A LAP OF CORNER COUNTRY

You gotta be joking, I thought, as Dick stepped across the hole and stood on the rickety wooden stage. But he wasn't! “Step onto the platform and then across to the ladder,” Dick advised, as we looked down into the hole we were about to descend into. “It’s only about 40 feet to the bottom and there’s a light down there,” he continued, before promptly disappearing into the earth. I was left on the edge trying to placate my fears of small, dark, confined places.

When I’d finally mustered the courage and headed down into the underground, I found myself on the small jackhammer used to break up the soft clay at the head of the mine.

Here, the mouth of what really is a giant vacuum cleaner laid in waiting, whistling and sucking the clay debris to the top of the mine where it was dumped straight into the back of an old truck.

“I pulled some good opal out of here a few weeks back,” Dick’s voice echoed from the semi-dark, above the noise of the vacuum cleaner. Whether he was just saying that for my benefit or whether it was the truth I wasn't sure,