Tall tales and true from The Ridge

By RW

I once spent eight months at Lightning Ridge supervising power line maintenance and found it a delightful and friendly place – provided you obeyed a few unwritten laws. The main ones were: 1. Don’t ask personal questions, and 2. Don’t move in uninvited. When I learned to open and close my mouth at the right times I was readily accepted, and some of the friends I made and the characters I met I will never forget.

Here are a few of the stories I heard during my time at The Ridge; most of them are true in every detail and one or two were ‘coloured in’ by the colourful character telling the story.

MY MATE DAVE

I became firm friends with a bloke called Dave. He was well into his senior years, but he would only admit to being 76 years young. Dave was a great yarn spinner and never told the same story twice, which is why he was keenly sought after by tourist companies to point out interesting features around the opal fields. Though some of the stories he told those tourists were nothing short of outrageous.

Dave was a survivalist, badly wounded in the Second World War, he lost half his stomach but this didn’t stop him getting about like a bloke half his age.

When a couple of yokels broke into Dave’s house (probably believing he had money or opals hidden somewhere) and found nothing they, hit him on the head with an axe!

“Bloody hell mate, you were lucky to survive that,” I said in disbelief.

“Yeah mate,” he said, “I suppose I was lucky. I had two axes on the wood heap and them silly bastards picked the blunt one.”

WHINGE AND WIN

Two mates arrived at the Ridge looking for a claim. They eventually acquired a lease that had been let go by the previous, owners who were two short blokes, each about five-foot-six in the old measurement. The new leaseholders were an odd couple, one was about five-foot-six and the other was at least six-foot-six. The drive in the claim was 10 metres long and suited the shorter of the two, but the tall bloke was always whinging because he had to bend his head all the way down to the work face. Shorty finally got sick of his mate’s constant complaining and said, “We’ll take a foot of dirt out of the floor and maybe that will shut you up.”

It did. They won £120,000 worth of opal from the floor.

THE LITTLE PILE OF STONES

A good friend of mine was lucky enough to hit the jackpot. He and a couple of his mates opened up a new field and the first shaft was a beauty. They had only driven about three metres when they took out a parcel of gemstones and I was privileged to be included in the celebrations. After a few bubblies with tinnie chasers, it was time to view the spoils.

A small plastic bag was produced and the contents tipped into the middle of the kitchen table. To me it was an anti- climax – I could have covered the lot with one hand.

My mate looked up and asked, “Whadya think of that lot?”

To which I replied, “To me it just looks like an ordinary pile of rocks.” Everyone went quiet and my mate said, “That little lot should cut about a $120,000.” By now readers will have correctly guessed that what I know about opal mining would fit inside the brain of a dust mite.

GETTING OUT QUICK

One of my favourite stories was told by a bloke I met several times. He lived “somewhere else” and when you asked him where (which you should never do at The Ridge) he would point in the general direction of “away”, but he visited the Ridge whenever he got the chance. He had spent many years in the area, shearing for tucker money then opal mining until the money ran out. Here is the story in his own words:

“Just after the war (WWII) I mated up with a pommy bloke who I met while I was working in a shearing shed. He didn’t seem a bad sort of cove, so I suggested we head to the Ridge and do a bit of gouging after the shed cut out.

“When we arrived on the fields there was a lot of talk about the Germans who had been on good opal but pulled out when the roof of the drive kept coming in. It was certainly too dangerous to work but my mate suggested we write to his dad who was a mining engineer back in England and ask his advice.

“Sure enough, back came the details of how to prop the roof to make it safe. We worked our little freckles off putting in those props and when we reckoned it was safe, we started to mine the face. I swear that mine had a jinx on it. We were onto a bit of nice colour when the roof came in again. We made it back past the props but the fall knocked the first three out.

“We gave it a miss for a couple of days and then went down for a look. My mate wouldn’t venture past the last prop so I went on to see what had happened. It looked like there was a large fault in the level and the roof was hanging suspended. I picked a couple of nice looking nobbies from the wall and was looking for more when my old mate yelled ‘Look out, she’s comin’ in again!’”

At this point I interrupted his story with “Shit, you would have had to get out of there in a hurry!”

“You’d better believe I did,” he replied. “I was thirty feet up the shaft before I realised the ladders were on the other side.”

THE NEW CHUM

Shortly after World War Two, a young bloke turned up at the Ridge with the rights to a claim that hadn’t been worked for years, and, to the best of local knowledge, wasn’t much good when it was being worked.

He camped on the claim, took a look down the mine and decided he didn’t have a clue what he was looking for. The lad had a bit of nous and he volunteered his labour for free to any miner who would take him on, provided they taught him about opal.

He worked for the old miners for a couple of months then started to work his own claim. In three weeks he won £50,000 worth of opal, sold the claim and was never seen at the Ridge again.

NEVER BORING

I once met a bloke at the Ridge who was a Pommy born in South Africa, educated in America, living in Australia, buying opals in Australia for a West German firm who flogged them to Russia. Cop that lot.

You could say the Ridge is a little bit different, but never, ever boring.