Why The Great Artesian Basin Is A Wonder Of Nature

[00:00:06]I'm here at the Lightning Ridge bore bath. The water here [music] comes out of the Great Artesian Basin without pumping heated to over 40° C.

[00:00:17]That's over 100° F, which makes it very cheap to run the these baths. The water in this part of the basin is over 2 million years old, which makes it heavy with particular minerals that some people think adds the pleasure of being in the baths. We even met one individual who'd been coming to the area for every year for 60 years and had become something of a connoisseur of the different baths and could tell us the the merits of the different ones.

[00:00:46]Lightning Ridge has a big tourist industry as the world center of black opal mining. It would do okay with even without the baths, but there's lots of other towns on the Great Artesian Basin for whom this water is the key to their survival. This is just one of the many bore baths on the Great Artesian Basin that have created something of a tourist trail with people going from one bath to another because they can sit in them all day if they like for free.