Find Your Own Australian Opal
Anyone is able to visit the Mintabie Opal Field and find genuine Australian opal. It is Australia’s gemstone, it makes the perfect souvenir and is fun to search for and find. Mintabie Opal Field has extensive areas of mullock heaps around the abandoned open cut mines. Most of these were mined using bulldozers which ripped the opal from the ground and often mixed it in with the sandstone mullock making it impossible for the miners to recover at the time. Noodlers, as they are called, scratch through the sand stone heaps and often are able to find good quality Australian opal stones that the miners have missed. Don’t worry about not knowing what to look for. Pick up anything that is smooth and shiny, wet the surface and if you see colour, you have hit it! I started noodling when I first arrived at Mintabie after working for the Aputula Aboriginal Community at Finke. I gradually progressed from noodling to exploratory drilling and then to underground mining. I made a very scratchy living but loved every minute of it. I also supplemented my income on the Opal Field by working for the local school and by managing the township water supply for many years. I was then lucky enough to be asked into one of those rare and lasting successful opal mining partnerships in open cut mining. Sadly the good claims ran out, Mintabie's opal became hard to find, the expenses became prohibitive and the Australian opal market took a dive. My partners and I have all moved on. The memories we have shared will live forever. The absolute thrill of chipping carefully away at the sandstone to uncover opal of awe inspiring beauty, brilliance and fire while you are 20 to 25 metres underground has to be experienced to be believed. A couple of times my partners and I found opal that looked so good in the rock we left it there, went and bought beer, then came back to sit and watch it for a while. After that comes the apprehension, the suppressed excitement and the challenge of preparing the rough opal for sale. The sale process can be a relatively simple affair or an agonising, heartbreaking experience, depending on whether the buyers like your opal or don’t show any interest at all. In the old days all transactions were in cash. Many millions of dollars changed hands this way without written contracts or legal agreements. An Australian opal miner’s greatest asset is his word. A good miner is as good as his word. His partners will trust him with millions of dollars worth of opal or cash. Naturally there is a great thrill in splitting the proceeds of a parcel of opal into the pre arranged percentage shares which everyone works by. One parcel of opal that my mates and I had found weighed 400 ounces in total. We sold it for $75,000 and because the scales were still on the table we decided to weigh the stacks of $100 notes. We found we had swapped 400 ounces of opal for 16 ounces of money! Opal mining produces a story a day. Watch for some of my opal mining yarns, coming soon!
Two of my partners digging opal at the 75-foot level in one of our claims.
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