An Unconventional Life: Jeremy (Sid) Lomax

This is not an obituary, but a story of a life well lived by an Old Boy who now lies seriously ill in a hospital in Lightning Ridge, NSW Australia, after a comprehensive stroke which has left him seriously paralysed. I became friends with Sid in the Junior School in 1950. This friendship continued through School as we were both involved with the Scouts, stage crew, and assisting with Sergeant Hickey’s Junior School camps in the village hall in Grasmere. On leaving School he went to the London School of Economics (LSE), which then, as now, was a hot bed of radicalism. There he shared a flat with three postgraduate Canadians who planned to make their way across Asia and eventually back to Canada. Sid decided the degree route was not for him. He left LSE after one year and, with the Canadians, bought an old army desert car and travelled across the Middle East and down to the southern tip of India. Two of the Canadians worked their passage on a boat to Perth in Australia. Sid, accompanied by the remaining Canadian, made his way up through India to Calcutta and then caught a rubber tappers boat to Penang and on to Singapore. There they settled in a Sikh temple to await money being forwarded by the others from Australia. On receipt of the money they tried to get through to Papua New Guinea (PNP), which entailed a complicated journey through Indonesian islands with a difficult land border crossing in PNP. At this time there was a civil war taking place in the islands, known as The West Irian affair, but after many adventures all four were finally reunited in Sydney and worked as labourers on various building sites. They heard that money could to be made opal mining in Lightning Ridge (LR), which is on the NSW/Queensland border, some 800 miles inland. The four of them moved up there, bought and marked out a concession and started mining for opal. This consisted of digging a onemetre diameter hole down some 60 feet or so to reach an opal-bearing level; then the miner digs horizontally in the hope of finding some opal – a dangerous, risky and precarious way of making a living. Air had to be pumped down to the miner, often by a man at the surface, pedalling a bicycle contraption which operated an air pump. Sid and his Canadian partners became successful and started to concentrate on buying stone off other miners.

In 1967, whilst living in Sydney, I went up to see him in Lightning Ridge. Their camp consisted of a corrugated iron hut with a dirt floor and an old oil tank made into a cooking stove and used by an Aboriginal lady. It was an extremely rough and hard way of life, but everyone was happy living an unregulated life far from rules and authority. LR was then a small mining town with a pub, a shop, a garage, a hot spring miners’ bath and a stretch of tarmac some 200 yards long by the pub: the other roads were laterite (dirt). In 1974, when we were back in Bolton for a couple of years, Sid contacted me out of the blue and came to stay on two or three occasions when selling opals round Europe. Once he came with two of his children; he had by then been married and divorced twice. Opal mining Scout Camp, Holland, 1958 Back, L-R: Jeremy Lomax, Mike McNeill had obviously become very profitable as The Canadians, as their loosely organised group were referred to, bought (1953-1961), Steve Ridings (1950-1959) the local pub and garage, plus a sheep trucking business, Front, L-R: Teddy Cheers (1951-1958), a small house/hotel on the Barrier Reef coast and a small David Prag (1953-1960), David Brookes plane in which to travel up and down to Sydney. They also had opal sales agents in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Amsterdam, London and New York and a jewellers shop in Sydney. The loose-knit Canadian group eventually split up, but Sid continued on his own, buying and selling opal and expanding his markets in Hong Kong and Japan. Later, Paul Brooks (1982-1990), the son of good friends of ours, went out to Lightning Ridge and worked with Sid as a contract miner for a year. In 2019 my wife and I drove to Lightning Ridge to stay with Sid and his wonderful partner, Helen. It took two days to get there. The turn off from the highway to LR was marked by their answer to our Angel of the North, a huge piece of architectural welded steelwork. We stopped to look and found that Sid was one of the main benefactors. The town was much changed. It had transformed from a rough and ready mining hut encampment into quite a sophisticated tourist town. There were still the obvious signs of the mining industry with many spoil heaps around numerous mine shafts. Sid lives out of town with Helen and he now has a brick house with a swimming pool, very different from the original accommodation. He is still involved with opals although not personally mining. He provides ‘grub stake’ money to start up miners who need cash for food when they start their new ventures. LR is still a self-help society and Sid is a very well-known figure in the area, being a recognised benefactor of many things, including the hospital, school sports pitches and the miners’ hot spring bath which had completely changed from the rough concrete, rather dirty, washing pool of my first visit in 1968, to a sophisticated hot spring tiled pool. Recently I was sad to hear from Helen that Sid has had a serious stroke, which has left him very damaged. Helen has managed to move him to the LR hospital where she can visit him daily. His four children come up often from Sydney and Coffs Harbour to see him. We wish him well and hope that he may be comfortable in his much loved Lightning Ridge looked after by Helen.