Highlights
- Hong Kong opal buyers descended on the outback South Australian town of Coober Pedy during the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s to deal directly with miners
- Rough opals would be taken back to Hong Kong to be cut in factories and sold to consumers predominantly in the US
- Locals say they mixed well with families from Hong Kong who later became residents in the town despite language and cultural differences
Two-thirds of Coober Pedy’s 1,700 outback residents live underground to escape the scorching summer heat, but don’t ask Wilson Cheung to live his life upside-down.
"Due to the Chinese superstition, usually only the dead stay underground,” says the former opal miner who arrived in the town in 1990, following in the footsteps of generations of Cantonese migrants who came before him.
It’s estimated that dozens of opal buyers from Hong Kong descended on the South Australian town each year from during the ‘70s through to the ‘90s, circling mines to buy rough stones to cut and feed thirsty markets in the US and Japan.
Locals recall “rooms and rooms” at the above-ground motel, Opal Inn, that were accommodated by fly-in and fly-out Hong Kong opal traders who stayed for as long as their short-term visas would allow.
Wilson Cheung first arrived in Coober Pedy from Hong Kong in the 1980s. Source: Supplied
Among them, a minority would make Coober Pedy their permanent home and in Mr Cheung’s case, one of a handful who’d try their hand at digging for their chance to strike a fortune.
‘Not suited to Asian bodies’
After migrating to Coober Pedy with his wife and two young children in tow, Mr Cheung would continue buying opals to send back to an opal cutting factory in Hong Kong.
He made the transition to opal mining in 1995 following years of “listening, watching and learning” from fieldworkers and hearing stories of one who found a million dollars worth of opals after a week of prospecting.
“I began thinking it was easy path to becoming a millionaire,” says Mr Cheung.
Findings are usually kept secret around town.
Miners are said to inconspicuously walk around in “ratty old shoes and drive old utes” while holding “a million dollars in the bank,” one local tells SBS Chinese.
Rare opal fossil with no standard market value. Source: Tony Wong
After investing in machinery to build a mine shaft, Mr Cheung took out a land lease and permit to start prospecting for opals.
He partnered with miners from Hungary to work underground and with whom he trusted, while he “looked after the machinery” from above ground.
Chinese, physically, we’re not strong enough. Opal is very heavy because it's a rock. Most of the miners in Coober Pedy are from Europe. Europeans are very strong.
Coober Pedy lured waves of Hong Kong opal traders
Hong Kong-born and Coober Pedy-based opal trader Tony Wong says mining for opals is no easy task.
“It’s very difficult work. It is also a very risky job. You need to be physically strong. Imagine the old days when miners needed to go down 70 feet, up and down to look for opal. It’s like finding a needle in a haystack,” he says.
He recalls two young Chinese men who tried opal mining until one of them lost a finger operating machinery in the shaft, ending their short-lived venture.
“This has happened many times in the field,” Mr Wong says.
Mr Wong witnessed the waves of Hong Kong migrants fly into Coober Pedy after arriving himself in 1975 as a 19-year-old. 
Though many Hongkongers only ever traded opal, he says there were around half a dozen who mined them.
Chinese opal trader Tony Wong (centre). Source: Tony Wong
He believes the ingredients to finding a “jackpot” are “plenty of luck and hard work”.
Chinese attracted by ‘chance’
Similar to prospecting for gold, mining for opal is thought to be straightforward and inexpensive.
Other than to seek fortune, they’re what attracted 40,000 Chinese immigrants in the 1850s and 60s to the Victorian goldfields and a smaller rush in the twentieth century to Coober Pedy.
Mr Wong says it's difficult to draw a comparison between the two waves of Chinese migration to Australia.
“The Chinese now who come here to find opals are well educated. If they don’t do opal mining, they can always find a job in the city and other ways of surviving,” he says.
Prospecting permits cost $92.50 and claim fees range between $50 to $100 depending on the land size.
Jacqueline Boland from Coober Pedy’s mining register says there are three to four surface levels in which you can find opals.
Opal mine in Coober Pedy. Source: Tony Wong
“You only need a pick, shovel and sieve to start searching at shallow levels,” she says.
For the more serious miner, a few thousand dollars allows one to dig and search for opals 30 metres below the ground’s surface.
“Any further and you start hitting mud,” she adds.
Mr Cheung says although Chinese people like him are always driven by “chance”, he was not particularly lucky.
“I think the best I found was probably $500,000 a year,” says Mr Cheung, who quit in 2005 after two years where findings did not cover operating costs.
He says this amounted to very little compared to others who found “millions”.
