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Published: August 31st 2006
The main stop on the trip between Adelaide and Alice Springs is an opal mining town called Coober Pedy famous mostly for its underground housing options. I have been to places where people live underground or in the cliffsides (parts of souther Tunisia), so I must admit that the Coober Pedy features I was most looking forward to seeing was the prop space ship Vin Diesel uses to escape the planet at the end of the movie Pitch Black and some of the murals of Priscilla Queen of the Desert that I heard about.
The title of this entry is one of the funniest lines in the movie Pricilla Queen of the Dessert, a great Aussie film and one of the most well known outside Australia. The movie is about two transvestites and a transexual going on a roadtrip from Adelaide to Alice Spring on a bus christened Priscilla. One of their stops is in Coober Pedy and the movie is commemorated in town by several murals of scenes from the movie. I thought it was interesting that a fairly conservative town celebrates a movie considered risque. I also found the Pitch Black ship in the middle of town in
front of a mining museum. Toilets and showers had been attached to the back end of the ship. I didn't have to go so I didn't use the Pitch Black toilets.
The mine museum had a tour so I could learn all about opal mining. I went into it thinking it was just going to be a 20 minute opal pitch but it turned out to include a tour of a sample underground dwelling plus some history of the town. Opals were discovered in the area around WWI. Returning soldiers flocked to the area to make their fortunes. There are no tress in the area and shipping in housing materials was costly. The ex-soldiers who had spent years in the trenches already new how to dig tunnels and had experience living underground. So they mined for opals and dugout their homes.
The homes called dugouts are much more than the holes in the ground that expected. Instead they are elaborate residents with all the amenities any of us are used to. Except for windows of course. Tunnels and rooms are cleared using explosives and tunnneling equipment. During the construction the miners keep an eye out for opals. The
initioal vertical shaft into the ground is used as the vent for the residence and all the electric and plumbing equipment is installed near the entrance. The walls of the room are sprayed with a resin to seal the walls and prevent chalky dust from floating in the air. There is no need for air conditioning or heat as the temperature of the dugouts stay at a constant comfortable level. My concern was cave ins. However, due to the geology of the area, there has never been cave in or tunnel collapse. We were told that if there was an earthquake in the area, the underground dugouts would be the safest places to be. Dugouts are not limited to residences but also included hotels (including the hostel I stayed in), bars, restaurants, a church, and even a bowling alley. The bowling alley actually belongs to private dugout owner who found lots of opals during his dugout expansion.
So Coober Pedy underground was quite impressive, however; above ground was a different story. Despite the Priscilla murals and unique Pitch Black bathrooms, the buildings were mostly run down and ramshackle. The landscape was marked with mining equipment and piles of spoil.
Walking around town was not a pleasure and this is probably one of the few places I've visited that I really have no need to see again.
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