Are you team car door or car bonnet? This town's history depends on your answer

Blow the layer of dust off Lightning Ridge and you will find a town as rich in colour as the precious black opal mined here.

The stone’s dark undertone is the marriage of carbon and iron oxide, brought together over millennia beneath the earth’s surface.

It brings colour to life in a way that no other precious stone can.

It is an exceptionally rare find, with more than 90 per cent of the world’s supply located beneath this outback moonscape.

Great fortunes have been made and lost here on Yuwaalaraay Country in Northern NSW, where stories have become facts and truth can be just as elusive as the black opal itself.

Among the corrugated iron shacks and the long-abandoned mine shafts that pockmark this land, the past is everywhere.

Exactly what that history is, however, depends on who's telling it.

The car doors

Barb Moritz is waiting for us in front of an old miner's cottage on the main street.

Built in 1932, its warped pinewood beams and lopsided tin roof resemble an abstract painting.

It's the headquarters of the Lightning Ridge Historical Society, and the seat from which Barb holds court.

She emerges from the shadow of the verandah awning whirring with facts and directions, her dark eyes glowing.

Barb cuts a strikingly vibrant figure amid a palette of rusted metal and aging wood.

When she smiles, the afternoon sun catches her opal dental filling and it flashes with brilliant greens and blues.

Introductions are swift before Barb leaps into her opening stanza, fine tuned over decades of leading tour groups.

She points towards the local pool, opened by Dawn Fraser in 1990.

The Opal Miners Hall of Fame is further out, just a few minutes' drive from the cottage.

Then there's the Lightning Ridge Cemetery, or as Barb refers to it, the "dead end of town".

She casts us a deadpan glance and pauses for effect.

It's still a great gag.

Barb is a long way from the cornfields of Iowa in the American mid-west, where she grew up.

She still isn't quite sure if she chose to move to Lightning Ridge, or if the black opal lured her.

"From the very beginning, I feel I was directed to opal," she says, her accent still thick.

Barb arrived in Lightning Ridge in the summer of 1990.

Three years later, she was working for the historical society.

"I met the people who lived here, the old-timers who built this community," she says.

"There was a time when I was communicating with a dozen octogenarians in the 1990s."

It wasn't long before Barb was the society's secretary.

Tucked away behind the old miner's cottage is an aging demountable filled to the brim with miners' ledgers and newspaper clippings dating back more than a century.

It is the engine room of the historical society.

And it's here, among the records, that Barb pieces together a version of Lightning Ridge's opal-mining evolution.

In the late 1990s, this history was translated onto a conspicuous canvas unique to the town's identity, the "car door tours".

Across the featureless landscape, car doors mark out four colour-coded routes (green, red, yellow and blue) to sites the society deems significant to the town's history.

"People lock their car doors because they're afraid maybe one will go missing," Barb says with a glimmer in her eye.

"We're always on the scrounge for car doors."

The doors have become much more than a tourist attraction for the droves of travellers and grey nomads who pass through.

They are now part of the landscape.

They're also used by locals and emergency services to help locate people living on claims that are well and truly off the beaten track.

The population of Lightning Ridge is a bit of a mystery. Officially, it has about 2,000 residents. Unofficially, it's more like 5,000 because many people move to this outback town to disappear.

We follow Barb's car as she navigates the dirt roads, tracing the green car door tour as it winds its way up to McDonald's Six-Mile opal field.

Perched on an ironstone ridge above the town, facing the western horizon, it's a moonscape of colourless rock, sheet metal and dozens of deserted mine shafts.

You can't miss the monument to Charles Nettleton.

Protected by a wire fence, the jagged rectangular stone slab and its plaque look lovingly maintained, but resemble a tombstone.

Morbid curiosity draws you closer.

There is pride in Barb's eyes as she takes stock of the monument, pale yellow under the midday sun.

It would not be here without her ability to move heaven and earth for her adopted home.

"[Charles Nettleton] was the first professional opal miner who came to this country" Barb explains.

 "And we decided … we needed to have a monument — a historical reserve — to where he had sunk his first shafts for the syndicate of businessmen who hired him."

A seasoned miner from Victoria, Nettleton first made his way to Lightning Ridge in 1902, sinking a shaft to try his luck finding the fabled black opal.

His first attempt failed, but he's celebrated as the founder of the industry that gave Lightning Ridge its reputation and lifeblood.

Among the dozens of shafts on the ironstone ridge, the exact location of Nettleton's first shaft has been lost to time.

Barb's not worried about that.

"We don't know which one he dug … he maybe dug them all," she says.

"We've chosen the one that's more accessible to us. One that we can see, we can put up our marker, and people can appreciate the beginnings."

