Under the Crust of Coober Pedy

      In 1971 Wanda and I flew to Coober Pedy in the Stuart Range, in South Australia, the location of the world’s biggest opal field.

      As we came in to land, Coober Pedy and its environs looked like Verdun after five months under artillery fire; what appeared to be shell holes were shafts of workings which went down 20 feet or so beneath the surface, into the desert sandstone in which the opals lurk and are found, or not, according to the skill and luck of the miners. Other holes in the earth’s crust, not distinguishable at this height, were the chimney and air inlets of the underground houses in which the majority of the permanent inhabitants lived troglodytic lives, having dug their multi-roomed residences out of the sandstone and equipped them with every imaginable and unimaginable convenience (one of the more unimaginable being a revolving bed surrounded by mirrors, whose owner, a half-French, half-Hungarian gentleman, proudly demonstrated it to me).

      The remaining unfortunates, who included the majority of the Aborigines, lived on the surface in the unimaginable horror of corrugated-iron huts or else in caravans, some of which were equipped with air-conditioning. Unimaginably horrible because in summer here the temperature rises to a shattering 140°F, shade temperatures reach the high 120s, and life is only tolerable underground, where the temperature never rises much above 80°F – less with air-conditioning. In winter the temperature outside sinks to the low 40s – the lowest ever recorded was 26°. Coober Pedy is a rugged place.

      There was no surface water in the town. What water there was, which was very salty, was pumped from 350 feet underground into a solar still. The inhabitants were rationed to 25 gallons a week, not that many of them actually drank water. Until 1966 it was carted all the way from Mathesson’s Bore, 80 miles to the north.

      There was not a lot to see on the surface of Coober Pedy (even the pretty little Roman Catholic church, which was like a catacomb, was underground) once we had seen the excellent hospital, the motels, the two or three eating places, played cricket on the cricket pitch, and had drinks in the Italian club to which we had been lucky enough to get an introduction. Even the buildings on either side of the dirt road which was the main street only had a skyline at dawn and at dusk. In the evening the great clouds of dust thrown up by the trucks and cars whirling into town against the sunset were a marvellous sight. By that time many of the Aborigines who spent their days scratching for opals among the spoil of abandoned diggings, the half-castes and the completely decayed white men, were all lying semi-comatose against a fence surrounded by empty port bottles.

      There were few Australians born and bred among the miners. Almost all of them were Europeans who emigrated to this distant land because they found life intolerable in their own – Slovenes, Serbo-Croats, Italians, Greeks, East Germans, Poles, Czechs, Spaniards, all dreaming of the day when they would make a strike and take the next plane out.

      Anyone could become an opal miner. No experience was necessary. All you needed were lots of guts, a partner you could trust when he was down the mine alone with the opals, and a Miner’s Right which you could buy for 50 cents at the Post Office. It entitled you to prospect a claim 50 yards by 50 for a month, after which, if you wanted to continue working it, you had to register your claim at a cost of under Aus$10 a year. You also needed a pick, shovel, hand auger, carbide light, windlass and ladders.

      Professional opal buyers came here from all over the world. The miners would accept nothing for their opals but cash; not even traveller’s cheques would do. And they gave no receipts for fear of being identified by the Inland Revenue. All buyers were forced to have large quantities of cash about their person. Most buyers were therefore armed, but in spite of this some buyers still disappeared.

      Digging started at dawn and soon after noon most miners had had enough. Then the long bar in the Opal Motel (men only) filled up and stayed full until about 10 p.m., by which time Slovenes, Poles, Irishmen, Czechs and even an occasional Englishman were either slithering to the floor or else collapsing as if pole-axed, according to their powers of resistance. During this time, ten hours or so, nothing had been discussed except opals, not even women.

      This was a tough town which all through the hot months was almost entirely without women. The girls came to Coober Pedy at the beginning of autumn, around the first of June, as regularly as migrant swallows. They came in air-conditioned coaches and the first arrivals were met at the bus stop and straight away carried bodily underground. They cleaned up a packet. One wonders what would happen if an outing of lady school teachers arrived at the same time.

      We quitted this amazing place with real regret and flew on eastwards over Lake Torrens, a ghastly, ghostly, dazzlingly white saline expanse, to Hawker, a pleasant little nineteenth-century town, in the middle of what used to be vast wheat fields, now sheep country, in the Flinders Ranges. Here I met Jeff Findley, who had been asked to take me into Outback country.

      ‘The Nips have got the six-cylinder Land Rovers licked with their Toyotas,’ he said gloomily. ‘If I was Lord Stokes I’d be real worried.’ I wrote to Lord Stokes pointing this out, but he was so unworried that he didn’t bother to reply.

      We drove up through the Ranges by way of the Hills of Arkaba, where there was a sheep station but scarcely any sheep, which was not surprising considering that in this sort of country at this time of year there were probably only 10,000 sheep to 10,000 acres.

      Finally, we arrived at the Parachilna Hotel, 57 miles from Hawker, but longer by the route we took, just at the moment when the sky fell in and this particular part of the Outback and a good 500 miles north of it were deluged with water.

      It is almost as difficult in retrospect to remember this night at the Parachilna Hotel as it is to forget it. Difficult either way with the malt whisky flowing like beer and the beer like spring water, and Angus Donald McKenzie, the proprietor of this old and extensive hotel, playing a lament on the bagpipes, with the rain falling so thick outside that it was difficult to breathe and while all that was going on trying to listen to old Bert Rickaby, who was eighty or ninety, I forget which, but looked sixty, who the previous week had opened up his stomach with a pen knife and got out 26 ounces of fluid, presumably pure Glen Grant.

      ‘… so I got some salt,’ Rickaby was speaking about some more ancient affliction now, ‘cut the poisoned part three times on top and twice underneath, rubbed in salt from the lake, and then went into Maree and got piss drunk.’

      The rain ended any serious attempt to reach the real uninhabited Outback. Having charged through Beltana, a ghost town deep in mud, population six families – three Aboriginal, three white – and water-courses which engulfed the transfer box on our Range Rover, all the next day we sat on the bank of Emu Creek waiting for it to subside while the mile-long trains of freight cars on the Central Australian Railway, from Alice Springs, hummed down the line triumphantly above us.

      The magnificent Victorian hotels we came across might have been in the West Country. They had hitching rails outside which were not for horses any more, but had been reinforced to prevent the owners of Nissans and Toyota Land Cruisers, all fitted with winches, lifting hooks and kangaroo bars, from driving them through the retaining wall of the hotel and into the bar inside.

      So far as I could make out most of the fighting in Outback pubs was on account of somebody refusing to have a beer with someone else.