Original subtitles

Just checking a few levels under here.

Just try and see what's going on.

What's going on back there, guys? You going all right?XAVIER: Just looking around.

Yeah, if you get a chip, no big swings of the peg.

Hear that?

There's some opal in there.

But I've got to get that out without this coming down on my head.

Everything's all so loose.

Could just come down and kill us in an instant.

Yeah, I'm chipping straight at the level now.

This brown stain is pure level.

We just want to see if there's some colour in here.

Like, we're finding bits and pieces

but we want something that's substantial.

Yeah, there's little shells in here and that just seam just in there,

you just want to smash it hard.

Get out! Get out, man! Get out.

NARRATOR: The brutal Australian Outback,

the driest inhabited land on Earth.

The worst drought in recorded history

finished about two years ago,

and since then it hasn't stopped raining.

REPORTER: Residents in outback SA

have spent the last 24 hours stranded

with flash flooding cutting off access to entire towns.

Those that call this land home

are drowning under record breaking floods,

bringing new dangers to the sodden earth...

LISA: Whoa! Whoa!JOSIAH: Whoa!

..and the opal hunters are on their knees.

JOE: The opal industry is ruthless.

The only old timers that have survived it,

you know, they've been through hell.

This is third degrees down through here, mate.

It is brutal.

For any hope to keep this way of life alive,

a new generation must join the hunt.

Stay!

Bringing new blood, skills...

No matter what we find, we're going to get some value out of it.

That's good. ..and cutting-edge technology...

JOSIAH: Straight from the miner into the metaverse

and into the palm of your hand. Yeah, we got it all.

..seeking the rainbow gem.

Gram for gram,

opal can be worth over 500 times more than gold.

OSCAR: That's been there for over a hundred million years

and I'm the first person to ever see it.

Oh, I could talk for days.

The hunt is just once you start, you just can't stop.

Oh, ow.

LUCA: It's an incredible feeling. Just beautiful.

SOFIA: Wait, whoa! ISAAC: Oh!Zac.

Livelihoods and the future of opal industry...

TY: Oh! Snake!

..rests on the shoulders of those tough enough to face...

Woo-hoo! MARK: Oh, no!

..Australia's...

This is unreal! We did it!

..last...

Oh, yeah!

..frontier.

It's big and it's cheesy.

LISA: Woo. JOE: Woo-hoo!

Look at that!

# ASH GRUNWALD: Money

# Money

# And fancy clothes

# Telling you what to do

# To get back where to live

# Where's too cold

MARK: Ah!

What went down?

You right? You right, mate?

That was scary. You didn't get

any hit you or nothing? Na, just my eyes.

Dust in my eyes. Just dust.Yeah.

What the hell happened?

I just picked, man.

One pick -What, the roof come down?

Coober Pedy,

the opal capital of Australia...

..where extreme heat and severe weather events

have forced residents to live underground,

and in the vast opal fields surrounding the town...

Oh, there we go, there we go. Oi, that's a tunnel, man.

Ah, you, ah.

Hey, hey, hey.

The Blacklighters, Mark I'Anson,

stepson Xavier, John Nassar and Paul Coon...

That is a pretty big tunnel, hey, going straight up the guts.

..have finally broken through to 15-metre deep tunnels,

after an epic year-long mission

to access old timers' workings

with an open cut mine.

JOHN: Hooley dooly.

It's just a little worrying that

they might have already taken all the good stuff out.

To come out empty handed would just, um, shatter us.

We have to find the opal,

so, no opal,

whole cut worthless, wasted a year.

It's been over 35 grand now that we've invested in this cut.

We've really got to start seeing some results pretty soon.

Yeah, I know.

It definitely affects the families when we don't find opal.

To support everyone, the pressure's just massive.

Yeah, our season target this year, you know,

we did set it pretty at 350.

We're nearly halfway through the season

and we're not even halfway to the target.

You know I've been underground lots and lots of times,

and personally it's, you know, it's not that safe in there.

JOHN: It probably goes down 15 feet there.

Pulling one little rock out...

and the whole roof comes down on you.

A lot of people die like that.

You got lucky you didn't bury yous -

yourselves, mate. All of yous.

