Chambers of the Black Hand is the most memorable underground stop in Lightning Ridge. The tour drops into an old opal mine, but the surprise is the sandstone: walls and pillars carved and painted with hundreds of figures, turning the mine into a strange, handmade gallery below the fields.
It works because it is both mining history and local eccentricity. You come out with a clearer sense of how opal mining happens, and also of why the Ridge attracts people who would rather build their own world underground than fit neatly into someone else's.