Australian Opal's Struggle with its Image - (4 Articles)

Update: Read an interesting discussion about this issue in our opal forum...

 

Gem fights its quiet past

by Daniel Williams

AUSTRALIAN men know that when it comes to lighting up a sweetheart's eyes with gifts of jewellery, diamonds and sapphires are the stones to buy. Further down the list are emeralds, and lower still - virtually at the bottom - are opals.

Opal producers and retailers say they are perplexed about why the stone, which is almost exclusively Australian in origin, has such a poor reputation in this country, while in other countries, such as the United States and Japan, it is regarded as perhaps the most beautiful gem of all.

Ninety-six per cent of all opal mined is produced in Australia, and more than 90 per cent is exported. On the overseas market, opals are increasing in value at a rate of 20 per cent a year. The opal is the sleeping giant of the Australian gem industry. Its appeal, admirers say, lies in two characteristics: its intrinsic mystery and unique appearance. Like fingerprints, no two opals look alike. Every opal is constantly changing in response to fluctuations in lighting conditions and even, some say, the mood of the wearer.

"They (opals) are definitely not appreciated here - which is very sad,"says Olivia Nelson, international director of marketing of the Berta Opal Company. "Australians do not appreciate the beauty of the opal.

"But if you could see the eyes of Scandinavian, American, Japanese and Canadian women when they're given an opal - that's a different story. They adore them. "The Japanese are going crazy about opals. They see it as a lucky stone and buy at the top end of the market. An extraordinary number of American men wear opal - in tie pins or cuff links. In fact, any American man who wears jewellery will almost certainly own an opal."

Nelson says she finds the Australian's aversion to the opal difficult to understand. It hasn't always been unpopular. In the 1920s, "every girl had one", and opals often were given as 21st birthday presents.

"Aunt Maude's triplet" may have something to do with changing perceptions, she says. The triplet - a composite consisting of a thin slice of opal set between layers of plastic, cements or crystal - has given opals a bad name in this country. "Young people are judging the opal industry out of an old jewellery box." The best opals can be as expensive as diamonds - the top-rate being about $6,500 a carat. The three main varieties of precious opal are black opal (the rarest and most expensive), boulder opal and white opal. Opals which flash red are the most expensive, followed by green, blue, orange/yellow and violet However, they are less appropriate as engagement rings. On the MOH scale, which measures hardness, the stone rates about 5.5 (diamonds rate a 10 and sapphires about 8.5), so there is more risk of damage.

Australians underestimate the value of opals, Nelson says. Some people may be sitting on a small fortune.

"People sometimes say casually: 'Oh yes, I've got an opal - what do you reckon?' It turns out to be a beautiful specimen they've just tossed into their handbag. I say: 'Oh, my God - let me wrap it up for you'."

Source: 20 October 1988 - Sydney Morning Herald

 

Why opals don't shine

by Mark Short

AUSTRALIA is home to 95 per cent of the world's opal deposits but the multi-coloured stone is not honoured in its own country.

Investors in Europe and Japan eagerly seek the best stones but, in Australia, it still has to gain full acceptance as a jewellery stone. Reasons for the opal's unpopularity abound. Some blame it on a poem by Sir Walter Scott.

The poem told of the violent demise of a woman who schemed to get her hands on a valuable opal. The poem is blamed for the traditional association of opals with bad luck. Another theory is that earlier generations had bad experiences with triplets. Triplets consist of a layer of opal sandwiched between a dark backing and a covering of quartz.

Source: 2 November 1988 - Sydney Morning Herald

 

Revamp for opals' kitschy image

by Natalie Gregg

OPAL miner Bruce Tully was so frustrated with the "kitsch souvenir" reputation of Australian opals that he began designing his own range of contemporary opal jewellery. With a family background in grazing and mining in the western Queensland town of Quilpie. Tully, 45, who now lives in Brisbane, says he never imagined he would become a designer. Tully says he was drawn to jewellery design four years ago after mining the stone for 16 years. He drew on influences from Africa and art deco styles and soon afterwards launched a range of jewellery under the name Depazzi.

I began designing through frustration with what people were doing with mined opals in Australia. I was frustrated with the name opals had in Australia, just as a souvenir shelf item. I see the whole Australian souvenir as a sort of kitsch thing," he says.

Tully's passion for the colourful stone has taken him from Quilpie grazier and miner to sought-after jewellery designer. In August he picked up a Churchill Fellowship award which will send him to Italy in February to study jewellery design on a month-long course in Metallo Nobile, a design college in Florence.

