Subterranean Living

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I get chatting to the motel manager over breakfast. She says that her occupancy rate’s currently well down, which she attributes almost entirely to the well publicised recent civil unrest in Alice Springs. She tells me that lots of bus tours through here have been cancelled, and even some of the scheduled Ghan services haven’t run due to lack of passengers. She says that the situation in The Alice is deplorable; gangs roaming the streets armed with guns and machetes, smashing cars and property, and injuring people. She says that the curfew has helped, as have additional police services, but it’s far from a complete solution. Hmmm. Alice Springs is our next stop, and I’m suddenly feeling relieved that we’ve opted for accommodation a few kilometres outside town. This is all incredibly sad. It seems to me to be an almost intractable problem, the confluence of two almost fundamentally incompatible cultures. It’d be great if could retain the best elements of both, but it’s hard to envisage a hunter gatherer lifestyle surviving in the modern world, and our introduction of alcohol’s been a disaster for our country’s original inhabitants. If there was a simple solution I’m sure someone much smarter than me would have come up with it by now.

We don’t trust ourselves to see all that there is to see here in Coober Pedy in the short time we’ve got available, so we opt to join a small bus tour with the laconic and highly entertaining sixty something George. We learn that Coober Pedy is often referred to as the “opal capital of world” due to the quantity and quality of opals that’ve been found here. The first opal was discovered in 1915, opal miners started turning up in 1916, and the town was formally established five years later in 1920. Its current population’s only around 1,500. It’s one of the driest settlements in the entire country, with an annual rainfall of only around 150 mm, so lack of water’s always been a problem, particularly in the early days. A number of bores were drilled close to the town, but the water they did find was too salty to drink. The current supply is pumped 30 kilometres from a bore in the Great Artesian Basin.

First stops are at two underground churches. We’re told that the front section of the Catholic Church was dug entirely by hand and took nine years. The similarly sized back section was then dug with a machine and that only took nine weeks. Hmmm. Next up is the much larger Anglican Church. Its roof span looks quite big, and a few in our party are starting to look a bit nervous about its stability. Issy seems to think the rooves of conventional churches are likely to fall in every time she steps inside, so I’m not quite sure how she’s feeling right now. George tells us that cave-ins are rare, and those that have happened are usually minor and caused by trying to dig with insufficient solid ground above. The more common problem is prospective home owners getting a bit over enthusiastic with their picks and suddenly finding themselves in their neighbours’ living rooms. Hmmm. We’re shown one of the church’s two large diameter ventilation shafts which run twenty metres or so up to the surface above. These are apparently an essential component of all underground buildings here.

If you want to find opals here, apparently you can’t just turn up and start digging. You need to make your way down to the Mines Department office in the main street and fork out $220 for a hundred by fifty metre claim, which you then need to peg with posts. It’s then yours for a year, and no one else can wander onto it. And once you’ve staked your claim, you have to actively work it, and Mines Department inspectors come around to check. You can only stake one claim per year. If you want to stake other claims within that time they need to be in someone else’s name, usually a spouse or other family member. If the sizes of the some of the claims are anything to go by, family planning doesn’t seem to be a big priority here.

Next stop is the Umoona Opal Mine and Museum. We watch an opal polishing demonstration, followed by a video on the early history of the town which focuses on the hardships the early explorers had to contend with. It took months to get here from anywhere else. You needed camels to carry everything, and they had to traipse across salt pans, sand hills and gibber plains which were hard on their feet. …. and if you miscalculated how much water you might need to carry, well that probably wouldn’t end well for either you or your animal. We’re shown through a typical “dugout”, and then taken down into the mine, one of the town’s earliest.

It might be a small town (population 1,500), but they seem to have most facilities here they might need. There’s a hospital, staffed with doctors from Adelaide who come here on a two week rotation, bowling green, swimming pool, school, and a stony race track that hosts a meet once a year. There’s even a drive-in theatre …. well there would be if a violent storm hadn’t destroyed most of the screen back in January. The locals apparently aren’t overly impressed that the insurance company’s been a bit slow coming to the party with the repairs. We climb a hill for views over the golf course. There’s not a blade of grass in sight - the “fairways” are gravel, and the “greens” are black sand - but I guess if you’re desperate for a round ….

Next up is a drive through and around some of the opal fields. It‘s a real moonscape, untold thousands of mullock heaps and shafts. We’re told it’s too dangerous to get out of the bus. George tells us that you want to wander around out here, you need to bring someone with you, and it might be in your best interests if it was someone that likes you. It’s apparently estimated that there are somewhere around a million and a half mine shafts in the area around the town, most of which are more than twenty metres deep, so if you happened to fall down one, and no one else knew exactly where, well good luck getting out. Once dug, shafts aren’t allowed to be filled in, as the fill would never settle which would make them even more dangerous than if they were left as they were..

This has got to be one of the most fascinating places on the planet. Apparently tourism is now just as important for the town as opal mining, and it’s probably just as well its isolation is preventing it from being overrun.

I take a dusty late afternoon drive out to the Kanku-Breakaways Conservation Park (“The Breakaways”) which is around thirty kilometres north of the town. The so-called “painted desert” landscapes out here are almost otherworldly, right up there with the best I’ve seen. A perhaps less attractive feature of the Park is the flies, so so so many flies. Where do they all come from, and who do they bug when there aren’t any humans around? I do seem to be about the only person here, so maybe the bug factor gets diluted when there are a few more people to molest. A loop track takes me along the famous Dog Fence which stretches more than 5,600 kms from the South Australian Great Australian Bight to the Darling Downs in southern Queensland. It’s roughly twice as long as the Great Wall of China and one of the longest structures on the planet. It started life in the late 1800s as a barrier for rabbits, a so-called “rabbit proof fence”. That didn’t work too well, so it was progressively modified in an attempt to keep dingoes away from sheep. It’s apparently not perfect, but has been at least partially successful in keeping the dogs out. It might work pretty well on emus too based on what I can see of one of them trying to get past it.

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Comments

[D MJ Binkley]

Beautiful
Stark and lovely

[DaveandIssy]

The Breakaways
Absolutely spectacular, and I had it virtually to myself.