Documentary Maker Radio Special on Lightning Ridge Personality

On my blog awhile back titled Cornbread, Harmonicas, And Alkies Birthday, I mentioned Billy Capp who I knew during the Lightning Ridge, Australia years when I minded the black opal and harvested adventures for ten years there as "Eskimo Nell". A documentary maker for radio ( I won't put in her name in case she wanted to remain anonymous) contacted me asking for his email. Well, I answered that he wasn't exactly the type to have an email as he mostly lives pretty rough and is quite the character. She had done the documentary on him for UK radio and as she said in subsequent email today," My documentary went out on the independent radio network in the UK. It was also broadcast in the United States where it won a gold medal in the New York Festival of Radio." What an exciting response to one of my blogs! You never know who will be reading your writings! To see what I do and why I do it go to www.ParchedEarthOpals.com and www.outbackgems.com

Yowah and Koroit Computer Terminology

RURAL AUSTRALIA THESAURUS OF COMPUTER TERMINOLOGY*
Log On - Make the barbecue hotter*
Log Off - The barbecue is too hot*
Monitor - Keeping an eye on the barbecue*
Download - Get the firewood off the ute*
Hard drive - Trip back home without any cold tinnies*
Floppy Disc - What you get lifting too much firewood at once*
Keyboard - Where you hang the ute and bike keys*
Window - What you shut when it's cold*
Screen - What you shut in the mosquito season*
Byte - What mosquitoes do* Bit - What mosquitoes did*
Mega Byte - What Townsville mosquitoes do*
Chip - A bar snack* Micro Chip - What's left in the bag after you have eaten the chips*
Modem - What you did to the lawns*
Dot Matrix - Old Dan Matrix's wife*
Laptop - Where the cat sleeps*
Software - Plastic knives and forks you get at KFC*
Hardware - Real stainless steel knives and forks from K Mart*
Mouse - What eats the grain in the shed*
Mainframe - What holds the shed up* Web - What spiders make*
Web Site - The shed or under the verandah* Cursor - The old bloke who swears a lot*
Search Engine - What you do when the ute won't go*
Yahoo - What you say when the ute does go*
Upgrade - A steep hill*
Server - The person at the pub who brings out the counter lunch*
Mail Server - The bloke at the pub that brings out the counterlunch*
User - The neighbour who keeps borrowing things*
Network - When you have to repair your fishing net*
Internet - Complicated fish net repair method*
Netscape - When fish manoeuvres out of reach of net*
Online - When you get the laundry hung out*
Off Line - When the pegs don't hold the washing up.
To see what I do and why I do it go to www.ParchedEarthOpals.com and www.outbackgems.com

Yowah Magic Amidst the Howling Dark Wind

My good friend Gwen and I awoke to a blustery cold black predawn morning. We shuffled our groceries and hot water urn out to the truck or "ute" as the Aussies say. We had loaded the portable grill and propane bottle on board the night before along with a long table and many folding chairs. The tourism group of filmakers both crew and stars were expecting to shoot on top of The Bluff here in Yowah, Queensland, Australia. We had offered to fix them a bush breakfast Yowah style. Gwen used to have her own catering company in Melbourne area before the opal mining addiction had hit her and I am a good cook used to cooking for fourteen when I did my Outback Opal Field Tours. About four kilometers away on a dusty bush corrugated dirt track with a steady climb upward, was the top of the bluff where if the sun had been up yet you good see far to the horizon in any direction without any sign of civilization. With our flashlights we hunted up wood kindling, sticks, and logs to start a blazing red orange fire for our guests to huddle by when they arrived and for us to see by as we unloaded our cooking gear and food. As the horizon began to glow and the fire roared we had already set up and fired up the grill. We had the crepe suzette batter made, bacon sizzling, coffee, tea, and juice bar laid out and were ready to pour the crepes onto the griddle when the sleepyeyed camera crew and actors arrived shivering in the cold and bee-lined for the campfire. Our scrambled eggs bowl was brimming over and the crepes were stacked. We set out bowls of fine grained sugar, and halves of fresh lemons, along with many sticks of real butter. We directed all to smear their crepes with butter, sprinkle lightly with the sugar, and then to squeeze the lemon juice over them. This was outback cooking sorcery at its best...this fresh and flavorful and light crepe! They then added their scrambled egg portions and snatched up the bacon slices and chowed down in great wonderment that our opal field food (tucker) could be so, soo... cosmopolitan. The contrast was part of the pleasure. The sun began its wondrous display of "Sunrise on The Bluff" and the bush magic show was complete. Yup, aside from being women opal miners, Gwen and I are Wizards of the Outback, too. To see what I do and why I do it, go to www.ParchedEarthOpals.com and www.outbackgems.com

