Is this Australia’s last generation of opal miners?

A bureaucratic error shut 3,000 mining claims in White Cliffs and Lightning Ridge, and many fear the industry won’t recover

Think of mining and you may imagine gaping great holes such as the iron ore mines of the Pilbara or cavernous underground workings of the copper mines of Mt Isa.

In outback New South Wales, the mining of Australia’s national gemstone looks quite different. Opal mining is the home of the one-man operation, where small-scale miners prise opal from the earth often with no more than a jackhammer and a rickshaw. Opal is not kind to the commercial miners who chase defined resource targets. As one miner puts it “opal doesn’t follow rules, opal is where it wants to be”.

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