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Hi my name is Russ and my partner is Nell .We are opal cutters buyers and fossickers .I have been in the opal game for more than forty years. I started mining at CooberPedy in the mid sixties .In 1969 I had a bad accident that left me unable to continue with the mining side of the business. In 1970 I began cutting triplets from CooberPedy opal. The opal trade was booming then so we were kept very busy. in the eighties I was making jewellery for the tourist trade.
In 1996 my partner and I went to South West Queensland to try our luck at fossicking. We fell in love with the area and all that it had to offer. Our first stop was YOWAH where we had a go at fossicking, The opal there is encapsulated in ironstone it is called matrix opal ,Yowah Nuts is the name given to these forms of opal ,They range in size and quality from no opal through to some of the best and brightest opal I have ever seen.
We returned to the area every year, It is far to hot in the summer months so we visited between May and September. In the year 2000 I started cutting opal matrix solids . We experimented making triplets from Australian boulder opal. The results were fantastic; in 2004 we started a new business called MATRIP OPALS. The results can be seen on this site; the colors are very bright through the whole spectrum RED GREEN BLUE and YELLOW and all the colors in between.
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