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Built on Opal: Coober Pedy, South Australia
Living and working underground in Australia’s Outback
Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome was filmed in Outback South Australia. So was the Vin Diesel movie Pitch Black. Thomas Engelman, producer of Pitch Black, selected Coober Pedy for the three-sun desert planet because its landscape ‘looked more desolate and dangerous than Mars’.
In South Australia, the Outback starts close to the cities. Past Port Augusta, the houses, factories, and service stations shrink in the rear view mirror. The Stuart Highway cuts north across red dirt dotted with mulga, past gibber plains and salt lakes glittering in the sun. Flocks of green budgerigars swirl across a wide blue sky. Goannas stride across the warm asphalt, unhurried and uncaring.
The Stuart Highway offers few diversions. At Pimba, the Olympic Dam Highway branches off to Woomera village, Roxby Downs, and the opal fields of Andamooka. It is sealed all the way to Andamooka, but after that the roads are dusty, rugged, and empty.
Coober Pedy is the largest town in Outback South Australia. Approaching from the south, the first indications you are nearing the place are billboards spruiking cheap fuel and accommodation. Closer to town, dirt roads turn off towards hundreds of mullock heaps that rise from the flat land like giant ant mounds. They are made of rock and dirt removed from opal mines, scrutinised by expert eyes, sifted, and discarded.
Coober Pedy is a town built on opal. In January 1915, at the height of summer, a party of prospectors crossed the desert to search for gold. They encountered drought and ‘a heavy drift of red sand’ that made it ‘very difficult to locate…known reefs’. In place of precious metal, they found ‘a huge deposit of opal’. In a note published in the Adelaide Advertiser (22 February 1915), the prospectors said they had ‘opened a top deposit some 20 ft in length’ and which they had ‘traced some hundreds of feet’. The field they found was huge.
