It's Like . . .

Cunnamulla, QLD - Australia

Yes, I'm still finding pretty opal. I'm helping a friend at his mine and another friend is open cutting my mine - he'll soon be at the opal level. When he gets to the level I'll be bouncing back and forth between my place and my friend's place hopefully seeing lots of gorgeous colors and patterns.

Many people ask me "what's it like being an opal miner?" . . . hmmm, can be a bit hard to answer . . . . A few days ago after stopping by the local artesian bore to take a shower in wonderfully warm and very soothing slightly minerally water, I had a chat with a fellow miner. I had been staying at his camp, but was going to be moving to stay at another camp. I told him I was going to stop by his camp to pick up my stuff. He told me to remember to throw some wood on the fire (it is winter here and gets chilly at night). He has a small fireplace (which I built a few years ago out of corrugated iron and about a thousand rivets). The fireplace does keep things comfortable. I stopped by his camp, collected and broke up some firewood as the sun was getting lower. Of course during the process of breaking the firewood I encountered a couple rather large and unhappy to be disturbed spiders and a bush cockroach (looks like a USA cockroach (often referred to as a palmetto bug) with a tribal shield on its back). Once the fire was started in the fireplace I sat back on his small couch for a few minutes to make sure everything was ok, let out one of those sighs that is produced at the end of a day of hard work and watched the flames. The door to his camp was slightly behind me on my right side. I had left it open and the red glow from the setting sun was filtering in as was a slightly cool, but very fresh breeze. As the sun dropped below the horizon, my thoughts halted, I was embraced by that wonderful stillness that occurs in the bush, punctuated only by the delicate and pretty songs from a couple of nearby birds and entranced by the beautiful smell and dancing of the fire in the fireplace. That's what it's like to be an opal miner.