Diggers and dugouts

Mullock hills and mine shafts

The first opal in Coober Pedy was found quite late in Aussie mining history: 1 Feb 1915.  That day, fourteen year old Will Hutchison, was left alone in a tent-camp while his dad set off searching for gold and water.  Even then, fourteen year old boys could not stay still.  

When dad returned after a day of no success, Will was missing.  Dad was just about to send up a panic alert, when back into the camp strolled young Will with a pick in his hand, a smile on his face, and a sack full of opal floaters on his back. That day Will was in luck, he even found water.  Riches all around.  

Young Will did not, however,  live to see the day in 1926, when the settlement he unwittingly started was eventually named Coober Pedy, after Kupa Piti, an aboriginal variation meaning ‘white man’s dugout’.

After the war, 'Diggers', named for the trenches they clawed out for shelter against wartime bombardment, found their way to Coober Pedy where they built different dugouts and gouged a living chipping for fabled opals.

Today, we see signs that show hundreds upon hundreds of vertically dug prospecting shafts: uncovered. Unprotected. Everywhere. A quarter of a million of them, or so it is said. Anyone could fall into one of these and die. Rules and laws about reclamation are still waiting to be clarified around here. Do miners, whose leases are complete fill in these shafts, or not? Who knows? Nothing seems set in stone for long. But one day, I fear, this random regulation is going to be a massive headache for the governing body who leases this mining land.

Underneath the bullock heaps

Coober Pedy appears  straight out of a wild west movie, though possibly, even more anarchic.  Mining towns, in the days our great-grandfathers wandered the country searching for something to fill their worn and weatherbeaten swags, must have looked just like this a hundred and fifty years ago.

Great falls of rubble slide from on high, straight down onto the main street: an accident waiting to happen. Unpaved streets radiate where local traffic demands and tyre treads mark the routes.

Random. Rafferty’s Rules.

Nowadays, low slung hills have been shaved vertically by big machines that toss waste into piled heaps -- and leave it. Into that clean-shaven hill a pit-roaring drill-and-bit bores out rooms horizontal to the ground, metres deep in the deep rocky hills.  Dugouts.

Dugouts 

Half Coober Pedy’s population of three to six thousand (give or take three thousand in any single season) live in such underground homes: some simple bedsits, others palatial pads with pools, ponds, gold taps and billiard rooms -- all darkened, cavernous and cool -- a stable 25C inside, while outside, on a summer’s day, you might fast fry a fresh egg on any flat rock.

Some twenty or thirty of these places belong to Hong Kong opal buyers who maintain homes and cars here, year round, and take their pick of the packets of opals available for sale.   

So, times certainly have changed.  

Many are palatial

oooOOOooo