Still on the trail of the Caper White butterfly and battling 40 odd C temps, panting like the poor birds around us. But what a place this is! I’ve found just where I want to be - if I decide to go off the grid (a little more!) and go a bit ‘feral’. Nebia Hill about 3 Km west of the Lightning Ridge township.
It’s an Ironstone ridge, which attracts lightning - a namesake you might think, and it grows lots of Ironbark trees. More importantly, I found lots of Wild Orange (Capparis mitchellii) as well as Poplar Box (Eucalyptus populnea). According to ‘what they say’, both of these trees are indicators of opal. The Wild Orange tree has a 25m root system and, in Lightning Ridge, the large Poplar Box (also know as Bimble Box) are regarded as evidence of deep roots enticed by water percolation through deep fissures, a necessary factor in the formation of opal. Sounds good to me, but there are lots of ‘hypotheses’ and folklore about good opal indicators. Who am I to question the locals?
Capparis mitchellii- the Wild Orange tree fruit. All those I could collect off the ground were dried and hard. Next time!
The Wild Orange flower - not at its best.
The leaves of the Poplar Box are soft and delicate with various shapes depending on age from tear drop, to heart shaped to round - like a Poplar! They shine as the light strikes them, quite lovely.
Opals or not, one could spend loads of time sifting through the gravel pits. Here on Nebia Hill, and probably other places, they contain petrified wood, jasper, quartz, agates, clear topaz plus plus.
It, well actually most of Lightning Ridge, is a place where there’s a healthy irreverence for convention. So the structures are whacky and colourful and the incidental and other artwork highly ‘creative’. I just love it!
The mining fields are less brutal here in Lightning Ridge than in Coober Pedy.
Looking out on the black soil plains. This is the site of the first hand dug shaft on Nebia Hill around 1900. The opal rush started c1905.
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