“For the Chinese, once they know where there is chance, everybody goes for it,” Mr Cheung says.
A town of many ethnicities
An opal mining town since 1915, Coober Pedy has a long history of immigration on its sandstone grounds, more recently attracting people from Sri Lanka, Pakistan and India.
Mr Cheung says he has never once encountered racism due to Coober Pedy’s multicultural population – said to comprise of 47 nationalities.
Opal mining’s low start-up costs can attract unskilled non-English speakers, according to Ms Boland.
Hong Kong opal traders would stay at the Opal Inn whenever they were in town. Source: Tony Wong
“We’re a big multicultural population. Everybody is a minority, everybody comes from somewhere else and everybody gets along,” says Ms Boland, as somebody who grew up surrounded by Hong Kong families in the community.
I remember as a kid, they would drive up to a yard, beep their horn and ask, ‘any opal, any opal?’
Buyers and sellers would haggle over the opal’s price, but according to Ms Boland the latter would never get what they wanted.
“The opal miners were getting the short straw of the deal,” she says.
Despite the bartering, Ms Boland recalls the friendliness of big groups of Hong Kong traders whom their children she went to school with.
Coober Pedy, the mining town where many people live underground. Source: Nelson Tse
“You had a few others who would come and go. They were gamblers on the weekends with the horse races,” she says.
She says locals would sometimes fly to Hong Kong to meet up with the opal traders and be taken out for dinner and shown around town.
COVID pandemic sparking a resurgence in opal prospecting
The pandemic has brought tourism to a standstill in Coober Pedy, but it hasn’t stopped miners from selling opals to buyers overseas.
Sellers are turning to e-commerce, even scheduling video calls with potential buyers to show them different opals they’re willing to sell. 
“It’s always nicer to see the opals in person, to see the true colour. But if the buyer needs to buy opal, they will,” says Ms Boland.
Crystal opals. Source: Tony Wong
“This business is based on trust,” says Mr Wong, who has still been able to sell opals throughout the pandemic to loyal customers overseas.
Since the ‘90s, secretary of the town’s historical society Jenny Davison says prospecting activity boomed after the Second World War, particularly among European refugees displaced by the second world war.
“A lot of them are no longer mining. The people who had families left when their children went to high school,” she says.
Like many isolated towns outside of Australian cities, there is the issue of attracting a young workforce.
“There are not a lot of young people. It’s a gamble,” says Ms Davison.
Ms Boland says opal values haven’t increased to support the rising cost of mining opals.
“Even to this day, miners are still getting the bum end of the deal,” she says.
If there was an upside to all this, Ms Boland says it’s that the onset of the pandemic has sparked a small comeback in prospecting activity.
There are currently 400 registered claims in Coober Pedy.
Everyone knows everyone in Coober Pedy, say locals. Source: Nelson Tse
Businesses are shutting down. People can’t find work. They’re scaling back and returning to opal mining.
Mr Wong believes there are still plenty of undiscovered opals in the ground in Coober Pedy even after 100 years of mining activity.
“In 1975 people were telling me Coober Pedy was finished. No more opals. People never believe. They were always thinking no more opals because people had been mining for so many years. But opals can still be found,” he says.
Outback isn’t for everyone, but for others, opals are forever
Although there’s been some reverse relocation to Coober Pedy, not everyone is enticed to live in a town that “doesn’t change”, at least above ground.
Locals say to escape the heat in the summer, they bunker underground where they barely get to see the light of day.
But the climate for the rest of the year is normally sunny for the town where, according to Mr Wong, “everyone is nice to everyone”.
As a self-confessed opal hoarder, he saw the opportunity to open his own business selling opals to US-based customers early on.
“I love opals so much. Without Coober Pedy, I’d still be working in an opal cutting factory [in Hong Kong],” he admits.
Although many of Coober Pedy’s residents are involved in mining, others mostly work in the tourism, hospitality and government sectors.
After a short hiatus from living in Coober Pedy after the opal industry went from boom to bust, Mr Cheung and his wife were lured back - this time as operators of Opal City Chinese Restaurant.
Wilson Cheung inside his Chinese restaurant Opal Inn. Source: Wilson Cheung
They’ve spent the last 10 years serving locals favourites such as Mongolian beef, honey chicken and sweet and sour pork to customers.
Mr Cheung’s two grown-up children are in Adelaide and have no intention of taking over the reins of the restaurant, nor do they have any interest in getting into the opal business.
But for some, opal fever is forever.
“If I went back to when I was young again, I still want to mine opal,” Mr Cheung says.
“I enjoy the mining opal because when you find money - you are very happy. Especially if you find some big opal, good colour, you love it.”
