Underground moving mullock -

A significantly large percentage of time while you’re opal mining is spent dealing with the waste dirt and rocks, known as “mullock” … in other words, taking out the geological trash.
This video shows me down in a tunnel at The Comet, using a rickshaw (the wheelbarrow-like thing) to move mullock and dump it into the bucket, which then travels up the hoist and is dumped in a pile on the surface. In general, in each load, this rickshaw would contain about 100 kg of mullock.
It’s a very tedious, physical, and time consuming part of opal mining.
I should mention that in the video you might notice my mask around my neck. When I’m jackhammering and generating airborne particles, I wear the mask. Sometimes when I’m rickshawing, and it’s safe to breathe, I remove the mask. I also removed it here so that my voice would be a bit more clear in the video.


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