OPAL - AUSTRALIA’S NATIONAL GEM

Extracts from
OPAL ~ the gem of the Never Never                                                 
 

By T.C Wollaston in 1924
Founder of the Australian Opal Industry

Opal the Gem of the Never Never.

Australia is the home of the opal. It is only what one might have guessed, for it is just that kind of home, with the ample room and happy conditions, which enables such a radiant child to grow and express itself in so many different ways.

The Australian Opal is the child of the desert and delights in the Never Never, for in its babyhood it paddled there in the shallow inland sea, which covered our vast interior like a silver quilt, romped with the periwinkles and mussels and fan shells, teased the sick lizards and captured their knuckle bones when they died, and took possession of the little harsh sponges and the grey fluted corals, and slipped into every odd corner or snug little holes where the waters were drying up and where the sun could be sipped at leisure.

It grew, grain by grain, to the music of dripping water, true and unhurried, building up a glad-eyed responsive nature like a babe does. And just as any active babe when its sleep is over
kicks off its clothes in its love for freedom, any vigorous opal, feeling the clear warmth through the thin covering of earth, could, in its brisk impatience kick of the quilt, and bask on the burning ridges, where one may catch the gleam of its starry eyes now and then as one rides through those grey solitudes.

Wherever the Greeks and Romans obtained their opals they were evidently rare. Marc Antony, it will remembered, coveted so much the opal ring of Nonius, to give to Cleopatra his sweetheart, that he banished Nonius for refusing to part with his treasure.

All down the Ages opal has stirred the artistic souls and passionate hearts of mankind, the Romans as well as the Greeks being lovers of “this miracle and Queen of Gems” as Shakespeare hath it in “Twelfth Night”. It was not only known centuries before Christ, but prized above all other gems, and became the symbol of hope and purity.