The Town That Everyone Digs
Sun Herald
Saturday April 6, 1996
IT'S a big day down Coober Pedy way today at the Opal and Outback Festival.
And as you're reading this on Easter Sunday, you are probably not at Coober Pedy - it takes a while for NSW newspapers to reach the remote South Australian settlement.
Perhaps you wonder why anyone would want to go to Coober Pedy. It's not the most beautiful spot in Australia, nor the easiest place to live. Yet there are many residents who would never leave - and nobody visits there without learning something about the Australian character.
Gambling is in the Australian blood and it has been since the first gold rush.
We believe in the bonanza, the lucky strike which will some day be ours. Some of us chase it at common gambling venues like the casino, the racetrack, the stock exchange and the lottery office.
And some of us hunt it, even in the most rugged corners of the continent.
That's what the people of Coober Pedy have done. They live in hope and the spirit they celebrate today is a spirit of optimism in the face of adversity.
Coober Pedy - Aboriginal for "man in a hole" - describes the life of the miners and of most of the town. They live underground. On the surface the main street is a lot more salubrious than it used to be but it is still hot, arid and dusty.
The locals like to tell stories about those compelled to come to Coober Pedy - the schoolteachers, police and public servants who swore they'd never stay a week but were bitten by the bug and now refuse to leave.
The bug is opal fever.
Opals have been mined since the days of the Pharaohs but were always extremely rare. Then such rich deposits of opal were discovered at Coober Pedy that it became known as the Australian gem.
Australia produces 95 per cent of the world's opal and most comes from Coober Pedy.
We owe it all to a young lad named Willie Hutchinson. He was out in the Stuart Ranges with his father and a prospecting party in 1915. They were looking for gold and his job was to mind the base camp and have a cup of tea ready for them. But silly Willie forgot to boil the billy. Instead, he wandered off to nearby hills and filled a sugar bag with rocks. His father choked back his rage at not getting a cup of tea when he discovered the bag was full of rich opal.
AUSTRALIA'S great mineral discoverers seldom made a buck. Paddy Hannan died a pauper after discovering Kalgoorlie's Golden Mile. John Campbell Miles found the world's richest deposit of copper, lead, silver and zinc at Mount Isa but left the field without a penny.
Willie Hutchinson made nothing from Coober Pedy and six years later, at only 20, drowned trying to swim a mob of cattle across the flooded Georgina River.
Many of the early miners at Coober Pedy were returned soldiers from World War I who couldn't get a job anywhere else in their grateful country. They knew about digging trenches after their sojourn in the fields of France.
They employed the same tactic at Coober Pedy, where the enemy was the wind. It howled like a furnace blast across the desolate sandhills and gibber plains and regularly flattened the few flimsy buildings of corrugated iron.
The diggers tunnelled into the hills and pushed air shafts through the roof to ventilate their caves. They discovered living like troglodytes had many advantages. They were free from dust and flies and enjoyed a constant cool temperature. The gypsum earth was secure from cave-ins but easy to excavate. And if the family expanded, they just chopped out another bedroom.
None of this has changed in principle. It is just that the underground buildings now include two churches, a couple of tourist mines and a hotel claimed to be the world's first underground five-star hotel.
If the life below is a little softer than it was, the landscape above is still the same. This is the country of the Moon Plain and the Dingo Fence and the Breakaways, where Mad Max - Beyond Thunderdome was filmed.
It is extraordinary country, and so is Coober Pedy - perforated by opal shafts and looking from the air like a giant crumpet.
The most respected commandment in town is the one about open mining shafts - "Don't Step Backwards".
© 1996 Sun Herald
