Lightning Ridge

Have they all been touched by the sun?There's something deliciously, refreshingly, awe-inspiringly crazy about the people of Lightning Ridge.

Meet Brian who, after reading a book about opals, arrived home to inform his wife that he'd sold their taxi plates and that they were moving to Lightning Ridge the following morning. Forty years later, Brian is still at the 'Ridge, and still pulling black opal out of the ground. (Though these days he's on wife number two, the first one having run off...with another miner.)

Or there's Gale, who was passing through Lightning Ridge on a two-month touring holiday with her husband, a senior Qantas executive. They walked into a house for sale, with no intention of buying it. But then Gale realised that she'd been dreaming about this house from the age of nineteen. So she bought it on the spot and informed her stunned husband Roger that now they were going to have to leave their high-powered Sydney jobs and move there.

In fact, pretty much everyone you meet here has a story. And, without fail, every story reveals a love for this most unusual of towns tucked away just below the Queensland border in outback New South Wales.

You'll discover the church built but never used; the medieval castle (the moat is yet to be dug). There is even a monument to the stars built by a Pole, everyone in town reckons he really was loony toons.

In fact, Lightning Ridge is so crazy that you'd be totally mad not to see it all for yourself.