Professionals Tamborine Mountain 
Opals are almost synonymous with Australia, so it’s no surprise that Tamborine Mountain has a part in the opal trade too. Darren Jack has owned Australian Outback Opals for four years and has quite a few stories to tell of his time there.
by Kyle Hitchmough
How did you get started in the opal field, and come to open this store?
I started cutting opals when I was 15. There was a lapidary along my way to school. One day there was a sign on the wall saying ‘Gemstone cutting lessons’ and I thought ‘that’s interesting.’ I signed up for cabochon cutting, cutting domes into gems like tiger’s eye, jade, and opals. It all started from there. Once you start cutting it, you find the beauty of the opal. It’s like an individual piece of artwork with its own fi ngerprint of pattern. The opals vary uniquely in their display and brightness and colour. When you cut, you’re discovering a beauty that no-one else has seen before. It’s quite the enjoyable hobby, and that evolved into a business.
You cut your own opals, how much of the process of creating your products are you involved in?
We cut the opals on the premises. We use jewellers to do the fitting and the metalwork. We use a specialist jeweller to do the various different work and design. We cut the opals and send them to the jeweller and receive the finished product to sell in store.
There’s a large spiritual market on the mountain, promoting the various powers of crystals and other like products. Does that affect your business?
The gemstone comes from deep in the ground, millions of years old. Any type of stone or crystal that’s been under that pressure, it’s got some sort of physiological energy that’s been built into that from the Earth and the process. You can’t see it, but it exists. I’m not really into that kind of spirituality, but I do accept that the process of how the individual gemstones are actually made imbues some kind of magnetic, creative force within the stones. We do get some people who want to feel the stones for their energy.
You promote that your opals are sourced straight from the mines. Do you work directly with any particular opal mine?
We source our opals from all over. South Australia’s got Coober Pedy with the white opal, Mintabie with the white opal, crystal opal, black opal… Andamooka towards the Victoria/New South Wales border with the light crystal opal, Lightning Ridge has black opal, and Queensland has boulder opal.
Aside from selling opal products, do you offer any other services?
We prepare opals for customers for engagement and wedding rings and other celebratory occasions. We cut for people that have their own rough opal and want those pieces finished so they can put them into jewellery. We repair broken and dull opals, repolish, reshape, where possible, and we make up and design jewellery so they have a finished product.
What, beyond your product, do you think Australian Outback Opals brings to the mountain?
Uniqueness. We’ve had people that have come from overseas, staying on the Gold Coast and caught a cab up to the shop to buy opals and that cab waited to take them back. There’s been multiple occurrences of that. You don’t want a thousand shops on the mountain that all produce the same thing, you want variety, and we bring variety to the mountain.
What do you enjoy most about your job?
The serenity of cutting an opal. It takes you into another space. You’ve got the hustle and bustle… but when you cut an opal, all that is switched off because you’re focused on the stone. You’re looking at the beauty of the rock, trying to read the colours, you’re polishing and shaping… you’re getting satisfaction out of your craft, and it is a craft. You can’t just cut a shape, you have to read the nature of the stone, the nature of the colour, the angle, the display… You can cut an opal and have it not display correctly and lose eight percent of its value.
What’s your relationship with the café and the gelato shop your business is attached to?
We have the gelato shop and Tall Trees Motel, we own both of those. We came from childcare where we learned a lot about the food intolerances of children, the effects of preservatives and commercialisation of food. When we started the gelato shop we used that knowledge. We don’t use wheat fillers—ours is pure cream and milk and wholesome ingredients. The colourings are beetroot, pumpkin, turmeric… marshmallow is the only artificial thing we use. We do a lemon sorbet with limoncello liqueur from Tamborine Mountain Distillery, a white Muscat sorbet from Cedar Creek Winery, a ginger beer and a stout beer gelato with beer on tap from Fortitude Brewery, a wattle toffee liqueur from the Distillery… that’s our gourmet section. Of course, we have the kids section as well but it’s all natural, it’s clean food.
Do you work with any other businesses on the mountain?
We promote the other restaurants up here such as the Visitor’s Information Centre, The Skywalk, Three Little Pigs, Gallery Walk etc. we stock all the brochures. We’re pushing out the experience. If people come here we don’t want them to come just for our opals. We want them to come for the whole mountain and come back.
What has been your most interesting experience running this store?
During the Commonwealth Games there were 71 businesses that sponsored a country based on their heritage. My wife’s Maltese, so we sponsored Malta. We had the Maltese prime minister and all his entourage come up. They came up to the opal shop, to the gelato shop, and we took them down to the waterfall. Two of the Beatles came up here in 1964 too!
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Or email the writer at kyle.hitchmough@hotmail.com, and follow me on Twitter @realcasualrvws.