I don't know if we should tell mum about this one, ay.

XAVIER: Probably not. Probably not. Definitely not.

Get the hell out of there. We got work to do. Yous...Yeah.

..clowning around in there.

I think we that's why we work aboveground.

Opal can make you do crazy things.

I reckon we've got to come through here

so we can get up to there with the digger.

A little bit uneven.Yeah. Little bit dodgy, you know.

Can't afford to break that machine. Need to get you in there doing that dig.

Yeah, I don't really want to do fill this up

cos I want to put the dirt in this hole, so.

Oh, man, it's not that bad. It's a digger. She'll be right.

Right. You're the operator. I'm the spotter.

Get this opal.

Andamooka, a tiny off-the- grid mining town,

population... 300.

The Mooka Boys, Matt and Cozza Kathagen,

are navigating a mountain of old diggings

at Horse Paddock opal field.

Yeah, spotting for Matty as he comes through.

Little bit of a gorge, you know, ah.

Their plan, to move their 20-tonne excavator

through an unstable, washed-out gorge

to work on a long-neglected claim they believe is still holding opal.

Ooh, come on. You can do it.

Ooh.

Come on.

Is that all right?

Ooh.Whoa! Whoa!Hey.

After their main claim was swamped

by "once in a century" flooding...

We're not going to be mining here this season. Surely.

The Mooka Boys have been forced to comb through other old claims,

in the hopes of digging up enough opal

to keep their operation running.

We're always keen to work and that.

We more than put the effort in.

If you haven't got the money, like, you know, you can only do so much.

So, yeah, we got the drill out, ah, trying to prove another whole new field out there,

but unfortunately, that's probably going to take some time.

So it's important that we try and find a bit of opal

while we're doing drilling as well.

And it turns out, I'm going to be a dad for the first time,

ah, which was a bit scary to hear at the start considering,

ah, the lives we live out here.

So a lot of extra added pressure for me.

We've all got families to look after,

we've got maintenance on the machinery to pay for, diesel.

We have a lot of irons in the fire to keep this show going.

Now, they're looking to mine at Horse Paddock,

an 86-year-old opal field

at the edge of the Andamooka township.

The problem with Horse Paddock is, there's been a lot of claims here,

a lot of dozer cuts, but at the same time

they've left some small patches of virgin ground

which we're calling pillars.

The Mooka Boys will split forces...

I'm happy with this pillar here if we're going to go for it and he's happy.

..with Matt and Cozza digging out the pillar they hope contains opal

and Leif operating the exploration rig.

I'm going to go get the drill ready,

and yeah, bring it up, have a look around.

The whole idea of all this was to keep it working.

Exactly what I thought. He'd be on the tipping point.

Well, now he's stuck.

The steep gradient and extra 1,400 kilograms of the digging buckets

has the excavator over-balancing.

Should have built a road. I'll just have to drop the buckets.

We wanted to get in here and start digging

as soon as we could and...

now he's dropping his buckets and carrying on down here, so.

I'll chuck the buckets behind me.

All right.

Come on! Come on!

Ah! Buckets, man.

Stay up! Stay up!

Come on!

You had one job.

One job!

LES: Hey.MATTHEW: Whoa!

ROD: I lift the arm up, slew her a little over,

put her on the truck,

bring her back, then we'll lay her back down

and do the body of the crane. Get it up here as well.

There's so many things can wrong in doing this.

Righto. Up you go. Steady.

On the isolated,

century old Grawin Opal Fields

in New South Wales, the Bushmen...

It ain't easy, but then nothing in opal is easy.

..Rod Manning, Les Walsh and Ty Gross

are about to haul their four-tonne super digger

out of failed mine, Slims.

Careful of that hole, Mick. MICK: Yeah.

They've enlisted Rod's cousin and fellow miner,

"Grubby" Mick, to help.

He's had Parkinson's for about 15 years probably.

A long, long time.

He gets by. He just works with it.

He's a bit of an inspiration, really.

The Bushmen are using their 60-year-old junkyard crane,

Arnold, to do the lift.

We called it Arnold after Arnold Schwarzenegger.

We reckon it could lift anything. It's made up out of bits and pieces.

