Rising Costs And Little Luck Cuts Australian Opal Mining

Belinda Goldsmith (Bangkok Post Monday 15, 1995) writes:

Opal obsession has kept the outback Australian town of Coober Pedy, the world’s largest source of opals alive for the past 80 years, but rising mining costs and low reserves of luck have caused a dramatic slump in the amount of mining in recent years. Situated on the edge of the Simpson Desert, 850 km (530 miles) north of Adelaide, this remote barren town has thrived on miner’s dreams of stumbling across a rainbow of opal in the underlying sandstone since 14-year old Willie Hutchinson found South Australia’s first opal in 1915.

Coober Pedy and the nearby fields of Andamooka and Mintabie still produce about 70% of the world’s and over 90% of Australia’s, but the industry is waning. “The town has been in a depression for the past few years with not much opal mining going on,” said Peter Caust, Chairman of the local business association which organized an opal festival this month to celebrate 90 years of mining.

“It’s more expensive to mine now with diesel prices higher and more machinery used and this has put a lot of people off.” Opal mining has always been a one man business with individual miners staking a claim to a piece of land and having exclusive rights over any finds in the pegged area. The industry in Australia peaked in the 1960s and 1970s when a wave of new immigrants into Australia, armed with picks and shovels, came to seek their fortunes in Coober Pedy and the town’s population boomed to 8400 in 1974.

Now only 600 of Coober Pedy’s 3500 residents are miners. The use of drills, winches and tunneling machines has replaced picks and wheelbarrows. Tourism has overtaken mining as the main industry in one of Australia’s last frontier towns.

Voola Ingram from the town’s tourism bureau said up to 150000 people a year visit Coober Pedy to see its unique underground homes, or dugouts, gouged out of sandstone hills to create homes away from the summer heat of 47 degrees Celsuis (117 degrees Fahrenheit). The South Australian Department of Mines and Energy estimated that in 1988, opal worth A$21.3 million was produced in Coober Pedy with all opal used either in jewelry or other luxury goods.

But Yanni Athanasiadis, who came to Coober Pedy as a miner in 1972 and now runs the Umoona opal mine and museum, said it was impossible to estimate the exact level of opal production as miners never talked about their funds and even tried to cover up their incomes so any estimates were purely guesses. “The only way you can tell s by looking at the size of someone’s dugout or their boat,” Athanasiadis told Reuters.

Athanasiadis estimated it cost A$400 a week to mine after initial cost of A$2500 to stake a claim, drill a shaft to reach opal bearing rocks and a tunnel to mine. Opal, a form of silica, chemically similar to quartz but containing 6-10% water is found in veins in the sandstone up to 25meters (82 feet) below the surface.

The color in precious opal is caused by the silica spheres diffracting white light and breaking it up into spectral colors ranging from red to orange, green and blue. Color determines the value of opal, with black opal the most valuable and non-colored opal, known as potch, worthless.

Miner-cum-tour guide Gary Orvad told Reuters that opals are an obsession with most miners. “To many, opal is at its most brilliant when it first reveals its color from the wall,” he said. “But there have not been many finds here lately. We desperately need a new field,” he said. Coober Pedy has produced the world’s largest opal rock, Jupiter 5, which was discovered in 1990 and weighed in at 527 kilograms (11.6 lbs) or 26350 carats. Hotelier and opal buyer Robert Coro, whose family arrived in Coober Pedy in 1963, said miners are a certain breed. “You have to have a certain affinity for mining and for opal to stay in the industry but I think the main attraction is the money,” said Coro, who stopped mining shortly after losing the top of his middle finger in a mining accident. “But the main attraction was and always will be that opal miners work for themselves and is answerable to no one else. What other industry, gives you that freedom?”