By Joanne Shoebridge
It's transparent when held up to the light, but looks like a hologram against a neutral background. The Tintenbar opal is one of rarest opals in the country, as Joanne Shoebridge discovered when she went hunting at the nation's largest mineralogical festival, Gemfest, in the northern NSW city of Lismore.
Ask any gem hunter when the magic of mineralised rocks sparked the fire that became their lifelong passion, and they'll inevitably tell you it started very young.
Heather Boulton was a 14-year-old growing up in the shadow of towering volcanic plugs near Nimbin when she saw an unimpressive stone transformed.
"It looked quite ordinary until it was cut and polished, then it looked quite beautiful, and I thought 'that was magic' and it's not magic at all, it's just what happens," said Mrs Boulton.
"It was carnelian from the creeks in Nimbin, a reddish brownish stone."
John Hoffman caught the bug as a six-year-old growing up in Sydney.
https://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/20 ... 237789.htm