Sometimes it has a mind of its own. It'll just start winching.

I've got to keep one hand on the rope,

make sure I can feel it's creeping or not.

TY: Hang on! Hang on!

LES: Come down.

Down? Yeah, down.

What are you doing?

Oi!

Hold it there, mate.

Hold it!

Don't know what happened then.

It's an awful lot of pressure on me at the moment.

This whole thing's just cost a fortune.

We've expanded big time with our operations

but with expansion comes way extra costs...

and way more problems.

And now having to shift claims.

This mine here, Slims, just hasn't worked out

the way we thought it was gonna.

We thought we'd find a lot of money down there

but all we've done is...

found heartbreak.

The ground's just way too hard to dig.

We can't dig down there so we got to get it out of there

and go to another claim.

The Bushmen have been forced to fork out $8,000

to buy another claim, Conrod.

If we don't find colour within the first week,

we run out of diesel.

This has to have some colour in it.

Also got the drill working.

Seven kilometres northeast

on an old opal field, Dead Dog Gully,

rookie team member, Ben Moses,

is on the hunt for a new opal patch

using their exploratory nine-inch auger drill.

This field was abandoned about 40 years ago.

We're hoping they've left a bit here for us.

We've just got to keep on scratching along to get some money.

The season target this year's 360 grand.

We've got to have everything go right to reach that target.

When you get this pressure, the only answer to it is finding colour.

We got the digger and everything loaded on the truck.

Now all we got to do is take her over to the new claim.

Righto. We're going to load the body up now and, um, send it down to you

so just make sure you're well and truly out of that way.LES: OK.

You get no second chances with this stuff.

Just stay clear of that hole as much as you can.

Righto. That's it.

Now just make sure I'm lined up pretty good.

Probably go over a bit.

Out of the way!

Righto. Just stay clear.

Ah, Jesus.

MARK: All right, let's do some ripping, man.

PAUL: Yeah, so we got the ripper out now.

Putting it to work and it seems to be

chewing the dirt pretty well, so...

feels like it's cutting through it like a...

a butter knife.

Deep in their open cut 15 metres down,

the Blacklighters are tearing through the walls

of an abandoned, underground mine

in the hunt for opal rich dirt to feed their processing plant,

Opalzilla.

It's a 1984...

Hitachi 20-tonne excavator.

A butt load of hours on it. It's got no-

doesn't have a door, front window.

Hopefully, we can find that big pocket

before the... the old girl the bed.

Oh, we're probably up around 35 grand now to get to this point

so it's a massive cut, massive job.

Yeah, it's getting hard to sleep at night now.

All that money out, nothing coming in.

Each time we go down,

the ramp's starting to get steeper to be able to get out the hole.

I've been working with the boys for,

yeah, around a year, year and a half.

I've definitely learnt a lot and...

I guess I'm the designated dump truck driver now.

Starting to get pretty deep there.

Righto, Xavvy mate, take that one away.

it's not liking it.

Whoa!

Xavier, you all right?

I told you just to build a road, mate.

Far out!

Oh, look at that!

Ah.

The Mooka Boys are battling to get their excavator

and spare buckets through a washed out gorge.

Ah.The wrong angle of the dangle.

Sort of got it.

Ah, it's crooked. There you go.

Exactly what he's doing now is what I wanted him to do to start with.

Drop the other two buckets, make himself a road

and just drive through here.

Matt and Cozza are trying to reach a patch of virgin opal ground

deep in the Horse Paddock opal field.

Here we go.

We've all taken pretty big chances,

ah, to be full time opal miners.

We've all chucked in our regular jobs

and regular pay checks for this.

Been a pretty big struggle so we really need to find opal

if we want to do this full-time for the rest of our lives.

No one's ever had a look at this ground before

so, ah, yeah, we'll get into it and, ah, see what we can find.

Looks like you broke through to a tunnel, mate.

A tunnel? Definitely looks like it.

That could be all of our virgin ground already gone.

Have a look, man. How big is it?

It looks about two metres deep.

Definitely not what we're looking for.

It's filled back in with some mud, so.

Yeah. We got one more chance.

If we dig on the other side and they've actually left us a little bit of material.

