About Tikka Opals

Family Owned business

Matti Tikka got into the Opal business by finding an opal worth $2,800 in Australia with nothing more than a screwdriver.

“Forty-two years ago I was holidaying in Lightning Ridge. And we spent three weeks with my wife on the field. Before I left I told a Miner named Andy – “I would like to have a taste of mining.” so he was laughing, gave me a screwdriver, and there was a hole, a 4-feet hole, in old Cochrane, and he said “just dig there” so I went down.

“Where do I start digging? There was sand-band on the wall, that’s usually where opal appears, and then he went away laughing you see…

“15 minutes later I’d dug a little hole, got a piece, and you know, two-thousand-eight-hundred dollars.”

Matti told me about how he then brought the Opal to a cutter, and due to his ignorance of the business, the cutter stole the heart of the opal from him. Matti was a very happy man though – he was able to take all $2,800 and invest it straight into his first new car, a brand new Ford Falcoln.

True black opals only come from one place and that’s Lightning Ridge, New North Wales, Australia. There are claims of Black Opals from other locations, but the real thing can only be found in the Lightning Ridge mines, according to Matti. Matti owns his own mines, but he’s been reducing them over the years, and now keeps his business simple with a “couple fellas” working on one of the mines.