Coober Pedy

Sunday 1st June

What an extraordinary town this is. The people all seem so passionate about Opal, the opal bug seems to have everyone in it's grasp.

We joined the tour offered at our caravan park, The Stuart Range CP, and what a good choice it was, our driver/tour guide Fran was a wealth of information even though she wasn't even a local, she is a nomad who pulled into Coober Pedy with her husband about 18 months ago has decided to stay for a while. She has been doing these tours for almost a year now. She absolutely loves the place and it shows in the way she tells us about it.

First we had a tour around the town and out to the residential area where you would never have known was there, the housing was all dugouts, dug into the side of the hills and tunnelled in to whatever size home you wanted. If you needed an extra room, just tunnel in a little further. These dugouts range in price from around $40,000 to over half a million. Over 70% of the population live underground in this type of accommodation, and do you blame them with temperatures ranging from zero to 65 degrees in the peak of summer. A great many of the locals leave town in summer and head to Adelaide or Perth, businesses close down and it becomes like a ghost town.

We toured around many of the opal fields, Fran explaining how dangerous it is to walk between the mullock heaps, as beside each mullock heap there is a mine shaft, most of which are uncovered totally  exposed, and a lot if them are up to 70 feet deep. The miners dig the shaft, do their tunnelling for opal and when finished they just abandon the hole, they have no legal requirements to fill in the holes/ shafts so they don't, they just move on, mostly only a few metres away to the next site to drill.

We got to see the machinery they use for both the tunnelling and the open cuts as well as the noodling machines.  After the small miners have abandoned the sites the open cut guys move in with their big machines and cut great sections open and they usually find more opal. The noodlers also move into abandoned sections of the opal fields and they sift through the mullock heaps, they too usually find even more opal.

We drove out to The Breakaways, another amazing part of this country. The Breakaways were originally part of a mountain range which millions of years ago broke away from what we know today as The Flinders Ranges, and left us with this spectacular landscape.

On our way to the Breakaways we drove along a section of the famous Dog/Dingo fence. This mesh fence at 5 foot high and 5600kms long across South Australia and the Northern Territory was built to keep the sheep safe from the dingos, which have been known to kill up to 30 sheep each per day, and they don't even eat them, they just kill them.

A bit of trivia for you, the dingo fence is more than twice as long as The Great Wall of China.


Back into town we visited the Umina Mine and Museum where we viewed a short film on the origins of Coober Pedy and of how the opal is formed. The museum also has a 'display' dugout home for tourists to see how it is to live underground.

Our last stop for the day was the famous Serbian Church, a stunning dugout, at 3 stories in all it is complete with a full altar and nave, fabulous carvings in the sandstone walls, leadlight windows and everything else you would expect to see in any church, and all totally underground.

Back to our caravan park for a BBQ dinner. We had met our neighbours earlier on the tour and invited them over for a wine, as they had lots of information for us on where we are heading.

The above is the short version of the places and things we saw today.

Coober Pedy, a place not to be missed if you are heading up this way. I am sure we will be back sometime as there is so much more to see and do here.