Lucky Miner

I’ve been mining for 25 years and although times are generally pretty hard about two months ago I found an opal worth about one quarter of a million dollars. I’ve shown it to everybody and no one has seen opal like this. I’m still celebrating! I got into mining when I was young. Our family had a friend who would go to Coober Pedy on his holidays and one time he brought me up here with him. Talk about once bitten! We went out that day and found opal, cleaned it up and sold it for $3,500 cash. Then, guess what happened? We went straight down the boozer and drank and gambled all night. The next day we went down to the mines again, and again we found opal. I returned to Adelaide and built a generator and came back to CP for two weeks. I found my first opal straight away (again about $3,500 worth) and I was hooked. Keep in mind that wages back then were like $140 per week. So, I went back to Adelaide, built bigger and better machinery, came back to CP and didn’t find one speck of opal again for two years. It’s a pretty cutthroat business and people have been known to do some pretty dirty stuff. The way mining works is that you first dig a bit of the ground to ‘prospect’ it and judge whether you want to mine there. One time I was doing this in a totally unclaimed area and I immediately saw a whole lot of colour coming up. I jumped in my car and drove as fast as I could to where all my stuff was so I could grab my pegs to stake the claim. As the other miners saw this happen they knew I had found something good, so they all followed with their pegs and raced after me to the new spot. If anyone had arrived before me they would have staked my area and it would have been theirs. By the next morning there were 50 claims in this area where the day before there was nothing. I brought in an excavator and in about six weeks found about $30,000 worth of opal and that area has since been named Reynolds Ridge after me. Another thing people do is to keep an eye out for good sites that are about to expire. If the owner forgets to renew their claim, even by a day, the new guy will put their pegs just inside the existing ones and pay their $150 to the Mining Department and the spot is instantly theirs. This kind of thing is definitely not the norm but it does happen. Mining is really expensive these days due to petrol prices. I spend between $1,500 and $2,500 in eighteen days on diesel alone. It’s made it impossible for a lot of people to mine. For me though, it’s a way of life. Here I don’t have to beat traffic lights and crowds. You do push yourself though, always striving for that next opal. I leave home by 5:15am and if it’s not too hot I’m back only after sundown. You sort of lose the plot, but you need to remember that if you don’t push yourself, you’re unlikely to find more opal. PAUL HAROLD REYNOLDS