But not everyone is appreciative.

"There are people in the town who don't like what they read about history, and they think they can change it," Barb says, with a dismissive glance over her shoulder.

As tourists take a moment in front of Nettleton's shaft to read the plaque, something else catches their eye.

Barb watches on with visible frustration as the carload of travellers take the time to inspect it.

It has been crudely fastened to a large tree with thick metal wire.

Large black letters have been scrawled onto a stark white background.

At a distance, it could be mistaken for a signature calling card of the historical society's car door tours.

But it isn't a door.

It's a car bonnet.

And Barb doesn't want to talk about it.

The car bonnets

Peter Glogauer doesn't see eye to eye with Barb Moritz.

A Lightning Ridge "true local", he's the son of German immigrants who scoured the world for somewhere to start afresh after the Second World War.

His parents never spoke of their past, and Pete came to feel ashamed of his German ancestry.

A restless student, he was fascinated by the stories of Ancient Rome and Classical Greece as much as he was by the stories he'd hear from the old miners he grew up alongside.

Lightning Ridge offered his family a new beginning, and a young boy an identity to carry with pride. 

Pete makes it clear — opal runs in his blood.

"We're a breed unto ourselves," he says of his Lightning Ridge kin.

Pete greets us with a firm, sandpaper-rough handshake and soft, warm eyes. 

Better known across the opal fields as "Gloey", he is the man responsible for the breakaway bonnets.

The origins of Pete's rebellion tellingly read like a Greek tragedy, aching with torn loyalties and a profound sense of duty to his home.

He too was once a member of the Lightning Ridge Historical Society, but the longer he sat among the official records, the more restless he became.

"I started to study, and look at maps and I realised that some of our history just isn't quite what's being presented," he says.

The relationship between Pete and the society never recovered, and he took it upon himself to stake an alternative claim to the tourists keen to learn the stories of Lightning Ridge.

"I didn't mean to go into competition with them," Pete says. "It was just pretty much to get some facts right."

Since the first car bonnet appeared two years ago, several have sprouted along the town's historical fault lines.

They read like handwritten notes in the margins of an old book, scrawled in a frantic rush to get thoughts onto the page.

"I thought I'd try and inform visitors to Lightning Ridge where the very early discoveries of opal were made," Pete says.

"So I started putting white bonnets up, who discovered them, the date they were discovered, who worked there, that sort of thing."

Pete says he has "good communal support" and recounts the day that two boys leant a hand when they saw him trying to erect a sign.

While Barb has the weight of the historical society at her back, Pete's undertaking feels close to the bone.

"Nearly 60 years I've been in the Ridge. I love the place, and to me, its early history is so important," he says.

The door war

We meet Pete at his home as he prepares to secure a new bonnet with iron stakes.

It's sitting in the back of his ute, the black paint still wet.

He's the first to acknowledge his handiwork is no Sistine Chapel.

"You might notice some of my writing's pretty ordinary," he says with a grin.

Such is the reputation of the historical society, Pete's rebellion seems almost criminal.

But to him, the greater crime would be to do nothing to counter what he believes is the inaccurate portrayal of one of the most famous opal-mining sites in the world.

While Charles Nettleton may have a statue built in his honour at the entrance of town, Pete refuses to place him on a pedestal.

He refers to Nettleton's monument as 'The Rock', and sees it as nothing more than a testament to the historical society's stranglehold on the history of his hometown.

"It's always been common knowledge to the locals that Jack Murray was the first miner here," Pete says, drawing upon half a century of being, as he refers to himself, a 'son of silica'.

John 'Jack' Murray, a boundary-rider employed by a nearby cattle station, was the first to find black opal in 1901, he says emphatically.

As the story has always gone, Murray was setting rabbit traps on the ironstone ridges when he came across a glistening gem exposed by erosion.

After Nettleton failed to find opal at Six-Mile, in 1903 he joined Murray at Nobby's Opal field one of first in Lightning Ridge.

"There were seven or eight other miners here before Nettleton turned up, but for some reason the historical society have fixated on [him]," Pete says.

It was enough to spur the old miner into action.

And he went straight for 'The Rock'.

"I'd like to see the story tell that Jack Murray sank the first holes and discovered the first opal," he says.

It bothers him that countless tourists have left Lightning Ridge believing Nettleton dug the first mine shaft near the site of his monument.

Pete says Nettleton sunk his first shaft about 95 metres south of "the rock" in 1902. 

"I put that white bonnet up saying that although Nettleton sank his first shafts here, they were not the first to be dug," he says.

"There's no false information in that. There are no misconceptions. It's just fact."

Barb doesn't dispute the fact that Murray may have been "out setting rabbit traps when he picked up pretty rocks". 

