Daniel Stephens is from Broken Hill, but as a child fell in love with the wild landscape of White Cliffs, the remote opal fields town of NSW.

I met Daniel on a recent visit, and asked how he come to be working underground, as a sort of adult mining apprentice, and why he swears he often catches the scent of the ocean.

“When I was a wee little kid, we used to get out in the hills on the other side of Broken Hill with an older couple - they had the Feldspar mine out there,” Daniel explained.

Feldspar is a mineral used to make class and ceramics.

“Then when I was a kid – maybe five or six – I came out here on a school tour, and it was even more interesting.

“I suppose I’ve been a ‘rock licker’ my whole life,” he laughed, referring to the practice of opal hunters to lick a promising rock, to wet it and reveal the flash of sought-after colour.

“As weird as it is, you find something pretty on the ground up here, it goes straight in your mouth. You got to chew on it and have a look at what's inside it.”

But alongside the prized White Cliffs opal, Daniel gets excited by the discover of ancient fossils.

“I love the fossils. The opal bit is beautiful and interesting, but the fossil side really gets me going. We've found shells and different little belemnites, which are little baby squids.”

The mine-pocked dry earth of White Cliffs now has a scorching summer climate but was once covered by an ancient inland sea. Like Coober Pedy and Andamooka, White Cliffs was a marine environment, and the fossils are from sea living creatures.

That is why Daniel swears he can still sometimes smell the ocean – more than a thousand kilometres inland – when he is mining underground.

“I reckon, one in a blue moon, I can smell the ocean when I am down the shaft. I can be just breaking into new ground and pull my mask off to have a moment and be like, ‘Ooh, I can smell the ocean.” We're digging into ancient ground that is still moist, and it smells like salt. It smells like the ocean. It's weird, but it’s amazing.”

Daniel works alongside opal-fields local legend Ken Harris, learning the craft of uncovering ancient treasures.

Ken famously uncovered an entire aquatic dinosaur in the 1970’s, from the same mine they work together today.