Wednesday 24 September 2014

Australia 2014 - (7) Coober Pedy

In the afternoon I took a bus tour of Coober Pedy. The town was founded in the early nineteen hundreds when opals were found there, prompting something of an opal rush which is still going on today. The whole town in surrounded by mounds of sandstone drilled out in the mining process. Anyone can stake a claim – all you have to do is go along to the Council Offices, pay $150 and state which lot you’d like. Each lot is either 50 m x 50 m or 50 m x 100 m. You, and preferably a couple of friends, then go off to your site, use a large drill to dig down up to 30 m (as this is as deep as opal can be found) and see if you can find the precious gems.

Our guide told us various stories of huge gains and losses. It costs around $1000 a day just for the diesel required to power the drill, tunnelling machine and giant vacuum that sucks all the rubble back out, so at that price, a lot of miners now have day jobs and just do it on the weekend.

The other remarkable thing about Coober Pedy is that because it gets so hot there that people started moving into the old mine shafts and there are a huge number of underground homes. I have to confess, I thought the whole town would be underground, but there are also quite a lot of surface homes too. The whole place looks a bit scruffy but our guide assured us, some of the underground homes are worth over AU$350,000.

We went to a museum based in an old mine which had living quarters as well as mining tunnels. I think I would find the whole living underground thing quite claustrophobic but I can understand why people do it.