But our chances just got a whole lot less.

All right, so, now we're on this southern side of this, ah, pillar here.

Just going to go take it straight down in a trench

and see if that tunnel either ended,

or... it's opened right up

and there's no point digging here anymore.

No signs of tunnels yet.

Hey! There's your tunnel, bro.

Is it? Yeah, right there at your heel.

Yeah, so if you have a look down on the wall,

you can see the very clear difference

between the virgin ground on this side...

and all this old spoiled dirt on that side that we dug down on.

There's also a nice vertical run of gypsum coming up the wall.

You can sort of see it leaching out.

In a really rich opal ground,

the opal can actually push vertically up as well.

Yeah, no opal. No opal.

As long as we get past that tunnel in the floor,

we got a good chance of some opal here. Oh, whoa, buddy!

You're leaking oil, bro! Oh! Heaps.

Whoa, ho, holy hell!

That was about as close as it gets to a catastrophe.

Out of the way!

MICK: It's as close as you'd want to get.

Oh, Jesus.

Thank goodness I wasn't right over that hole.

It's hit the side of the hole and led,

otherwise that was freefalling all the way to the bottom.

TY: How close is that, Les, to just flying down there with us.

Well, it's only a split second...

if it falls straight...

and by the time it registers in your mind,

there goes your - your couple of seconds.

It'll kill you.

That could have been so - so serious,

it really could have been the end of us.

The legs have just caught on the top of the shaft,

enough to lean it into the blower to hold it there.

So someone was looking after us.

The Bushman's old crane, Arnold,

has failed, catastrophically.

Nothing's happening.

It's up to 75-year-old bush mechanic, Les,

to figure out what went wrong.

I don't know what we'll do. We have got no alternatives.

This is it.

Yeah, it sounds like something's probably gone inside it.

Mick.

With no way of lowering the digger,

the team can't mine their new claim.

It's real big stakes here, you know. This is our season.

If we don't make it this season, we're .

I don't know what we'll do.

Now the alternative is...

trying to find someone that's got a crane that'll lend it to us.

There's not too many cranes on the field at the moment

for some reason.

TY: We can't win a trick, mate.

COLIN: You're kidding me. MATTHEW: Oh, man.

What the hell?

Oh!

A hydraulic hose break on the Mooka Boys' excavator

has stopped their dig dead.

Must have got a rock jammed between the hitch and the boom.

Look at that ding!

That's - oh, that's right on a fitting too.

Ah.

We're going to have to give Leif a call now.

Team leader and heavy machinery mechanic, Leif,

has been drilling for opal on another part

of the Horse Paddock field.

Ah, we got issues, bruv. Ah, we just done a quick hitch line.

Yeah.You'll have to come and have a look.

Sorry because we're dead in the water here right now.

I'm just up with the drilling and that.

I'll shut it down and I'll bloody come and have a look.

Drill out of action and excavator down,

the Mooka Boys' desperate search for opal

to continue their season is floundering.

We're all at the end of our budgets, so...

every time that we need to fix something, it's sort of all we have.

What a mess. Yeah, sorry, man.

All I could see was oil and Cozzy screaming, man.

I didn't even see a rock in here, like.Yeah.

Having something break down, it always throws you back a bit,

and takes me away from what I'm doing up there too, so.

We might have to make a hose, ay.

We might be able to tape one of these screw on fittings here,

put onto this one.

So we ended up finding a few old hoses

that were left lying around.

Cut the fittings off and making one like that.

Really handy having a heavy diesel mechanic on board of our team.

What's the old saying in the opal field? Was it guess once, cut once?

Fingers crossed, boys.

I'll stand to the side, ay.

You beauty!You beauty! Digging the floor out now.

Mooka Boys are back in business.

We're looking for some slabs of concrete here

cos we're getting a fair good price for it at the moment,

up to 2,000 bucks a kilo if, ah, it's good cracking material.

It's got all these tiny little pebbles,

they're level stones and stuff,

all stuck around the silica base.

Known as concrete,

the porous sandstone is made up of quartz granules

of differing size and density.

As the softer granules dissipate over millions of years,

the minute voids left behind are impregnated by silica rich water

to speckle the sandstone with opal.

