Opals, galahs and peaches

and a story from my dad

GALAH. issue 10 Invention | peaches with gochugaru and feta

I am sitting here in a white adirondack eating sliced peaches. I’ve added a sprinkling of gochugaru,¹ a slick of olive oil and a crumbling of feta. It’s a riot of colour, so cooling and sweet with a kick of heat. The tones match the cover of the magazine I’m reading. It’s a summer moment. 

The magazine is called GALAH,² named after the pink and grey cockatoo, a species known for adapting to many habitats across Australia. It’s the perfect name; the magazine covers the colourful stories of people from regional Australia. I love it when GALAH flies through my mailbox, for the artwork, the escapism, the quirkiness, the writing, and the access to the smart voice of the editor and founder of the magazine, Annabell Hickson. 

I met Annabelle in 2018 at a workshop in Orange, New South Wales. This was after she had moved from the city to a pecan farm with her husband and children but before she had hatched her podcast with Gillian Bell.³ Annabelle had a conspiratorial sparkle in her eye, an enthusiasm for life, a curiosity, a sense of wonder. We talked about podcasting, storytelling, the making of the massive indoor structure she had erected for the workshop made of giant quince branches, her insatiable passion for photography and her struggle to balance creativity and the domestic. It turns out Annabelle can bring all her passions to life. You’ll find it in her podcast, Dispatch to a Friend, in her book, A Tree in the House, and now in her magazine, GALAH. I lap it all up.

I’ve left past issues of the magazine around our cottage for summer reading. My sister Sally inhaled an early issue over coffee one morning, then passed it on to our dad. This explains why he walked into the kitchen last week in his gardening clothes, keen to talk about a story he had read in an Australian magazine starring an opal miner and volunteer undertaker named Ormie. My dad is a retired family physician, an amateur geologist, a storyteller and a writer. He loves quirk and he loves rocks. (When my mom and I visited Australia in 2018, all he asked that we bring him back was a hunk of Australian opal). So I asked him to capture all of this enthusiasm in a story. A few days later, he sent me this. 

An Unexpected outcome of an Article in the Australian Periodical GALAH  

(There are recipes for healing. Could story telling be one of them?)  

by Ian Cameron

My wife Bev has Palindromic Rheumatism. Periodically she will have an  acutely inflamed joint in her body. The pain is excruciating and incapacitating and thankfully lasts less than 24 hours. Recently her right wrist was the target and her symptoms were compounded by swelling and pressure on her median nerve causing numbness and tingling. 

One of our daughters subscribes to GALAH, a beautifully produced  Australian periodical that captures the beauty, grandeur and quirkiness of  Australia. Another daughter had read Issue 01. limitations and said, “Dad you  have to read, Life and Death at the Ridge.” So I did and told my wife about it  during her agony. 

The article -written by Annabelle Hickson with photographs by Hugh  Stewart - is about Lightning Ridge, a small town in North-West New South Wales where the annual average temperature is 28 ℃. The story begins with a funeral conducted by the Volunteer Undertakers of the Lightning Ridge Funeral Advisory Service. This is when we meet Ormie Molyneaux, an opal miner, and the other volunteers - his brother Joe, Nifty Martin and Tom Urquart. I’ve known some Molyneauxs in my time. Their motto is En Droit Devant (straight ahead). At the grave site there is a problem: the casket won’t fit in the hole. The grieving family wants closure and Ormie goes straight into problem solving mode. 

While the reader waits for grave site resolution, Annabelle tells us about life in Lightning Ridge. It’s all about small isolated communities and the magic of  making do. When the nearest undertaker is two hours away you create the  Lightning Ridge Funeral Advisory Service. When you drive hours in the  sweltering heat to a public swimming pool you raise money and build your own pool and get the Prime Minister to provide matching funds. Lightning Ridge is big enough to get things done and small enough to care.  

Annabelle doesn’t disclose and I might be on wobbly ground here, but I think Lightning Ridge might have got its name from an epic event involving death. Perhaps people sought shelter under a tree during a thunder and lightning storm on the Ridge. Then, zap. Ormie and his volunteers weren’t around to look after the death and destruction. That’s the bad news. The good news is that Lightning Ridge has great geology, opals! Opals are a silica gel that seeps into sedimentary rock then hardens. Precious opals have iridescence and a high quality black opal goes for big bucks. Just outside the Visitors Centre at Lightning Ridge a visitor was specking (Australian lingo for looking down) and found a black opal worth $20,000.  Annabelle indicates that there is a lot of specking in the opal fields and for the most part the mining is low tech: pick, shovel, wheelbarrow, excavator, dump truck. The miners live in adjacent “shanties, shacks and slapped together structures” with the occasional “genny” (generator) but amenities are in short supply. Danielle, a lifelong resident, grew up in the camps and has a “real affection for the local landmarks”. Hugh has taken her picture sitting on the rusted fender of a vintage truck slowly returning to its original mineral state. Danielle is dressed in black with a florescent green vest, an iridescent black opal in the midst of the higgledy-piggledy camps.

Hugh has photographed the wall of a beer can house that features a window of two coloured glass bottles, museum quality. Hugh has also immortalized Pete Cooke’s workshop. Pete is a welder and he washes earth for opal on an industrial scale. His dump truck carries 20 tonnes of earth and he can wash 90 loads and find nothing, then a load will have a quarter of a million dollars in it. On the walls of Pete’s workshop you see his welding artistry - order from chaos.  

There is an old saying, “where there’s muck there’s money,” and if you look  beyond the muck and money of Lightning Ridge and are keen observers like  Annabelle and Hugh, you will find gems of humour, creativity and a functional community. 

At this point in recounting the story, I asked Bev what she thought Ormie  looked like. ‘‘He is tall, wiry, wears a hat,” she said, “and has leathery skin and  chapped lips.” Bev was so close. Ormie had a trimmed moustache, an untrimmed mid-chest curvilinear beard as if the wind is constantly blowing from his left to right, he smiled with his eyes and wore flip-flops. 

Back at the grave site Ormie had found a tool with “more purchase.” He removed the problem handles from the casket then lowered it, with elevator precision, down the six feet to its final resting place. 

Bev felt better with the telling of the story and after a while all that lingered of her Palindromic Rheumatism was a slight tingling in her right middle finger and the memory of a wonderful Australian story.

1. I buy gochugaru, a Korean chili powder, via Flavourfull.ca

2. Galah - it’s an investment to have this beauty shipped to Canada, but it’s worth it.

3. Remember Gillian in this episode of The Food Podcast? Gillian and Annabelle’s podcast was called Dispatch to a Friend. You can listen to archived episodes over here on Spotify.