message then. He was an idiot." At the time of the incident, with "lightning" having destroyed his caravan, he was living in his Toyota 4WD.

We thought we'd have a look at where Coober Pedy had been living out in an opal field known as Carter's Rush, about 15 minutes from the Club in the Scrub. It's down a dirt track through a cypress pine forest with disused mining equipment scattered all around. It's a kind of miner's utopia where a man can stake a claim, put a caravan above it, dig and dream of his fortune, and forget about the world while drinking himself to death.

We have trouble finding the burnt-out caravan but come across a man living in a Bedford bus with a giant pig dog for company. We approach warily as the man emerges, shirtless. He points to a spot in the distance where Coober Pedy's caravan had been.

"They went too far," he offers after a bit. "They should have put him in his car and run him out of town either that, or shot the c..t and thrown him down a shaft, never to be found." All this business just brings in the cops, gives everyone a bad name, he reckons.

The shirtless man says he had once caught Coober Pedy thieving and had "given him a good floggin', but within reason". He then took him to a mineshaft and dropped him into it. "It were only eight feet deep," he says as a grin splits his face, "but he never knew that when I let him drop. Left the f..ker there for half a day, squealin' like a pig."

Back at the club we meet Paddy Ellis, a gentlemanly old prospector with nicotine stains around his mouth and an otherwise snow-white beard that reaches halfway down his chest. He looks 80. He's 64. With a bottle of Tooheys Old in hand, Ellis takes us to his camp in a battered Ford Falcon with a Jesus sticker on the back and a jumble of mining tools on the rear seats. "The missus is not home," he says, peering over the steering wheel as we approach the house. "That may not be a bad thing."

His camp is a humpy that appears to have missed the 20th century. It's a rickety shack of tin and saplings that his old man built in 1974. Ellis inherited it. There's a slow combustion stove in the kitchen with a row of fading Christmas cards strung above it. His missus lives in the shack. He lives in a caravan, off to the side. Ellis has been a miner all his life. "I've had a few good finds out here - 10, 20 grand, but it's been a long time between drinks," he says, as we settle down in the shade out the back. His missus hates it, he says, while constructing a perfectly formed Log Cabin cigarette, but he loves it. "There are good people out here, smart people. You can live life the way you wanna live it. I look at those guys in the city - they work 11 months of the year and then they come up here for a month each year to get away from it. Mate, I'm here 12 months of the year."

His voice turns soft when he talks about the "incident". No one seems exactly sure what happened, but what is certain is that Coober Pedy lost a finger or two after a run-in with locals who thought he was a ratter. The exact details of all this will have to be picked over by a magistrate when two men appear before the court. But there are things that are beyond dispute.

Coober Pedy was living near where Ellis has his claim. "He was a strange man," he says. "He was sort of always only half here." Ellis was annoyed Coober Pedy's caravan had been burnt. It was perfectly serviceable and he was going to offer him some money to use it as his tucker van, if he were to leave for good.

Did they cut his fingers off? I ask. "That's only what I've heard - I don't know any of the details."

What he did hear is this: on that Sunday in the weeks before Christmas, Coober Pedy was discovered down someone's mine, or somewhere he shouldn't have been. Some of the men who found him allegedly "took to him" and, as our lawyers would have us say, an "altercation took place". For his own safety, it was suggested that it might not be a bad thing for Coober Pedy to leave the opal fields.

Later in the day, it is alleged, some men spotted Coober Pedy in the vicinity of the Club in the Scrub. He hadn't heeded the warning. The police say that at this point there was another fight; who was responsible is yet to be determined. There was a rumour that he was held down and had his fingers chopped off but this, from several accounts, including the police, seems to be untrue. Coober Pedy and his opponent were both allegedly armed with iron bars, or steel fence pickets. It was during this medieval scuffle that Coober Pedy's hand was struck and his fingers were crushed. Just who is responsible, and how the fracas unfolded, will be determined by the magistrate. Ellis says "it was a bad incident, real bad" and that someone should have stepped in and stopped it. He says he'd warned Coober Pedy that he wasn't safe and that he should move on. "Unfortunately, that's not the way that it turned out. We are supposed to be civilised people - most of us are."

Coober Pedy ran screaming past the Club in the Scrub, past where we are sitting now in Paddy Ellis's camp. "Maybe he thought I was home and that I'd help him, but I wasn't here." He made it up to Old Joe the Dutchman's camp. The Dutchman patched him up and drove him to Walgett hospital, an hour's drive away. Coober Pedy, police say, was then transferred to Dubbo Hospital where two of his fingers, which had been hanging by the skin, were amputated.

Meanwhile, someone commandeered Coober Pedy's Toyota. The rumour is that it was driven to the Club in the Scrub, where everyone had gathered for the badge draw. Unknown people were said to have pulled gear from the vehicle. "Does any of this gear belong to anyone?" they yelled, allegedly. That is, if there was someone there to hear the yelling. "Has this ratting c..t stolen any of this?" People gathered to inspect the gear but nobody claimed any of it. No one seems to know what happened next, but Coober Pedy's vehicle was later discovered in the scrub a few kilometres away, burnt to a shell - another lightning strike, perhaps. How it got there and how it came to its charred end will be decided by the magistrate. It is not known if any of the alleged participants made it back in time for the badge draw. No one I speak to claims to have witnessed this incident; they were all away that day. This is just what they'd heard.

We find the spot where the Toyota perished. The vehicle body has been removed and all that remains are a few pots and pans, some cutlery, engine parts and a roof rack - possibly all of Coober Pedy's worldly possessions. Two men from Grawin, aged 51 and 43, have been arrested on charges of common assault and motor vehicle theft. They will appear in Walgett Local Court in April.

Coober Pedy, a police officer informed me, was now living at an undisclosed location, away from the opal fields, "probably for his own safety". The day we visit the Club in the Scrub the alleged perpetrators are apparently among the drinkers but nobody points them out to us. But then, nobody witnessed anything.

There are mixed feelings about what happened. "I think it is f..king terrific," says one miner. "If those ratters think that their fingers, or their balls, will be cut out they'll think twice about ratting down someone's mine at night. Wouldn't you?"

Pat Fletcher, head of the local miner's association, disagrees, saying it brings unwanted attention. There is no police officer stationed in the area and the police in Walgett and Lightning Ridge expect people in the community to deal with their own, within reason.

"And this was not within reason," says Fletcher. Besides, it is not the ratter who is in trouble with the law; it's the blokes who attacked him. "We don't want everyone thinking we are a bunch of f..king hillbillies."
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PinkDiamond
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Re: Opal Truth is stranger than fiction

Post by PinkDiamond »

Wow mick, what a saga! :o
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Re: Opal Truth is stranger than fiction

Post by SwordfishMining »

Thank God so few of them think to come out into the open, for what it is, from the cities they skulk in. I mean you have to provide for yourself outside.
I'll jump over my shadow. https://www.virginvalleyopal.com"
Opals & more at my ESTY store https://swordfishmining.etsy.com"
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