Other End of Yowah Opal Field Life

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Most Opal Field Women Amaze Me

Photo is of myself and another femal miner in Yowah. Women on the opal fields of Australia amaze me. I see them swing a pick, haul a twenty litre bucket of ironstone rocks and hoist it upon a sorting table. I watch them jackhammer out huge slabs of rock. Yowah and Koroit opal is found in hard sandstone rock. The rock must be broken and the ironstone concretions known as "nuts" removed. The nuts have to be hauled out of the mine and back to camp. There they must be broken or sawn. They swing a hatchet like implement at the small round ball in their fingers with great force to break the "nuts" open..the ironstone rocks NOT their fingers. They sit for hours either sawing using a rock saw similar to a tile saw or sitting swinging that hatchetlike tool. Often you can watch them develop a "tennis elbow" from the reptitious swinging and the jolts that connecting hatchet or sledgammer to rock results in. No complaints just the ocassional sigh. such are the tasks they must accomplish to process the ironstone in search of that illusive one which will contain a potential payday. Now in between they make cups of tea for friends that drop by, chop wood for their wood stoves, and cook up a dinner. They still must do the laundry, cut opal into stones on the cutting and grinding wheels at night and clean out the ever present dust and critters of the outback that try to take over their homes. They are full of encouragment to their opal mining husbands and partners. Most of them grow gardens and nurse the occasional injured kangaroo. They always make time to help a friend, donate time to raising money for the flying doctor, and escort a tourist about while answering the flood of questions tourists throw at them. Yes, they have firm biceps and a great sense of humor, and sun damaged skin that disappears with their wonderful welcoming smiles. Their passion for their lifestyle is forever apparent. As is to be expected, once in awhile one runs into the town fishwife or an inveterate gossip or two, but for the most part the women take people as they find them and show respect for each other's differences. To see what I do and why I do it go to my website at www.ParchedEarthOpals.com and www.outbackgems.com my son's site

Cornbread, Harmonicas, & Alkies Birthday

This one of my memories of Lightning Ridge, New South Wales , Australia back when I had mined there for ten years. I remember one particular old reprobate fellow who was much alone most days at his barstool but had an air of respectiblility and gentility about him. He spoke like a university professor. Altho I didnt hold much with drinking, I still had time for his brighter thoughts and wit. I heard it was his birthday so raced over the dirt track back to my camp. I took the plastic grocery bag down that was hanging from the rafters of my rough as guts mining camp at Pigs Hill. The sacks hung up there to deter consumption by field mice. The place had a gravel floor and a wood stove with a sink that had a bucket under it to catch the water as there was no plumbing save a garden hose leading from the 200 gallon rainwater tank outside. I had punched a hole thru the corrugated tin wall to bring in my drinking and washing plumbing. I said rough as guts... Anyway all I had for a birthday cake was the fixin's for cornbread. I added extra flour and baked it in my wood burning wood stove oven, bought a six pack of cold beer for my friend's present and drove my rattletrap car thru the meandering rough old dirt tracks in a somewhat unfamiliar terrain in one section of the opal field that I wasnt usually known to travel. I had to stop and knock on a ratty looking camp made of tin to inquire as to where his camp may be. Well lo and behold if it wasn't Billy Capp and a rhuemmy eyed friend leaning tipsily in the doorway. Told them what I was up to and they said lets make it a party.Billy used to be in vaudville in Sydney and was tiny, toothless and stringily capped in white hair with glued on opals running up his thread bare suit jacket sleeves. I tumbled them into my car and we scrubbled thru the dirt to my Mates door. We knocked loudly and when the door opened, a dark cloud of smoke billowed out and there stood "the Professor" all gangly and boneskinny and stooped shouldered in his striped bathrobe and lopsided slippers. We sang happy birthday while Billy Capp played the harmonica. Wasnt he shocked and I dont think that his look of the following extreme delight has ever been duplicated for me since. They drank beer, ate cornbread (a first for these Aussies), and we sang and laughed. I never knew any of them really well but we came close to something familial and tribal as in the Tribe of Man that day.Birthdays they come real regular but they needn't be "regular". To see what I do and why I do it, go to www.ParchedEarthOpals.com and www.outbackgems.com too.

