Word: opalized
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...with pick, shovel and explosives--backbreaking work. Now there are circular drills mounted on caterpillar treads, which lurch forward chewing at the soft rock, making a hellish racket that changes to a shrill glass-crunching scream when the teeth hit a pocket of "potch" (the gray waste near opal that runs in veins through the matrix). These drills are 4 ft. in diameter, and they create vaults in the tunnel roofs--beautiful, arched Romanesque spaces cut in the creamy pink-veined stone. It is troglodyte architecture: dense, theatrical and intensely moving, infinitely better than anything built above ground...
...after we shot some walk-and-talk through the tunnels, during which I was interviewing John about luck and hardship and the resemblance between opal mining and professional gambling (which is very strong), the director Chris Spencer asked John to go at a face with the air hammer. He obligingly did, talking meanwhile about how he hadn't found an opal in weeks. Then he asked me if I'd like to have a go. I took the air hammer and started ripping some sandstone off the wall. And then, suddenly, there was a shrill noise, somewhere between a crunch...
Indeed, it can't be. The big mining companies--which the opal miners hate, along with the government and the cops and the tourists--have never devised a profitable means of detecting or extracting opals. It's handwork. You just stake a claim and start digging. Sounds simple, but the trouble is that none of the conventional geological spotting techniques apply. Opals don't react chemically with the stone matrix around them, and they don't leave the "traces" that gold or diamonds do. So it is a matter of digging and digging and digging. One spot is as good...
...miners with whom I spent a night drinking in the clubhouse of the Coober Pedy Golf Club are full of stories like this--you can place an explosive charge, set it off and find that you've blown a quarter-million bucks' worth of opal to worthless dust, the texture of coarse sugar, because you didn't know it was there. Then you just go and have a drink...
...Opal is a silicate fossil. It comes in "shells"--seashells originally, for this whole desert was once a vast inland sea--or more rarely in "pipes," or tubes, the fossilized backbones of archaic freshwater squid. The paradox of the stuff is that although it is so brilliantly colored, it has no color of its own. It's a solid diffraction grating, and the color you see is the light dispersed and reflecting through it. John Smart, the miner in whose mine we filmed, waxes reflective about this. "The opal's just a bloody illusion. It's as though...