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The Peculiar Charm of Coober Pedy, Australia’s Opal Capital

Green Hearts by Green Hearts
March 14, 2022
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It might have been a Saturday evening in any Australian city. Against the backdrop of a fiery sundown, a line of autos snaked its means into the native drive-in.

At this outside theater, although, in place of commercials for native companies or a refreshment stand, one thing else was projected onto the large display screen: a reminder for patrons to not convey explosives into the complicated.

Welcome to the South Australian city of Coober Pedy, the opal capital of the world, the place in days passed by, Saturday evening on the drive-in would typically finish with a bang.

“Coober Pedy has attracted its fair share of characters over the years,” mentioned Stephen Staines, who works in town’s district council. “People come here for the adventure, and miners would head to the drive-in with their utes” — pickup vehicles — “packed full of equipment, including the gelignite they use out on the field.”

“If they didn’t like the movie or got bored,” he mentioned, “it wasn’t unusual for them to throw sticks of gelignite at the screen.”

While nights on the drive-in are not fairly as unstable, the locals aren’t any much less defiant. In reality, you must be as a way to survive in a single of Australia’s harshest and most remoted environments.

Summer temperatures right here common round 100 levels Fahrenheit, and repeatedly prime 110. Vegetation is sparse as a result of of a scarcity of topsoil. Drought is an on a regular basis actuality.

So what attracts folks to such a desolate and unforgiving place? In a phrase: opal.

Australia is residence to a overwhelming majority of the world’s industrial opal provide, a lot of which comes from the world round Coober Pedy. There are a number of hundred energetic mining claims, and prospectors working the claims estimate {that a} century of mining has left a number of hundred thousand mine shafts scattered across the area.

Miners start by drilling deep vertical shafts earlier than excavating outward in search of the dear opal veins. Machines known as blowers are then used to suck the excavated rubble to the floor, creating monumental pyramidlike mounds that dot the panorama.

Like many others chasing the dear gemstone, Kenneth Helfand, a prospector, mentioned it’s the chances provided by putting it massive which have saved him mining opal for 5 many years.

“There’s opal on the field worth 10 or 20 thousand dollars an ounce — and when it’s cut and polished, it will fetch 10 times that,” mentioned Mr. Helfand, an American who began mining opal in Coober Pedy within the early Nineteen Seventies.

“What that buys you is freedom, and that’s what keeps you digging,” he mentioned.

With a inhabitants of round 2,000 full-time residents, Coober Pedy is just not on rather a lot of folks’s radar. Roughly midway between Adelaide and Alice Springs, and a day’s drive to every, the city is so remoted that the native soccer workforce’s away video games are greater than a 560-mile spherical journey.

My curiosity in Coober Pedy got here through its reference to the British nuclear testing program of the Nineteen Fifties and Nineteen Sixties, carried out 200 miles away at Maralinga. Into the Eighties, anxieties lingered in Coober Pedy concerning the chance that contaminated tools — incliuding bulldozers and vehicles — had been dropped at the city from the testing websites. Even the city’s group corridor was feared to be radioactive because of this of nuclear fallout. Now deserted, it’s an idiosyncratic relic from a disturbing interval of Australian historical past.

As I first drove into city, although, it shortly grew to become obvious that the corridor and its nuclear legacy weren’t the one peculiarities that Coober Pedy needed to supply. And so my fleeting go to grew to become a weeklong keep.

Established round 1920 after the invention of opal a couple of years earlier, Coober Pedy epitomizes life on the sting. Scattered round city are gopher-like earthen mounds, do-it-yourself mining operations, a dusty rock-strewn golf course, a restaurant that serves do-it-yourself waffles and pancakes (whereas dabbling within the opal commerce on the facet), movie places and deserted props and the societal particles accrued throughout a century of isolation.

Nowhere is Coober Pedy’s extraordinary essence extra evident than within the city’s distinctive resolution to surviving the scorching summer season warmth.

Over half of Coober Pedy’s residents reside underground. And it’s not simply the properties which might be subterranean; the city additionally boasts underground shops, bars and eating places, inns and even church buildings.

While some constructions make the most of outdated mine diggings, many have been purposely carved into the encompassing hills. Maintaining a year-round temperature hovering round 75 levels Fahrenheit, the dugouts, as they’re referred to regionally, supply a first-rate escape from the warmth of summer season and the nippiness of winter. It’s one small fixed in a city whose existence and success are tied to the fluctuating fortunes of opal mining.

“Take away the opals and you take away Coober Pedy’s heart,” Mr. Staines mentioned. “It’s as simple as that.”

Back on the drive-in, midway via the Saturday-night characteristic, Coober Pedy served up one other shock: A mud storm swept via city. With a powerful clap of thunder, automobiles had been hit by the following gale, blanketing them in pink mud and interrupting the screening.

It was a well timed reminder that, regardless of whether or not you’re above floor or beneath it, you by no means fairly know what you’re apt to search out in Coober Pedy.

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