Tales From the Opal fields – The Day Fritz was Taken by Aliens.
There are a lot of people who live on the Australian opal fields who never do any opal mining. In fact, some of them have never even been down a mine and wouldn’t know a good piece of opal from a wombat.
Imagine driving 10 hours from Sydney where most people believe life is wonderful by any standard in the world and arriving in a place where the trees don’t like to grow much more than head height, grass ( except marihuana) is an extinct herb, and where you might as well say it never rains because if it ever does it generally just falls down holes in the ground and is never seen again.
Ah! But when it rains the native flowers bloom and throw themselves out of the ground like a virgin’s bosom and the grass sprouts in front of your eyes like a head of hair and everyone, and I mean everyone, even Wayne who just grunted the day he heard the news that his first son had been born, simply explode into smiles, leap into the air and come down grabbing and hugging the first person that they see. The barman traditionally puts on a free keg of beer and turns on the coloured party lights and runs them all night long!
No he doesn’t. There’s not even any electricity and I’ve already told you that the grass is extinct. What really happens is that the opal dirt, which is everywhere you walk, since it is taken out of the mines and spread around the planet where you have to walk gets wet and turns into a kind of gooey, marshmallow mud which is a cross between epoxy resin and crap. Then everyone is just pissed off!
Yes, imagine driving 10 hours from Sydney and finding this place and thinking: This is it! I am home. I have found my place in the sun…
Well, you certainly have and in 55 degrees Celsius that sun is going to burn your bald head up like a snag on a bar-b-que and even worse if you take your hat off.
Well, Fritz is one of those non mining people. He came from Germany as a baby booming German which was understandably hell on earth and traveling via Canada where he became a Canadian he eventually found this glorious place in the sun and thought: Ja, Ich bin nicht mehr ein Berliner!
To be continued
Imagine driving 10 hours from Sydney where most people believe life is wonderful by any standard in the world and arriving in a place where the trees don’t like to grow much more than head height, grass ( except marihuana) is an extinct herb, and where you might as well say it never rains because if it ever does it generally just falls down holes in the ground and is never seen again.
Ah! But when it rains the native flowers bloom and throw themselves out of the ground like a virgin’s bosom and the grass sprouts in front of your eyes like a head of hair and everyone, and I mean everyone, even Wayne who just grunted the day he heard the news that his first son had been born, simply explode into smiles, leap into the air and come down grabbing and hugging the first person that they see. The barman traditionally puts on a free keg of beer and turns on the coloured party lights and runs them all night long!
No he doesn’t. There’s not even any electricity and I’ve already told you that the grass is extinct. What really happens is that the opal dirt, which is everywhere you walk, since it is taken out of the mines and spread around the planet where you have to walk gets wet and turns into a kind of gooey, marshmallow mud which is a cross between epoxy resin and crap. Then everyone is just pissed off!
Yes, imagine driving 10 hours from Sydney and finding this place and thinking: This is it! I am home. I have found my place in the sun…
Well, you certainly have and in 55 degrees Celsius that sun is going to burn your bald head up like a snag on a bar-b-que and even worse if you take your hat off.
Well, Fritz is one of those non mining people. He came from Germany as a baby booming German which was understandably hell on earth and traveling via Canada where he became a Canadian he eventually found this glorious place in the sun and thought: Ja, Ich bin nicht mehr ein Berliner!
To be continued
posted by Gary Hocking at 1:35 AM
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