The Great Opal Robbery

Archie Kalakorinas writes:

1959 was a year of change in Coober Pedy, the opal mining settlement, deep in the heart of arid Australia. A Greek miner by the name of George Christianos had gone there with his family to try his luck and, indeed, he was lucky. At the eight mile, right under the main road to Alice Springs, he struck it rich—during the first afternoon a twelve gallon bucket full. And it was all opal! One had to look hard to find even an ounce of dirt in that bucket. And the quality! All the world knows now. Eight mile opal is the standard against which all Coober Pedy opal is judged.

Stories about the Christianos riches spread fast. In the Greek coffee shops throughout Australia men talked and talked until the lure become too great. They left their coffee shops and trekked in vast numbers, as the gold miners did a hundred years before, in the hope that they too would strike it rich. Next door to the Greek coffee shops in Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney were the Italian fruit shops. It was impossible not to notice the activity and rapid evacuation of the coffee shops and when the reason became known there was another trek—of Italians with their spaghetti—in the footsteps of the Greeks.

I met one of the Christianos boys in Lightning Ridge—a thousand miles from Coober Pedy. He told me about his father’s opal and I did not believe him until one day I saw it for myself…the effect was electrifying! I could not rest until I had abandoned my career in medicine and joined the ranks of miners in Coober Pedy.

We struck it rich too—in a minor sort of way. And life was good. It seemed that nothing could disturb the joys that had come our way.

But one of my partners was a hungry man. He wanted riches far greater than anything we had found. He wanted this so much that he decided to take what was not, according to the strict letter of the law, his.

The story was strange from the very beginning. One year before, a Greek prospector had commenced a shaft. It went sixty feet through ‘hard blue’, a type of rock renowned for hard work and no opal. Lack of money forced him to abandon the shaft and return to the city where he could at least earn enough money to buy food.

One night he had a dream—that shaft was full of the most beautiful opal! In the morning the dream did not fade. He churned it over in his brain until he could keep it to himself no longer. With a shaking hand he sat down and wrote a letter to Coober Pedy.

And that is how I came to stand at the opening of that shaft one hot and dusty summer afternoon when the flies were bad and nothing else dared to stir in the isolation of the desert. To me, with science as my god, the dream was crazy. I walked away. I walked away from the greatest fortune ever to be seen in Coober Pedy.

It was another Greek, Mad Mick, who set the wheels in motion. He believed in dreams. So why not? His shaft bottomed on a rich but isolated pocket. With a smile he came to me with his prize. ‘Who is mad now, Doctor?’

Of course, Mad Mick’s next move would not be based on science. He read the coffee cup and the reading startled him to activity. The main run of opal (according to the cup) was in a claim next door. How he tricked the owner into giving up that claim is a masterful lesson in psychology. But when Mad Mick changed his brand of coffee he obtained another reading that sent him into another train of clever psychological ploys to obtain possession of another claim altogether.

Meanwhile, a real man of science was at work—a Greek of course—by the name of Bill. He was working in an adjoining claim and the indications were all there, as clear as night and day. The opal was in the claim that Mad Mick’s first coffee cup suggested. And so another round of psychological tricks was commenced in order to gain possession of someone else’s claim. But things went wrong—very wrong. Finally, in desperation, Bill attempted a daring and deliberate robbery. He was caught red handed with a bucketful of opal.

At this stage the law stepped in. Miners fought with all the cunning they knew to gain legal ownership of the claim with the main body of opal in it. One lucky neighbor who was just on the tail end of the run bottomed on a million dollars and his eye lit up as he said that the opal got thicker and richer as it ran into the disputed claim.

That is how one of my partners entered the picture. He teamed up with eight other men and drove a long tunnel underground into the disputed claim while other miners argued their cases in court. He reached the opal and that where fate played its hand against him. But that is the story and I must not spoil it. And that is how I left Coober Pedy, at the point of a gun with several fractured ribs and a ruptured kidney.

In the end the benefit was mine. I lived with Aborigines in their camps on the fringes of the desert and learned another way of life. Opal is certainly beautiful and it can haunt the minds of men but there is something even more beautiful in those who love it for what it is, not for what it can buy.

Archie Kalakorinas
Australia