"You almost can't sell opals in Australia," he says.

"I realised I had to design opal jewellery in a completely different way to appeal to the Australian market. I want Australians to be proud of opals because it is something that is unique to here."

Tully combines opal pendants set in gold or silver with strands of beads in amber, red coral and semi-precious stones such as turquoise. The designs range from chunky tribal African chokers to art deco styles. The tribal theme also is carried through in Tully's crocodile skin chokers and wrist cuffs.

Tully still owns his Quilpie opal mine and exports the opals as well as hand-picking particular stones to use for each one-off piece. Tully designs the entire Depazzi range and hires different jewellers to suit each individual piece.

Source: 8 December 2003 - Courier-Mail

 

Gem of many colours - the new opal

by Kris Olsson

REMEMBER opal? Cheap chips of blue and pink embedded in Taiwan-made boomerangs in the windows of souvenir shops, or clasped in a teardrop on a chain around your grandmother's neck.

Ubiquitous opal: cheap, common, brittle. Never a girl's best friend. Rarely forever. No wonder we passed them over for diamonds.

"They're probably the worst marketed gem in Australia," says Bruce Tully, who should know. He grew up around the world's opal capital, Quilpie, where he and his siblings scuffed their boots on bits of rare red opal lying in the crimson dust of their cattle property, untouched for thousands of years. This is where 95 per cent of the world's opal was created, deep beneath the earth 40 million years ago, when the brilliant blues, reds, greens and mandarins crystalised in tiny spheres of hydrated silica.

Now Tully, whose forebears opened up the vast grazing country of Queensland's southwest, has brought the colours of the mulga and gidyea and the red sand hills to the city, and vowed to restore to the opal the reverence Cleopatra apparently held for it.

The trouble, however, is that it seems the best opal has always been exported, leaving Australians with a version of their national stone that is "unimaginative and mass-produced".

"Good quality opal is one of the most rare gems on earth, four times as rare as diamonds," Tully says.

It is the unpredictable nature of mining opal that has protected it, however, from multinational companies exploiting the gem. Because of this, each good piece of boulder opal is precious, according to Tully: "Each piece is unique and has its own story. Australians don't understand this, they don't understand its variations, the colours that range from delicate to outrageous, the way each piece has a different mood - and even that changes. It seems to mirror the country it comes from."

He says he has been fascinated by opal since early childhood, when he would camp under the stars with his father at the family's Valdare opal mine.

"We were always mucking around with it," he says. "It always seemed to be around. And so were these buyers from Japan and Europe, who saw something phenomenal in it. Why didn't Australians?" Now he knows: Australians have never seen it at its best. We've seen what the exporters didn't want, usually crystal opal that is splintered into doublets and triplets which are cheap but far from durable - they're not even supposed to get wet.

Frustrated by opal's tawdry image, and later by the vicissitudes of life on the land (which finally meant the family farm was sold in 1998) Bruce Tully decided to make a tilt at quality opal mining and design.

' I wanted to tear down the sourvenir shop status of opal and have people look at opal as if they were seeing it for the first time' He moved his family to the city and established Depazzi opals, using his pioneering grandfather's nickname for a pioneering venture of a different kind.

Over the past three years, he has commissioned some of Australia's best jewellery designers, including Brisbane's Richard de Chazal, to put together a collection that is difficult to reconcile with our old-fashioned notions of opal. The gem's extraordinary, mercurial colours are cut without any reference to the predictable tear-drop and fused with the sensuous textures of South Sea Island pearl, coral, emu and crocodile skin.

"I wanted to tear down the souvenir shop status of opal and have people look at opal as if they were seeing it for the first time," Tully says. "I wanted to make Australians proud to wear their national stone again, to buy a piece of Australia, if you like." Tully is married to Michelle and they have three children: Lauren, 12, Caroline, 10, and Cameron, 3. He grew up on Naretha Station outside Quilpie and went to Nudgee College as a boarder. They now live at Graceville.

Tully still goes out west and gets his hands dirty at the family's four opal mines, but more and more his involvement is with design and with changing the image of the gem he adores.

You can't take the bush out of the boy, though. The resourcefulness he learned growing up in the west - mustering, fencing, shearing and fixing everything from engines to sick sheep - he has brought to life in town, and to his new business.

"There's nothing more serene than the bush. And nothing more honest," he says.

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