Lightning Ridge

Fast facts

• Hardworking opal-mining town where Outback characters and stories abound
• 758 km north west of Sydney
  

Why go there

Lightning Ridge, a place of larger-than-life characters, thrives on the largest deposit of black opal in the world. While it might seem like a typical Australian country town at first glance, you soon leave the motels and picket-fenced houses behind you and arrive in perhaps the most unusual suburbs in the world.

There are houses made of beer bottles, a full-scale castle built by hand from local boulders, both drive-in and walk-in mines, a cactus nursery with more cacti on display than anywhere else in Australia, and an 18-hole golf course with dusty brown ‘greens’ and rock-strewn fairways.

Visitors can ‘noodle’ through the piles of old clay and stone left over from the diggings, searching for chips of opal left behind by the miners that came before them. Or you could join the miners in the local outdoor bore-water baths, and wallow in hot sulphurous water under the stars.

Further out through the scrub are the wild-west opal fields of Coocoran, Grawin and Glengarry, with their rash of above-ground mining equipment and holes in the ground. You can find some unusual bush pubs around here, like the wooden sheds that make up the Glengarry Hilton.

Don’t miss

• The clotted-cream-coloured mud plains of Coocoran, made from slurry discharged discharged from giant agitators used to separate rocks from clay
• The Easter goat races, where competitors sit in carts pulled by goats and race up the main street
• Watching a local opal cutter as she crafts a precious stone out of a lump of rock