You can see the level?

There's part of it back up here. You see the, like...Yeah.

..comes here and it comes drops down.

Is that the level right down there? I don't know but it's weird.

We need that colour, man.

MARK: Oi, careful, man. What just happened then?

Your front wheels just locked up and slid.

Yeah, it's a bit heavy this one, ay.

Sixteen-year-old Xavier is struggling to drive

the Blacklighters' fully-loaded ten-tonne dump truck

out of their 15-metre deep open cut mine.

Just roll back slowly to the mound

and give it some more berries and try again.

Righto.

Don't really want to be messing up next to this hole here.

Give it the berries, mate.

That's it! Give it the berries!

Hey! Hey, hey, hey.

I don't think it's easy for anyone to just get in and drive that truck,

reverse it down into an open cut.

It's a hard job.

Even a seasoned campaigner and he's just nailing it.

So proud of him.

We're putting all the dirt through Opalzilla that we get out the cut.

If there's opal in the dirt, Opalzilla will 100 percent find it.

Opalzilla is the Blacklighters' custom-built noodling machine

and the main tool they use to hunt the white opal

Coober Pedy is famous for.

Just chuck the dirt in one end.

The belt chucks it in the trommel,

goes onto a shaker deck, through the darkroom under the lights.

Travelling on a belt in the dark room,

ultraviolet lights react with the water content in the opal

causing it to fluoresce.

Are we going to get anything? Are we not?

This is the time where we're going to find out.

All opal from colourless potch

to rare high value red fluoresces equally

so every piece needs to be checked for colour.

Ah, today it's going a little bit slow so far

but definitely changing in the cut a little bit

so I think that's good signs.

Oh ho! Here we go.

Starting to thicken up now.

You beauty. Here we go.

Ooh! This is a thick nice patch chunky material here.

Starting to liven up. Are you there, Mark?

Yeah, mate, I'm here.

There's some absolute chunky bits coming through.

Oh, you beauty.

Ended up with pretty well a full bucket.

Pretty impressive day.

PAUL: What's he got here?

Looks heavy. Does look heavy.

Ooh.

Some absolute chunks came through, man.

Look at that, man!

The Blacklighters have a parcel of crystal opal,

featuring the full spectrum of colours.

It's in the rough and there's 480 grams.

It's got some reds.

Ha-ha! Whoo!

Some absolute chunks.

Ha-ha! Whoo!

Well done, guys.

That could be 100 grand there. That could be crazy. I -

Don't put numbers in your head now. No, settle down.

Settle down. Till we tumble it up... Hey...let's settle down.

Let's get this home and in the tumbler, ay.

That's a win, man. That is a win.

Woo-hoo!

BEN: Hello?

Hey, Benny. We're up the , mate.

We've just had a major catastrophe.

Everyone's OK. I nearly dropped the, ah, digger down the hole.

Oh, hell. You're kidding?

She stopped on top of the hole, mate, but geez it was close.

And that's why I'm ringing you. Yeah.You said the other day

you run into another driller who also has a crane. Yeah.Who was that?

Mate, you know the old Frenchman over there, Jacques?

Oh, Jacques the Frenchman? I'll give him a buzz

and see if I can get onto him and get him over there, mate, ASAP.

After a near tragedy

when the Bushmen's vital four-tonne digger

almost plummeted 14 metres.

MICK: Good news.

LES: Yes, it looks like we got a helping hand.

Had a bit of a win.

Good old Jacques.

He's going to do the job for us.

That's all right. We pick him up. But you're lucky.

Oh, very lucky.

I was just about to lower it and she just started freefalling.

He's got a crane on the back of his truck

so he's going to lower it down for us.

Righto.

Yeah, a bit of a relief.

I didn't know what we were going to do then but, yeah,

it's gone from a catastrophe to being OK.

That's it.

It's on its way down, all right.

Yeah, Jacques saved us.

That could have been a season ender for us.

TY: Well, here she comes.

Whoa! Whoa!

Having good people on the fields.

When you got a problem they come and give you a hand

with no notice. It's pretty good.

This is the last part coming down now, boys.

Hook up all the way, mate. Hook up all the way.

You beauty!Yeah.

