Author and illustrator, Barbara McCondra, worked in the oilfields of Prudhoe Bay Alaska before heading Down Under to buy a black opal. Twenty five years later she still hunkers down around campfires  with miners fevered of eye and wild of heart who share their secrets, dream their dreams, and laugh at frustration. The food she cooked in outback makeshift kitchens gave her energy to labor seventy feet below ground with jack hammer and shovel. The companionship shared in those dirt floor kitchens gave her heart  to continue living the opal life. The people of the outback, the energy of the bush, the thrill of the hunt for opal and her ability to bring it alive to the reader is found within the pages of this cookbook.  She has already published the book Fire in a Plain Brown Wrapper and numerous articles for Rock and Gem Magazine in the USA and Metal Stone and Glass Magazine in Australia.The cookbook is in the mail to the printers. It will retail for 14.95 USD but is being offered for sale at a prepublication price of 10.00USD plus 2.00USD postage. within USA. The printers promise a four week turnaround. Send purchase price plus postage to Paypal account mccondra@parchedearthopals.com 8.5 x 11 inches and 70 pages in black and white with characatures and cartoons of the locals and the life and times of mining in Lightning Ridge.

I learned how to cook on this!

Opals Win Some Lose Some ( about Yowah and Koroit Opals ) is finished as is Smoke Gets in Your Eyes a Lightning Ridge Opal Field Cookbook and so is all except the cover of Fancy Patterns Opal. I am half way through Do or Die Cutting a book on Cutting Yowah Opals. So although not digging opals I have been busy. the only sore muscles from these endevors is my glutemus maximus from all the sitting at the computer! Now the task is to raise the money to pay for the printing. Sometimes I think I would be better off just writing for magazines. There is no money up front there. But then I wouldn’t have an inventory of books for future sales, just the one time payment for the article. Decisions decisions. The old recluse miners of today, as I guess did their predecessors before them, always love the mining and the finding but then their headaches begin. Decisions on valuing, partnership splits, where to hide the opal, how to cut it, if to cut it…all decisions and worry. Exactly what most had gone Bush to avoid. None of it is easy.

 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.

There’s nothing glamorous about your alternator failing you on highway 405 South at rush hour in LA. Somehow, my mind interprets mechanical failure on a bush track differently. Afterall, you may spot a show of opal in the dirt or meet one wonderful albeit crazy old Aussie bushie because of it as you take one challenging step at a time to get yourself moving again.

On a US freeway with cars screaming past, a cell phone in your pocket, AAA minutes from your rescue, it is not the same. Breaking down here  is an inconvenience, a major expense and plain ass boring. I tried to get a yarn out of the AAA driver about his life, or his philosophy of it, and all I got was a sales pitch to get me to take the car to his friend a guy who can he said, “Fix it good for you. ” I replied, “No, he won’t fix it for me since I only have $50.00 in my pocket. which means that you will just barely get paid for the tow if you take me too far.” Boy, did that stop all conversation.

Around the opal fields in the Land Down Under, that $50.00 in my pocket would buy a number of beers to slake the thirst of bush travelers who stop to give me a tow or a ride to the next town even if it were a hundred kilometers away. The garage there more than likely would be called Smash Repairs (instead of body shop) and a brother-in-law of the owner would fix me right up. I probably could trade opal partly for the work or give a promise to send the cash later. Hell, they most likely would surprise me by having heard of me…that crazy Yankee Sheila who mines opal!
Australia’s small population and bush telegraph system (gossip and yarn telling) make all this possible. OR I could camp on the roadside for days as I always take food, water, sleeping bag, a billy to boil up tea, matches, a torch(flashlight), insect repellant, and toilet paper and shovel. At any rate, out there the bush sounds are soothing, the pace is slower and less frantic. A whole richness of life thing happpens out there. Every bit of travail is a new chapter in my own personal adventure book that is my life.

But here, in the frantic must-have-lots-of-money-to-throw-at-any-problem style of life or clog another artery, I can’t reach inside and calm myeself, or even smile that watch-me-beat-this grin. Yeah, I get down in the mouth, too. Of course, three days before I was broke down on Interstate 10 with a broken timing belt. Even here in USA, my car is always loaded with opal rocks, opal books, and yes, the sleeping bag, water, food, torch but no insect repellant. The insects have the good sense here in “civilization” to get away from the poisonous, polluted terrain where Man builds his elbow to elbow nests.

Of course a lot of this “attitude” today may also be coming from the fact that one week before the breakdown on highway10, I limped from LA to Phoenix with a boiling radiator that my son Ron came down from Mayer, Az to replace with a new one. Son Ray in LA has the broke down beast in his garage in LA in parts trying to get the alternator out to replace it for me.God Bless my sons. They learned in the bush of Australia to build a carburator with a log and a piece of string…but evidently logs don’t cut it with radiators, timing chains, and alternators.

On a lighter note, I must say those souls I got to talk with on the Buckeye, AZ timing chain problem were nearly as helpful and interesting as bushies. The mechanic was honest and didn’t skin me for the timing chain and the AAA driver told a good story. With an affectionate smile, he spoke of his brother who also seems to turn his back on the “conventional” way of life over here and is an avid desert rat. Dave the AAA guy even drove by and stopped the next day to see me and wish me well as I optimistically repacked my now repaired Honda ready to continue on to LA and experience the alternator fiasco.

Hey, this is all just part and parcel of my chosen gypsy life on the road. Nell tells me to quit my whinjin” and get over it!

I awoke to the sound of wind gusting and tin flapping. An occasional clunk of wood dropping against wood punctuated my waking haze. The wind gusted with short breaths as though a man laboring up hill and giving a once in awhile long sigh. I peeked out the window. The branches of the trees jiggled their taunting dance like kids shaking their bums,” na na nanana no mining for you today.” the tempo began to pick up and  the blowing wind took on an assailant’s characteristics. The big bad wolf was blowing my house down! Later, the sky was overcast with the smell of rain in the air as I stood there in my nightshirt, holding my warm and soothing cuppa, and contemplating what I was to do today if not dig. In Yowah it is not all hot blazing sun and dozens of black flies in your sweat stung eyes.

Barbara McCondra is wearing the white shirt and the Yowah opal mining sweat bandana. Opal historian Barbara Moritz is the bejeweled one. We are having a fizzy cordial (a carbonated version of kool aid) in opal miner Johnny Kovac’s camp. Johnny is the featured miner in Rena Briand’s book Coober Pedy White Man in a Hole written in the 1970s. Johnny has been mining in Yowah for many years now. Moritz is an author and opal field historian from Lightning Ridge New South Wales. Read on for the bushies’ Christmas part.

Out of range of the camera lens (you’ll just have to take my word for it) are yards of gossamer cobwebs that Johnny had spray painted silver for the Christmas holidays. That is festive decorating Yowah opal field style! Happy Holidays, Mate!