To really enjoy this you should go to the source first. Not that it is full of opal pictures. Go to socials for those.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... Lands.html
Take a step inside Aussie ghost town Mintabie where loners and misfits struck it rich thanks to its famed black opals - but were forced to flee when it was shut down over sinister dealings. Stephen Gibbs is a senior reporter for Daily Mail Australia
In the baked centre of the Australian outback a once-wild opal mining town stands abandoned in the red dirt, four years after it was forcibly shut down
In the 1970s and 1980s, Mintabie was the largest producer of opal in Australia and one of the most feral frontier settlements on the continent.
Mintabie was deemed a staging post for drink and drugs being supplied into the APY Lands, a 103,000 sq km swathe of Indigenous-owned country where alcohol is banned.
Among the hundreds of hard-living miners who came to the fields seeking their fortunes from the region's famed black opal was a fair share of fugitives, loners and misfits. Stories were told of Chinese millionaires arriving at Mintabie's airstrip on chartered flights for opal buying sprees and some who struck it rich bringing prostitutes into town by the busload. Darker rumours abounded about bodies being buried in mine shafts, amid high-stakes gambling, drug dealing and alcohol-fuelled violence. Today, Mintabie is a ghost town where unoccupied houses have been plundered of anything valuable and overturned cars stripped for parts. The last 15 or so inhabitants drove out of Mintabie in January 2020, leaving behind homes and businesses they had built with earnings dug out of the ground.
Mintabie is about 1120km north-west of Adelaide and 485km south of Alice Springs, on the edge of the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands
The opal field remains open, at least until 2027, but without accommodation and services most miners moved to Coober Pedy or gave up. Opals have been mined at Mintabie on an industrial scale since the late 1970s and the industry peaked a decade later. From 1978 to 2016, opal worth $411.13million was mined. In 1988 there were 775 miners working the Minatabie Precious Stones Field and opal worth $39million was pulled from the ground. By 2000 there were fewer than 150 miners left on the field, removing opal worth $7.75million, and every year from 2012 costs outweighed results.
Mintabie has been left to crumble and Anangu have said they do not want the town returned to their management until it is cleaned up.
They story is MUCH longer but is full of depression desolation and abandonment photos, not opals and a discussion of the issues around the area.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... Lands.html
For my two cents...Push it all into the closest burn pit with D-9s, round off the ashes then spread the opal layer tailings on the now scorched surface to re-seed and be float forever. Naturally. After the closer to town desolation is improved as if this on mining is any different from the thousands of logging fishing you name it towns done used up.