Get rich quick in Australia
Opal mining, gambling, horse racing and gold panning on your travels
If you travel to Australia for a holiday, then there's always the chance of striking rich. Places such as Melbourne, Coober Pedy, Ballarat and Sydney have places where you may just get lucky. Here's how you can find your fortune Down Under:
Noodle for opals
If we didn’t know any better, this would look suspiciously like an Al-Qaeda hotbed. For a start, everyone seems to live in caves blasted into the rock. Secondly, according to our guide, a popular family activity for Sunday afternoons is sitting around, making bombs.
This is Coober Pedy, possibly the weirdest town on earth. It is smack bang in the middle of the South Australian desert, miles from anywhere, and temperatures routinely top 40 degrees.
That is the reason that people live underground, but instead of buying houses, people buy plots of land and as much gelignite as possible. They then blow up the rock, and lovingly sculpt homes out of the holes.
As you’re led round a showhome/ mine, you can’t help but notice how intricate it is. There’s proper lighting, bathrooms, the works. Just like a normal home, but in a big hole. The ceilings are of seemingly random heights, and apparently this is because the constructors are originally looking for opals. If they don’t find any rich seams, then they don’t really see the point in blasting any further.
And it is opals that Coober Pedy lives on. It can quite justifiably call itself the opal capital of the world, with a huge percentage of the multi-coloured gemstone coming from this bizarre outback outpost.
While the big boys are out in the surrounding regions, smashing things up with potent explosives to find the larger chunks, if you’re prepared to scrabble in the dirt a bit, you can maybe find your precious as well.
Just off the town’s main street are huge mounds of dirt left there by the diggers, and amongst it there are plenty of small specks of opal. Look hard and look lucky, and you could find something valuable yourself.
Wayward Bus (www.waywardbus.com.au/ 1300 653510) stops off at Coober Pedy on its 8 day South Australia and Red Centre tour. A mine tour and a rummage in the dirt is included.
All your money on red?
Depending on whether you think Las Vegas seems like a lovely destination for a holiday or not, Melbourne’s Crown Casino will either strike you as all-in excitement or a hideous shrine to tack.
Either way, if you’re in the city, it’s worth stopping by if only for the cheap meals and the chance to watch kamikaze Asian businessmen throw away an absolute fortune.
If you think gambling is your passport to riches (rather than a passport to feeling like a stupid twat for wasting all your money on a machine with shiny lights), there are a million ways to dabble. Slot machines, blackjack, roulette… the choice is yours.
Crown Casino is on Melbourne’s Southbank. Even Stevie Wonder couldn’t miss it.
$300 on Sad Ken in the 3.40
One thing I will never understand about women is why they will choose to get dressed up in their most ridiculously fancy clothes and then stand in a muddy field for a day, trying to look dainty sipping champers.
But that’s a day at the races for you, and whilst it does present a marvellous opportunity to blow money betting randomly on the horse with the funniest name/ nicest kit, it’s more about a day out in the sunshine, eyeing people up and getting tiddly.
Of course, the day is improved immeasurably by actually winning, so it might be worth cajoling someone who actually understands the form guides into helping you out. But if no-one is at hand, never fear – you’ll probably be too ratted to notice.
Royal Randwick is Sydney’s main race track – details of meetings can be found at www.ajc.com.au.
Going for gold
It’s not just Spandau Ballet that are obsessed with gold – chancers from around the world have seen the shiny yellow stuff as their passport to a better life for many a year. And Australia is no exception. When gold was discovered near Ballarat, Victoria, in the 1860s every man and his dog legged it down there, pick in hand.
There’s still gold in them thar hills, although most of it was snapped up by the early hoards, and if you’re lucky and patient enough, you can find some yourself.
You can do a tour of the goldfields area on a day trip from Melbourne with Melbourne Tours (www.melbournetours.com.au/ 1300 130 550), and this includes a trip to Sovereign Hill, which is still living in the 1850s. There’s more than a touch of wild west frontier town about it.
The trip also includes the chance to see a cool $50,000 worth of gold being poured in the Gold Museum, an underground mine tour and, yes, the chance to pan for your own little bit.
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