It seems appropriate somehow. Here we are, coming in to Lightning Ridge in our trusty old DC3, itself a veteran of many conflicts with the elements, as jagged lightning streaks flash from the bottom of the mushroom-shaped cloud a little to the north of us.

Bruised and black at the top, the base of the massive cloudbank leaks an unseasonal shower over the red and grey land, but our pilot skirts it, and we land safely, just minutes later, into the last of the rain.

It's appropriate too that this town was named for just this sort of celestial caper, some saying that the iron stone ridges actually attract the lightning bolts. The aboriginals, of course, knew it first and named it 'the place of the hidden fire stick'.

Regardless of storms, another flashing light has gripped people who have trickled towards this far northern-NSW town ever since opals were first discovered in the 1880s. This is the fire in the belly of the stone. The red and blue, purple and green flames that leap out as you turn the rock. The 'colour' that every miners yearns to see, and that few do.

This is the lure that keeps people burrowing around, downwards and sideways for months, years. It takes casual visitors and turns them into people possessed who scrounge the hard pallid earth for decades. At the end of it, who knows? Maybe all they'll have to show for their troubles will be a few white mullock heaps around their diggings. Or maybe they'll have made their millions. Few admit to finding anything.

It's a funny place, 'The Ridge'. Like mining towns everywhere the sub-text of intrigue and distrust, scandal and straight-out crime is there. Some whisper of people who robbed others of their booty, and whose bodies were dumped down a disused mine shaft, never to be exhumed. Or is that simply a disguised warning, said loud in the bars, just to warn off would-be assassins?

Like most mining towns too, this is the place that attracts dropouts and those who want to remain anonymous, people on the run or eccentrics like Amigo whose hand-built stone castle is now on the local tour bus's itinerary. It's truly magnificent, but a grave for his worn-out sneakers in the garden gets as many photographs as his carefully constructed drystone towers.

The population of the town is, in fact, hard to determine because the people are so scattered, so reclusive, so plain unwilling to be counted. The estimate is around 2800, yet the supermarket is immense and the other shops, banks, hotels and accommodation points to that number being the just the tip of an iceberg, with much of it, quite literally, buried underground.

Lightning Ridge bills itself as ' the home of the black opal' found only in the area, yet there are several varieties ranging from pale white through vivid blue and green to fire-streaked boulder opal, and many shops in the town sell every size and shape you could desire. The quality varies enormously too, and few except the dealers who visit regularly can quote the price. Signs pop up in shop windows 'Canadian Buyers here today' and those who have hit opal come discreetly to get their findings evaluated and sold.

And strangely, in this hot place, the miners working at a constant 22C, sometimes feel better off than those on top where the temperature can crank up to 52C. For this reason a few year's ago five local girls banded together to raise money to have warm artesian baths constructed on the edge of town. An evening soak in these therapeutic waters is a must now, for many people after a hard day's work. 

Nor is The Ridge a pretty town. The diggings have pock-marked the landscape so much there are multiple warnings of the danger for people wandering around. Many sites post warnings: 'No Fosiking' (sic) says one, and the preferred material for these signs are doors and panels from clapped-out vehicles that dropped dead negotiating the bumpy local tracks. 'Rubber nails', aka disused car tyres, take on new life holding down wilful sheets of loose roofing iron on homes that you can be sure never saw a building permit.

And why should they? In Lightning Ridge the mine is the most important thing. Why else would you battle the heat and flies and uncertainty? Why come here, to begin with?

It's as if the vision of that fire in the stone begets a burning fire in the belly that just won't go out. Ever.

Have you visited Lightning Ridge? What did you think of it?

Sally and Gordon Hammond traveled to Lightning Ridge with Dakota National Air.