But as to whether or not he took the initiative to dig for opal, she is less sure.

"He may not even have sunk a shaft," she says.

"Charlie Nettleton, as a professional miner, knew what to do with it."

Barb bristles when asked to address Pete's alternative car bonnet tours.

She would rather they did not exist.

"There are so many of them around the field and they are confusing and they're not part of the tourist association," Barb says with disdain.

"They're confusing because it's not significant history.

"We don't want anybody to even notice or know about them … they're just creating havoc, they'll be gone soon."

The conflict between Pete and the historical society reaches into almost every aspect of the town's colourful history.

However, both Pete and the historical society agree that the town's name was inspired by a macabre natural phenomenon that occurred sometime before 1880.

A young drover and his flock of 600 sheep were all struck dead in an instant by a lightning bolt hitting an ironstone ridge above the town during a powerful storm.

The exact location of this fatal bolt has been lost over the generations of retelling.

Ten kilometres out of town, at a rest stop on the Castlereagh Highway, the historical society has erected a plaque to commemorate the tragic event.

Placed there in 1999, it provides a convenient place for travellers to stop and reflect on the poor drover's fate.

And this is where Pete's frustration bubbles to the top again.

"[The historical society] got a plaque out there that says this is the spot that marks the area where the young man was killed by lightning, him and his flock," Pete says, with an exasperated sigh.

"It happened nearly three kilometres up the road."

The historical society's attempts to strike a delicate balance between the truth and the tourism industry that provides so much to the town, has never sat right with Pete.

To him, history does not concern itself with whether it fits into an itinerary or provides shade for a picnic lunch.

The Law country

Gamilaraay Yuwaalaraay woman Aunty Rhonda Ashby travels the same dirt track to get to McDonald's Six-Mile Opal field, but sees the land she traverses altogether differently from both Barb and Pete.

The past that Pete and Barb dispute is but a fraction of the history Rhonda can feel and hear in the ironstone.

"There's layers of stories we have with this country," she explains, while surveying the arid landscape.

Nettleton's monument may have been built to honour the beginning of one version of history, but from atop the lookout, an ancient past stretches to the horizon.

"For local Aboriginal people this ridge was one of the creations of Baayami," Aunty Rhonda says.

"He [Baayami] built the ridges up so he could look out over country," she says tracing the Yuwaalaraay creation story into the earth beneath her feet.

It's a story her ancestors have told for tens of thousands of years.

Aunty Rhonda marks the cardinal directions the creator looked out upon.

He came down from the north.

He went out to the west.

Then he went to the east.

And then looked out to south.

It forms a familiar shape.

"We believe his power is in the lightning," she says.

For Rhonda, Lightning Ridge is hallowed land, where the iron in the soil has been attracting fierce lightning storms for millennia.

"Lightning Ridge, was Law country, a bit like a courthouse … but for Aboriginal people Law is a bit different to the law we have in court today," Aunty Rhonda says.

"Special people came onto this country and discussed Law … that may have been because of the electricity with the lightning being struck here and that connection to the higher creator.

"So maybe that's why this place is pretty special to our mob."

Gamileroi Yuwaalaraay Elder Brenda Mcbride's ancestors walked the ancient ridge lines long before Charles Nettleton and Jack Murray split the earth to chase their fortunes.

There are few people on Yuwaalaraay Country who hold the knowledge she does.

To Aunty Brenda, not enough has been done to understand the stories that cannot be found in miners' ledgers, old newspaper clippings or painted onto a car door.

She believes the oral history that she holds true should be shared with visitors long before they take to the winding tracks that lead to the lookout.

"[The historical society has] done all this other work, and they should go back to the people who live there," she says.

"A local person who's got history of Lightning Ridge should be put up first before those car doors."

Aunty Rhonda agrees.

"I really do believe that there's a voice there for our mob," Aunty Rhonda says.

"It's a much deeper meaning to country, because we always had that special connection with country, whether it was spiritually [or] physically."

Aunty Rhonda acknowledges the car doors are a useful tool to help tourists navigate the Ridge's maze of dirt roads, but says more can be done to include the missing chapters of the town's story.

"There's place names still in language, and so all along these tours there's narratives that could be spoken about from a First Nation [perspective]," she says.

As the caravans and four-wheel drives rattle down the Castlereagh Highway laden with accounts of long-dead miners, there are three stories they can take with them about this outback land and its precious black opal.

Aunty Rhonda dreams of those convoys departing with a richer history.

"I'd like to see a tourism industry where our mob are leading so they've got an opportunity to share that history and the knowledge of some of these beautiful ecosystems that we have around the country," she says.

"History is important to be learnt. I don't think it's too late."