“In the ‘old’ days, Peter used, everything it was such a big deal if you wanted to market your stones outside of the isolated ‘Land down under.’ Not only were we further away than any other country on the planet, but where the opals came from was even more isolated”, he said. To get to these ‘outback’ regions, it could take days of travel along dusty roads in the search for white, black, and boulder opal.
In those days many opal dealers would make a yearly pilgrimage, to arguably the greatest gem show on earth, Tucson Arizona, where they measure gemstones by the square acre, rather than the carat. It was a huge challenge carting heavy containers of rough opal in drums to the other side of the world.
Opal dealers, mineral collectors, jewelers, and all kinds of Rock hounds, still make these pilgrimages. Admittedly, it is something special to travel to America and meet up with an international family of gem collectors, displaying things that you would never have believed could be found in the ground.
To quote Peter, “Lazy people like me, prefer to take good pictures of whatever opals are for sale, and post them on the net. We couldn’t believe our luck when they invented the digital camera. We had lots of trouble with the old cameras, getting the light just right to capture the changing colors of this unique gemstone”.
But that was the old world, before the internet. Now, Peter’s daughter Cindy has become the photographic expert. She has taken literally thousands of amazing shots of the endless variety of colors, patterns, shapes, and sizes of this remarkable stone. Much of her work is on display at www.opalmine.com along with lots of pics of the opal mines, and outback Australia.
