Every person who wants to have a crack
can come up here and have a good crack.
And that's what's appealing to it.
Like, there's no big BHP or whatever.
I love the mystery.
I love the idea that, you know, Mother Nature keeps its secrets.
It's like a natural miracle.
The biggest problem for the Australian opal industry
is getting supply, actually, so demand is outstripping supply.
There's a lot of luck.
It's like winning Lotto.
I never won Lotto but I found a few opals so that's pretty good.
Australia produces the best and brightest opals on the planet.
And right now the price is booming.
If this goes through maybe a couple more hands
it will command in excess of $20,000 per carat.
And we've got a 25 carat stone there.
We work in Asia, Europe and America
and it's running a split between the three.
China is a relatively new market, only a few years old.
They're learning very quickly
that it's very rare, very valuable, very beautiful
and they're happy to pay very good prices for it.
Opal is not something you can talk about,
you've actually got to get it in front of the client.
And it's got a three-dimensional sense.
You can look into the stone, it's just full of dreams, you know.
The vast majority of Australians have no idea
of the value and the beauty and the rarity of Australian opal
and how important it is in the world gem market.
But selling opals is one thing,
finding it is a different proposition altogether.
If an opal miner tells you it's not tough times,
they've either been extremely fortunate
or they're talking bullshit.
My name's Kelly Tishler,
I live in Lightning Ridge
and I've been an opal miner, on and off, most of my life.
Hopefully there'll be opal in it.
If not, chuck it out and keep looking.
I'm a third generation opal miner, so the family's involved.
Every day I go out with an opportunity to change my life
and not only to change my life but my children's life.
My husband and I, we're just a team
and we just go out and have that drive and opportunity
because you never know, one day you might just put a good hole down
and then you don't have to worry about anything else, really.
And there's no guarantee and that's the thing,
you're chasing, like, a rainbow,
hoping to find something
and that whole time you're doing it,
you might get absolutely stuff all.
Sometimes you think "God am I just crazy?
"Why are we doing this? Really?"
Like, but we don't know any different,
Basically, you're a tragic opal miner or you're not.
Lightning Ridge in outback NSW
is home to the black opal,
the rarest and most valuable form of the gem.
For more than 100 years,
it's been attracting miners from all over the world.
I come from Bavaria, southern Germany.
I had first a look around here near the area in '88
and then opal never left my mind,
so I thought I better come here and have a go.
It's like the old gold rush times.
You think "Oh, we're all 100 years too late."
And then I came here and said
"Hey, them things are still happening here."
That's what I call here the black forest.
Cos that's the timber that's in there.
A few of them in here.
And they basically are our life insurance.
They hold all the dirt up
because we don't want that coming down on us.
Once you find an opal in the wall when you dig along and say
"Oh, there's an opal here," you know,
and you get it here and you see it in the wall,
that's just a terrific feeling.
Here, I don't know if you can see, there's a little bit of colour here.
That's a very tiny little nobby.
100-million years nobody has seen that,
nobody ever has seen that thing.
But after 100 years of digging,
Lightning Ridge opals are proving to be more elusive than ever.
The industry in 2016 now,
we are definitely a transformation in our industry.
There is much bigger expectations now,
the regulations becoming stricter.
At the moment we are just a little bit down in production
because with the coal boom
we lost a lot of, at that time, the younger generations.
We're trying... a few things to attract them for mining, you know,
but at the end of the day you have to find the right spot.
The fall in opal production
has some in the industry concerned for its future.
It does look to many people
like a finite resource that might only have 20 to 30 years left.
The normal rules of supply and demand
don't necessarily apply in the gem industry.
As a stone becomes very rare, people see less of it.
It can disappear off the gem-buying map.
It's like a continuous process of prospecting,
even when you're digging underground, you're prospecting.
And you dig and dig and dig and you go broke.
You know, you need to be finding some opal.
When we get a rush, when a new field's found,
and there's a good opal production,
it just brings a whole lot of people back into the industry.
Well, without new areas to mine, all the other areas they're gone.
They've been mined out. It's not a replenishable resource,
it's not like we can go there and keep mining an area out,
once it's gone out of the ground, cut and sold, that's it.
We need more areas opened up.
But there's another major stakeholder in Lightning Ridge: farmers.
Look, the farmers that are there are under an enormous stress.
And the reason being, is that we've got a whole lot
of mining activity on private land
where they're not following the laws of the land.
Nearly all of the Lightning Ridge opal mining and prospecting
occurs on land already leased by farmers for grazing,
and for years the two groups have been at war
over access and land rehabilitation.
For me, it looks a little bit like
a scene out of the Mad Max movie, to be honest.
We've got abandoned mineshafts,
environmental issues around mullock heaps,
which is the dirt that comes out when you do your mining.
That's meant to be rehabilitated once the mine is finished,
and those things aren't happening.
So, it is a bit like the wild west.
A couple of land holders, they're just,
they're just, don't want us here.
We're not interested in the agricultural land,
we're not in the wheat paddock or something,
we're just on the ridge and on the edge of the ridge.
Earlier this year, the NSW Government stepped in
to try and ease the conflict.
It launched a voluntary surrender scheme,
offering to buy out disputed land from farmers
to make it available for future mining.
For now, though, the battle continues.
NSW farmers and the Lightning Ridge Miners Association
were back in court last week over more land-access issues.
The regulations and the laws are there.
What we want to see is better enforcement of that.
But many miners believe it's not just new land that's needed
to reinvigorate the industry.
Overseas, they're doing great guns.
But as far as field prices,
it hasn't come anywhere near what we should be getting for our product.
And it's a shame because what they don't realise is
by starving us they're going to starve their own industry.
This is where the heartbreak starts,
because you might think it's going to be a good stone
and then it just...
There's so many things that can go wrong with it.
It's really much rarer than diamonds
and that should reflect in the price.
So I reckon our opal at the moment they're much too cheap.
Millions and millions of years old, found under our feet.
Something we shouldn't be wasting
because there's not much of it left.