A Peek Thru my Yowah Opal Field Window

Slept in the antique hospital bed in the central room of the house instead of the master bedroom near the loo. It is summer in Yowah Australia on the opal field and the very high peaked roof with a whirly thingamabob on top keeps it a bit cooler than in the insulated tiny low ceilinged back bedroom. As I swing my legs out of bed, I feel a twinge of pain in my lower back and roll back into bed to do a few lumbar stretches. Another ibuprophen day I reckon. I shook out my slippers to check for hidden centipedes and slip them on luxuriating in their soft fleece lining. I unlock the door leading to the back of the camp where the laundry( newely cemented because of the venomous snake found under the rug when it was a dirt floor) is. Also in the back is a door to the snug in winter bedroom located so close to the loo. Yes, I now have a flush toilet with a bath tub and shower too altho the tub base is lined with Australian gibbers (rocks) that have been sealed with a plastic latexy sealer. The laundry shows the rusty silhouettes of broke down lapidary cutting equipment against the early morning light of the prop-up-to-let-the-air-in-window. I open the loo door and note it's time to clear some of the clothes off the hooks that hang on the door...a collection of muddy bras, sweat kerchiefs, one pair of super dusty mining levis, and one silky dressy blouse with Aboriginal patterns on it. The white walls were given my morning perusal looking for the latest creepy crawlies to find my place. I keep the light on at night because of snakes and centipedes. Last night the mosies (mosquitoes) congregated in this bathroom drawn it seems by the water in the flush tank that is accessible to them because the plastic cistern tank is bowed and the lid doesn't fit tightly. A cloud of mosies had risen out of the tank during my middle of the night visit to the loo. I picked up the insect spray I keep near the toilet, apologized for the taking of life, and sprayed the walls and into the opening of the bowed tank.. Noticing the bath mat was still flat in the bottom of the tub instead of hanging on the side, I picked it up remembering the huge goanna lizard once found lying beneath it with its tail out looking at heartpounding first like another encounter with a snake. The ibuprofen pills were on the shelf beneath the mirror that sits on the shelf leaning against the wall waiting to eventually be hung. I went back into the lounge/kitchen/bedroom area in the center of the house. It is the room with the wood cooking stove smack dab in the middle. I checked the electric jug on the sideboard for drowned insects. Finding it all clear, I pressed the button to begin its boil. After taking my pills with water from the tap which comes from a hundred gallon cooling tank set high on a tower out front (the water comes out of the town well at 129 degrees Farenheit), I took my ibuprofen and made toast with a slab of cheese and honey drizzled over the lot to have with my instant coffee for breakfast. If you are an Australian peeking in the window you would not have gasped at the sight of me mixing a cuppa with instant coffee. Instant coffee is "the thing" to have and serve here in the bush of Outback Australia. That or a good cuppa tea of course. To see what I do and why I do it go to www.ParchedEarthOPals.com or www.outbackgems.com