hello and welcome back to curiosity mine and welcome back as well to opalwords where we
look at the terminology used in the Australian opal industry particularly at lightning Ridge
in New South Wales this time we're digging into a bit of inside baseball about opal dealing with a
few terms relating to the buying of a rough opal so one of the ways opal gets to us is in a bucket
form so you can buy a bucket of rough from a miner which looks a bit like this if they're lucky
enough to find a bucket load and then we're lucky enough to purchase it from them so this is quite a
big bucket 12.5 kilos and it's got some beautiful gem quality what we call seam opal on the inside
and some of it the miner has actually cleaned up we haven't gone through it properly yet
so the miners will rub it back and expose some of the colour to see what they've got and then
price it accordingly so that's a bucket of rough the next one is what we call a parcel of rough
parcel can be a kilo it could be 500 grams it could be two kilos but it's generally in a bag
and in here, this is nobby opal
and when you're buying black opal or a rubbed opal where rubs are partially cut
or partially cleaned up and in a parcel form you're looking for the king stone or the gun
stone as they say so what that means is the piece that will make you your money back or the profit
whichever whichever comes first at the end of the day this is the parcel I purchased today
it's mainly blue green with lots of crystal but there is some black and so some of the king
stones or gun stones in this particular parcel is this one the miner has already rubbed it back but
this way I know that I've secured some money back already in these pieces that have been exposed so
that's a beautiful blue green on black here you can see crystal opal so this particular parcel
has produced a mixture of black opal and crystal opal all in the one which is not unusual and also
only if you're lucky enough so that's what you're looking for and you know you'll cut your money and
then the rest is a bonus or profit hopefully but it can definitely go the other way so once an opal
buyer has their hands on a bucket of rough opal or a parcel of opal they'll grade it out grading
means to sort it out by quality your best pieces in medium quality pieces and your lower quality
pieces to figure out exactly what it is that you have and then they will make some business
decisions about it usually the best pieces will be rubbed or cut and sold at a premium and the rest
of the parcel all the rest of the bucket of rough will be sold on as potch and color or lower grade
rough this is where a runner might come into it a runner is someone who sells opal on behalf of
someone else for a commission or a percentage of the sale price I know this because I used to be
one many many years ago I used to sell opal on behalf of my family's business and as well for
a few other opal dealers a runner serves a few purposes the most obvious is that by employing
a runner the opal dealer doesn't actually have to go out and personally sell their own opal,
they forfeit a small percentage of the final sale price as commission to the runner but they get
their time back to do other things using a runner also gives the seller some anonymity because
the opal community is quite tight-knit so it's inevitable that opal dealers often end up selling
to other opal dealers and if a runner maintains some confidentiality about their clients when they
sell the opal it'll be sold at face value and any offers that might be made won't be biased one way
or another because of who owns the opal it also allows the buyer to be more honest about their
opinion of the material they're looking at because it's easier to talk frankly with an intermediary
than it is to tell the owner of a product that it's overpriced or it's not the quality that they
think it is on the other side of the same coin this also means that the owner of the opel gets
better feedback from the runner about what other stakeholders in the industry actually think about
their products and prices it's a good system and it works well and it's worked well for a very long
time using a good runner also means that your opal is backed up by the good reputation of the
runner runners can sell a lot of opal on behalf of a lot of people so it's in the runner's best
interest to do all of the hard work building up a rapport with opal buyers and building up
a network of contacts within the industry a good runner will always have their ear to the ground
and will know which buyers want which types of opal and who to see first to sell material
efficiently so a seller knows that they can tap into that resource by using a runner [Music]
thank you and on the subject of runners this is Brian Klerck and he was kind of my grandfather
Brian was pretty famous around lightning Ridge for being a bit of a mad lad and also for being
one of the most active and successful opal runners in Lightning Ridge history he passed
away in 1999 and he has a plaque dedicated to him at the entrance to the Lightning Ridge Historical
Society's museum here in Morilla Street he used to get about town in a 1980s Datsun stanza Triple
S and I have some quite measurable regrets about not having kept that car and he had some stories
about selling over one of his favourites was the time that he sold the same bucket of opal 12 times
to 12 different people for a 5 percent cut every time it sold so he'd take it to an opal buyer,
they'd buy it and they'd scoop out a few pieces that they thought were worth something and then
they'd hand the rest of the bucket back to him and tell him to sell it again on their behalf and
he'd take it to someone else and they'd do the same thing and this would repeat over and over
a dozen times in the end he had literally taken it to everyone in Lightning Ridge who could speak and
walk upright and he was worried that he'd blow his cover if he accidentally took it back to someone
that he'd already shown it to so he ended up buying what was left in the bucket of opal himself
and dumping it out in his driveway and he still ended up making a profit from the five percent
commission that he earned every time the bucket was sold I'm sure there are plenty of stories
like this from opal runners back in the 1990s it was a really strong time for the Lightning Ridge
economy so local generosity was certainly running high so that was Brian Klerck my grandfather
so that's buckets of rough parcels gun stones grading and runners quite a few more additions
to the Lightning Ridge dictionary that we're building here on opalwords stay tuned for more
because there's still a lot to come in this series we will not be running out
of strange terminology anytime soon this video was made with the help of down to earth opals
at Lightning Ridge it was special thanks to Vicki if you enjoyed this video please
consider subscribing to Curiosity Mine on YouTube and following Along on all of the
usual social media channels the links are in the description and thank you for watching [Music]