Travel
Opal fever
by Pamela Wade
Gemstones and fossils are beneath your feet – and above your head – in Coober Pedy.
There were teeth marks on the ceiling of my hotel room. And on the walls. In fact, only the floor was free of the combed grooves made by the tunnelling machine that had cut the room out of a sandstone hillside. This was both disorientating and dismaying, because it looked exactly like the brown and orange shag-pile carpet that it had been my misfortune to live with for five years in the 80s.
It was not a happy memory so I clicked off the light, and was plunged into darkness. Outside, the sun was shining, but not a single ray penetrated to this room that was neither warm nor cool: it was as though all my senses had deserted me. No wonder Coober Pedy is full of odd people. This place messes with your head.
Before I arrived, all I knew about the place was that opals are mined there, it gets so hot in summer that everyone lives underground, the lunar landscape was the location for the third Mad Max film, and people go there to disappear, not always intentionally. It sounded fascinating. I couldn’t wait to get there.
But nobody gets to Coober Pedy in a hurry. Halfway between Adelaide and Alice Springs, it’s nine hours by car along the Stuart Highway and two hours even by plane, a trip during which the immensity of the Outback begins to sink in. From the air the land around the town looks exactly like a vast sandy beach where the tide has gone out, exposing thousands of small round holes, each surrounded by neat conical mounds, like worm cast.
Some worms: the holes are actually a metre across and up to 30 metres deep. No one knows how many there are – or how many have a jumble of bones at the bottom. All around the opal fields there are danger signs, illustrated by a startled stick-figure plunging head-first down a shaft, and warnings not to walk backwards when taking photos are repeated to every visitor. But in a place where both temperatures and tempers run hot, huge fortunes can be had underground and guns and explosives are common, an abandoned pit is a handy place to dispose of the evidence of a terminal disagreement.
Although the police station, courthouse and a restaurant have been blown up in the past, and the fortnightly outdoor cinema still begins its programme with a slide saying “Explosives are not to be brought into this theatre”, tourism has become the town’s second industry and life is a lot tamer now. As well as the busy pub there are pizzerias, hairdressers (beard trims a specialty), motels, opal shops and churches, some of them underground.
Opals were discovered here in 1915, but it wasn’t until soldiers returning from World War I put their trench-digging skills to use that miners discovered the constant cool and sheltered comfort of homes dug into hillsides away from summer’s 55-degree heat and dust storms. Now over half the townspeople live like this, some with underground pools, saving electricity on heating and air-conditioning and spending it on lighting instead.
Jimmy the Runner is a miner-turned-tour guide. He’s nicknamed for his marathon titles, although his stories about economising with fuse-length back in his dynamite days suggest another explanation. He proudly showed me St Elijah’s, a dugout Serbian church with scalloped ceiling and perfect acoustics. The honey-coloured sandstone glowed warmly in the light from the stained-glass windows, picking out the intricate carvings of saints sculpted by Norm Aston, a Kiwi who was also a Mine Rescue volunteer. He was just one of the thousands from all over the world who come to Coober Pedy fired up with opal fever, get the dust and desolation under their skin and can never leave.
Jimmy is another one. “I lost my heart to this place,” he said, his Greek accent still strong after 43 years, as we stood on the orange and brown lands they call the Breakaways, looking out over the stark beauty of the Moon Plain.
This was the floor of an inland sea 120 million years ago and its only vertical feature is the 5400km Dog Fence that divides sheep and cattle country. In among the shiny red stones and thick chunks of transparent gypsum flashing in the sun are the fossils of creatures that once swam here, including a six-metre ichthyosaur found by Derek Rowe, who took me out to the Painted Desert.
Stockman, potter, opal miner, champion cowboy rider and amateur palaeontologist, Derek is immensely knowledgeable but also still full of wonder for the Outback.
“She takes ages to give up her secrets, this bloody joint,” he said, as we watched the puffs of dust stirred by the wingtips of a wedge-tailed eagle swooping low along the road to fell a drought-weakened kangaroo.
He was equally interested to hear from me that there was a new German waitress at the Oodnadatta Roadhouse, only 200km down the road. Like other eligible men in the area, he’d be calling there soon to check her out.
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