The Australian Town Where People Go to Disappear: Lightning Ridge

Описание: There's a town in outback New South Wales where the official population is a question mark. The census can't count people who don't want to be counted.

Lightning Ridge sits on the only place on Earth that produces black opal — the rarest gemstone there is. That prize built a town like no other: miners living in camps under names they invented, fortunes pulled out of forty-degree dirt, millionaires who look like swagmen, and a main street where the first rule is that you don't ask what someone did before they came to the Ridge.

But the Ridge has a problem the town doesn't like to talk about: the miners are getting old. The opal is getting harder to find. The young won't come — the dirt is too hot, the odds too long, the world too comfortable. This is the story of Australia's strangest boomtown, the obsession that built it — and what happens to a town of hidden people when the last generation of diggers hangs up its picks.

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