Lady of the Lamps

 4,500 year old lamp

 Tsar Nicholas II's lamp

 Whores' Lamps

Tuesday, 12 June 2012


Yesterday evening, we had the most fantastic experience – we visited the Black Queen. There we twelve of us in the group and we were invited into her camp to hear her story and experience her lamps. Her camp consisted of three “cottages” and the first one we entered was the combined kitchen/living/bedroom. It was in this room that Gale told us her story, how her and her husband left their high-powered careers in Sydney and moved to Lightning Ridge. We moved to the second cottage and Gale became the original Black Queen, Joan, who told us her story, how she came to Lightning Ridge and built the camp, with only some help from her husband. The coincidences were quite serendipitous! Then this amazing woman took us into the third cottage – and into the world of lamps. This was no museum collection of look but don’t touch. Gale actually passed some of her lamps around for us to handle; it is impossible to describe the feeling of holding a lamp which is 4,500 years old! Some of the lamps were just exquisite, with the most incredible glass/crystal works. Gale even had a lamp, with bears holding the actual lamp, which had been made for Tsar Nicholas II. The most unbelievable would have been the whores’ lamps – the shades contain three circles of coloured glass; red for stop (busy), amber (nearly ready) and green (ready or go, of course). Legend has it that this is where the colours for traffic lights originated!

Today was more a housekeeping morning, with laundry, cleaning, car washing, etc. Of course, the first thing that happened was a trip to the supermarket for bread! We did visit (or stop outside) the bottle house, but didn’t feel inclined to pay the admission price to see the bottles from the inside. This afternoon we played a game of bowls at the Lightning Ridge Bowls Club and met some interesting people, not only from Lightning Ridge but other tourists like ourselves. We both won on our rinks but Leslie came away with the runners-up prize of six stubbies. A good afternoon all round.