Harold Hodges lived in Lightning Ridge from the late 1950s through the 60s and 70s and was one of the free spirits who gave the place its maverick, larger-than-life reputation.

“He was a character,” says Lightning Ridge resident and friend of Harold Hodges, Kevin Williams.

“He was his own person - straightforward - called a spade a spade.”

Hodges famously won a hundred pound bet that the kids of Lightning Ridge would one day ride down the main street on a tram, when he brought in the trams that were to become the Tram-O-Tel.

He was an opal dealer and SP bookie, owned the local slaughterhouse and established a local museum containing relics of Lightning Ridge greats such as Fred Bodel, Orm Long and others.

Perhaps his most notorious caper was commissioning and wearing a set of dentures crafted out of opal.

The teeth were made in Hodges’ former hometown of Parkes, NSW in the dental surgery of Geoffrey Brown.

While the molars are of conventional appearance, the front of the denture is a work of dental art of which any opal carver (or rap singer) would be proud, featuring six teeth beautifully crafted from Lightning Ridge opal.

Like so many celebrities Hodges grew tired of the public spotlight he had drawn to himself, as more and more people asked him to, “Smile, Hodgie.”

Eventually he had the denture cemented into the wall in his corner of the Diggers Rest Hotel

where it continued to amaze and amuse for some years.

Fortunately Hodges’ wife Debbie retrieved the denture from the Diggers after Harold passed away and in 1985 entrusted it into the care of Hodges’ close friend Kevin Williams and his wife Helen.

“I promised Mrs Hodges I would take care of the teeth,” Kevin says.

Kevin and Helen have themselves had a long connection with Lightning Ridge; indeed, Helen’s grandfather Charlie Troy mined with pioneering opal miner Charlie Nettleton in the early years of the twentieth century.