Day 6. 15 Jun 2021
Lightning Ridge
Today was a great day exploring the surrounding area and mines. This was made easier with the novel and quirky idea of following four different colour coded and numbered car door routes to a range of different sites and attractions around Lightning Ridge. The tours are a handy way to find your away around and allow you get a feel of the town and mining life. I followed the Red Car Door tour on my bike yesterday, so today we followed three others around Lightning Ridge by car - the Green, Blue & Yellow routes. Highlights of the Green tour were Nettleton's First Shaft lookout across the plains, the nearby stone labyrinth and a house made of beer cans and bottles. On the blue route we visited an underground mine which was a great experience, and very informative. The highlight of the yellow door track, (and one of the top two attractions in Lightning Ridge after John Murray's gallery) was another underground visit, into the Chambers of the Black Hand. The Chambers of the Black Hand is an old opal mine in which over five hundred carvings have been made in the sandstone walls, forty feet underground. The carvings have been 18 years in the making and work continues. Each chamber has a theme including, politicians, Egyptian, biblical, super heroes, celebrities, dinosaurs, Buddha, Aboriginal and many many others. The opal miner turned artist, Ron Canlin, uses a jackhammer, a pickaxe and kitchen knife to do the carvings. Along the Yellow track were also great examples of the camp life and mining and a graveyard of rusting vehicles of all sorts at Lunatic Hill. What a great day, and far too many photos taken to post.
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| Nettleton's Lookout |
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| Labyrinth at Nettleton's Lookout |
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| View across the plains |
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| The beer can and glass house |
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| Inside. |
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| Mineshafts everywhere |
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| Flaura |
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| At Nettleton's Lookout |
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| More native plants |
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| more relics |
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| and more relics |
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| there may be some life left in this one. |
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