Bright stars in a rugged land

The hot, dusty opal fields around Lightning Ridge in outback NSW have traditionally been a man's world. Now The Weekly meets the women who have been struck by opal fever.

- MANDY MCKEESICK

Everything about this land suggests life here is hot and hard. The summer sun blazes from an enormous sky, nudging the temperature into the mid-40s. The heat shimmers and radiates off white ground; toasts skin. A willy-willy stirs grit and whisks it about aged mining machinery and through camps made of corrugated iron. Kangaroos doze under scant shade.

Yet despite appearances there is a siren’s call here. The world covets opal but the most revered is black opal – a kaleidoscopic play of rainbow colours set against a contrasting dark background – and one of the few places in the world to find black opal is at Lightning Ridge and its surrounding fields in northwestern NSW.

Black opal creates an incurable fever. It has captured hearts and minds since it was first discovered here in the 1880s. But among the heat and dust of Lightning Ridge there are other gems – the women of the opal fields who call this place home.

“I was six weeks old when I landed on the Glengarry opal fields [70km south-west of Lightning Ridge] with my family in the 1960s,” says third-generation opal miner Kelly Tishler, 51. “My grandfather got opal fever and never left, so we all followed. We lived in a camp, which was a tin dwelling with no running water, no electricity and dirt floors, but we had a wonderful life and got up to so much fun and mischief.”

With three younger brothers and four younger male cousins, Kelly was the ringleader, fossicking for opal for pocket money and inadvertently learning about the opal trade.