Yowah and Koroit were not my first love. I stared into a  Lightning Ridge black opal ring from age thirteen onwards. Owning it was the beginning. I was nearly 41 years old when I made my first trip to The Ridge and began to live the opal life.Writing this cookbook has brought back a wave of old stirrings…opal fever, adventure images, and adrenalin highs. I can smell the campfire at my tin shack, the stale beer and smoke of the pub where clay spattered thirsty miners filled my head with their tales of opal glory won and lost. So,  it takes me longer perhaps than most, to correct the errors my proof reading disclosed. I keep getting caught up in the memories instead of the correct hook direction of quotation marks. 

I hesitated to offend with a description of immigrants on the field. I changed the word “refugee” to “European”. I think I lost some of the feel of the time and the place and the people by doing that. I am going back today and putting it back. I don’ want to loose the authentic look and flavor of the opal fields, as seen through my eyes, by shooting for “politically correct”! I better stick to the spelling and puctuation and clarity of thought revisions.

A New York Agent said he got hooked and engrossed into the telling of my mini escapades and felt cheated because they were short and he wanted to knowmore of what happened to me. He is encouraging me to write who I was and what I did.  So, this cookbook with its excerpts of life in The Ridge and flavors of that life, is a springboard to a biography I guess.