We finally got our digger assembled underground.

Everything's good up here.

Everything's good down here.

Time to find some colour.

Pay some bills.

First scrape of the new claim.

All the drama we've had, but here we are.

We're doing it.

Hydraulic-powered super diggers

are capable of 30 tonnes of breakout pressure...

Ground's good, actually.Yeah, look- good looking ground, ay.

..able to gouge 60 tonnes of dirt a day from the mine face.

Tiny bit of trace. Yeah?

No colour in it, but just starting to come in there.

It's really good looking ground. We got a little blow over there.

A blow's like a... a gas explosion, I suppose,

it's happened deep, deep in the ground.

It's welled up and come up.

It's generally a reasonably good sign

for, ah, opal alongside it.

Come on, baby.

Show us your pretty colours.

Here she comes. She's got a little bit of colour there.

Little bit of colour? Yeah.

There's a nice bit of green.

Exactly right. Like you said, near that blow.

It's only very thin but it's... it's trace

and it's right where I thought it might come.

COLIN: We're finding a level here.

MATTHEW: Yeah. And here at the floor.

So get you to take out at least another foot, two foot.

Yep.

The Mooka Boys are finally seeing signs of opal

at the Horse Paddock claim.

LEIF: Haven't seen a good looking level like this for a while, ay.

There's a real thin layer of potch here on this rock.

It's not much to look at but it's a good sign that the ground's active

and it's doing the right things to create opal.

Here we go.

Oh, yeah, she's got colour in it, boys.

You got colour? Yeah, mate.

Bit of concrete but... Yeah.

It's clean too, ay.

Oh, they look like some half-decent pieces, too.

Oh, man. Needs a clean, but I could see some good colour in that.

Concrete, old timers used to sell it for around 40 bucks a kilo,

and then, it went up to about 100,

and they thought that was good but the price we're pushing

up around 1,500 to two, 2,000 a kilo for the good stuff.

It's getting harder and harder to find.

It's becoming popular because people like the idea

of doing the process and creating their own thing.

If we get a few more kilos of concrete,

we'll do all right here.

We could be into something.

We got colour. There's big sections of concrete.

It's opal. We found what we're here for.Yeah.

Big smiles all round.

The team won't know for sure

if their concrete rocks hold valuable opal

until they treat them with a chemical process

known as cooking.

Hey, man.How are you?

How'd you go cutting those test pieces up?

Yeah, just swapped them over. I got the acid heating up

but um, yeah, they come up all right.Yeah.

You can see the colour already in it.

We'll see what Horse Paddock had.

Treatment is a process of filling the rock up with sugar.

We drop them into the acid and the acid reacts with the sugar in the pores

instantly carbonising the sugar and turning it black

which, ah, essentially, turns the host stone black in the concrete,

and makes those colours come out a lot nicer.

Something similar to black opal.

Now, a half hour wait.

Some of it cooks really well. It's really porous,

and sometimes it just might not turn out at all.

Safety first.

Yeah, we'll just give a quick rinse off

with the warm water we got there.

Oh.

They look nice.So, yeah, that's a successful treat.

Definitely darkened it up. That's as good as it gets.

That's beautiful.

The Mooka Boys have top-grade concrete

weighing five kilograms.

Partially treated, the process has revealed

a full rainbow of opalised silica in the stones.

Five kilos, that's ten grand.

I've had orders for this for six months,

so this'll go straight out the door, man.

The good news is is there's plenty more ground there.

Heaps of potential.

I'm really happy. It's clean as too,

so it's going to cut some very nice gems, man.

I guess we can buy some steak this week, ay?

Yew! Steak dinner.

Mooka Boys!

Just have a look at that, Ty. I reckon I saw some blue fall out of that seam there.

TY: Here's a little piece. There is?

It's only a tiny piece. Look at that.

LES: That's a nice looking piece that.

Bloody good start, ay.

Good sign for this.

After setting up machinery in their new mine, Conrod,

the Bushmen's expanded team is finally operating at full capacity.

All good. Everything's working.

How good's that.

Got a copy there, Rod?

Yeah, mate.

Yeah, just got a message off Benny.

Drop everything and come down to the drill rig,

so I don't know what's going on.

