On the Road with Joe (age 1) by Lisa Upton

A hive of thieves, booze and biffo or a sparkling cradle of dreams? Lisa and her family head to Lightning Ridge and discover the mining town’s true colours

We’re on our way to Lightning Ridge because of the Williamson family. Rex Williamson is an opal miner. He comes home from the mine each day covered in dust, his beard like the back end of a dog that’s sat in mud. Rex hasn’t struck much colour, but he’s sure his luck is about to change.

“I sensed it today!” he says. “Tomorrow we’ll be on the opal, son, and we’ll be bloody millionaires!” Rex’s wife isn’t so sure. She reckons she’s been dragged to a place full of “holes and criminals and freaks”.

The Williamsons and their kids, Ashmol and Kellyanne, are characters in the novella Pobby and Dingan by the British author Ben Rice. The Williamsons’ world implodes when Kellyanne’s imaginary friends, Pobby and Dingan, go missing down an opal mine. It’s a gorgeous story and I’m dragging my family to Lightning Ridge on the strength of it. I want to know whether this little town in northern NSW is as wonderful and bizarre as it’s portrayed in the book. We’ve spent the past two months in Tasmania and now we’re heading north in search of the warming winter sun, as well as Pobby and Dingan.

Along the way we stop off in Leeton to visit friends. Joe finally has some little people to play with. He’s been three months on the road with Mum and Dad, and sometimes I wonder if he is missing out on things – the Wiggles, playgroup, the company of his cousins. At least he’s not deprived of music. Every hour he rocks out to the ABC Radio news theme.

Tonight, though, is different. There are kids and toys and space and Joe is having a ball. At six o’clock we plonk him in the bath with the girls. Within a matter of seconds my boy has disgraced himself as babies will. The girls flee the bath squealing.

When the kids are finally tucked up, we enjoy dinner courtesy of our hosts, Jeff and Michelle Ticehurst. They visited Lightning Ridge a few years ago. “It’s completely bizarre,” they tell us. “There are only about two and a half thousand people on the electoral roll and six thousand collect their mail from the post office.” What could this mean, I wonder. A transient population? A politically apathetic community? Maybe, and this is what I’m really hoping – there are lots of people on the run from the law, just like Ma Williamson described. A place full of holes and criminals and freaks.

We roll into the Ridge as the sun is setting. A sign announces ‘Lightning Ridge: Population?’ We drive down the two commercial streets, past Peter’s Opals and Sunset Opals and Bright Opals and the Opal Motel and Opal FM radio. At the caravan park, we pull in next to a group of elderly men huddled around a bunch of coloured rocks.

Within 24 hours I have met a Jamaican, a Bosnian and an American. They’ve all lived in Lightning Ridge for about 20 years. The Jamaican mines opals, the Bosnian sells opals and the American takes visitors on tours of everything opal-related.

Anybody who comes to Lightning Ridge can be an opal miner. For a couple of hundred dollars you can lease yourself a 50m x 50m patch of opal dirt and get to work digging up the sparkly stuff. Most people don’t make much money, but that doesn’t deter the dreamers, like Kellyanne and Ashmol’s old man, Rex.

Lightning Ridge’s architecture has grown up around the mines. About half the population lives in ‘camps’ on the outskirts of town. What starts as a caravan in the bush grows organically with the years. Sheets of corrugated iron sprout up here, walls of stone or recycled bottles emerge there. Most camps are surrounded by rusting, antiquated machinery. It looks like the set of Mad Max – a place where men can be men and the white picket fence never stood a chance.

One night we are invited to Bob and Donna Hewlett’s camp for dinner. Bob introduced Donna to Lightning Ridge more than 30 years ago. For a while they lived in a caravan with two small children and no power. As the boys grew, so did the camp. Three decades on it’s a home that’s original and charming and well loved and full of good books. The caravan is still there – the rest of the house has grown around it. My favourite feature is a set of stairs made of old tyres that lead up to a view over the dam.

While Joe gets to work cleaning out the Hewlett’s kitchen cupboards, Bob and Donna entertain us with tales from the frontier. Plenty of people have gone broke, but there are men who’ve made big bucks too. Of course, no story of fortunes made overnight is complete without the bad guys. In Lightning Ridge, they’re known as ratters.

A ratter is an opal thief. The opal books are jam-packed with stories of ratters, the pubs are full of men who’ve biffed them and the Lightning Ridge Miners’ Association even has stickers condemning them. Bob tells us about the ratter gangs: men with night vision goggles and automatic weapons who terrorised opal miners in the ’90s. There are tales of angry miners bombing the homes of suspected ratters.

Apparently most opal miners in Lightning Ridge have been ratted, although Bob Hewlett is an exception. He laughs uproariously as he confesses that he’s never found enough opal to steal. But at 71 he’s still pursuing his dream. Bob says he doesn’t believe in anything heavenly but he has some crazy faith in what lies beneath. Like Kellyanne Williamson, he’s been sustained by imaginary friends. 

Lisa Upton is travelling around Australia with her partner, Greg Bearup. Their experiences will be published in a book he is writing – Adventures in Caravanastan. Volvo and Jayco caravans are sponsoring their trip.

Open Road July/August 2008