Probably something's broken or whatever but, yeah.

The drama isn't over.

I'll bet you anything he's bogged.

There he is over there, look. Oh, yeah.

Well, he's not bogged. The rig's, the mast's up.

How are we, boys?

I was thinking you must have had it bogged, Ben.

No, mate, she's not bogged.

Not bogged? What'd you break? I haven't broken anything.

Oh, haven't you?No. Well, why are we here?

Ooh. Ooh!

You serious? LES: That's good shit.

It's all colour. It's all colour.

Ooh. What a ball tearer. Look at that. Hey.

That's a nice piece on the bottom here.

TY: You'd cut most of those, too, will cut nice stones.And reds.

And it's a nice bright red. too. That's a gemmy red.

That's all out of not one hole?

BEN: That all come out of this one hole here, mate.

Ben has drilled up grey-based and crystal seam opal,

displaying the full spectrum of colours.

It's in the rough and there's 12 grams.

Mate, he's nailed it. He's hit the colour

and that's what it's all about.

Gives you goosebumps seeing stuff like that.

It's gem crystal and all the colours.

And the value's about 1,500 bucks.

I think 1,500's fair, mate.

You've done well, Ben.

Happy with that one, boys, or what? More than happy with that, Ben.

We might be onto something here. Yeah, I think we might be, mate.

We'll peg this.Yep.

The old timers 45 years ago didn't get the lot of it, obviously.

No, looks like they might have left us a bit.

They've left us a bit. Good on you old fellas.

We'll have a beer for yas.

You beauty! Hey! How good.

Well done, mate. Yeah, cheers, mate.

That's put a smile on our dial.

MARK: All right. We know that's the best opal

he's ever going to have seen probably for years.

Seventeen ounces of yumminess.

We've got to be prepared to walk away.

Mark, Paul and Xavier

have travelled over 800 kilometres to Adelaide

to negotiate a last minute sale with opal buyer, Sinan Kocadag,

before he flies out to the Lightning Ridge Opal and Gem Festival.

SINAN: Hey! Hey, how you going, mate?

Good to see yas. XAVIER: Yeah, all right.Hey.

You rang me and said you got something special, so let's see it, mate.

PAUL: Have a look at that. It's not going to go cheap either,

so don't try your normal games. What have you got here?

Seventeen troy ounces of absolute...

Yum, yum. ..chunks, mate.

Look at the colour in that one?

Like get that up close. It's a nice piece, Mark.

We want 170,000 and we'll - you can catch your plane.

It's as simple as that.

One-seventy?One-seventy. I can't do that. You know that.

Mate, look at this stuff. Check it out...

check the gear out. Mate, look at this stuff.

That is insane. We're asking ten grand an ounce.

Mark, I... I've got 70, cash. I'll give you 70 now.

Ha ha! You know we can't sell that stuff for 70, mate.

Ninety grand, cash.Na. I'll give you 90. Na.Na.

I'll give you 100 and it's final. That's it.

One-fifty, you know.No. Tw - that's taking 20 grand off.

If you want 150, you might as well walk out.

I'm not going to give you that.

I'll come up another ten.

All right, well, you've got to catch your plane.I'll...We'll...

One-forty, I can't do it.

You're lucky to get to see it first, ay.

We'll see you soon. We'll see you soon. We'll let you know.

Let's go, Xavvy. Come on, Xav.

XAVIER: Coming. SINAN: Mark!What, Sinan?

One-twenty.

PAUL: He's getting in the ballpark now.

See, he wants it.XAVIER: Yeah. He wants it. Let's go.

Sinan, you play games with my emotions, mate. SINAN: Yeah.You do.

You know how good that stuff is, ay.

Oh, it's good. That's what I'm saying and that's where I'm at.

Is the 120 and I can't g - that's it.

One-twenty will work. All right, mate.Well done. Thank you very much.

Guys, we have just leaned up, oh, yeah.

The 120, that's our biggest sale of the season.

That's just a massive, massive influx

of everything for everyone.

The machineries get a complete service,

everyone gets a few bucks in the bank and play on.

It means we're fearless now. We can just attack.

Subtitles by Deluxe