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| The Opal Beetle! |
The kids didn’t mind being in a giant sandblaster and ran off to play on the playground, while Dave and I sat huddled between the caravan and the tent wondering if we had made a terrible mistake in booking in for three nights! Thinking it better to get out of the wind, we drove into town to have a look around. The Underground Serbian Church was our first stop and it was so peaceful down below ground we couldn’t even hear the howling gale. Tempting as it was to convert and stay, we decided that we were too unOrthodox, so we found the Opal Beetle. The lady there told us that high winds were common in October, but unusual for now, so we made a mental note never to return in October. She chatted to us about opal as she dusted all the red dust off her shelves and we learnt the difference between opal and potch.
We wandered into another opal shop, and spent the next hour and a half being thoroughly entertained by Nathan Aretos, a Greek second generation opal miner. He was opal mining more than he was attending school at the age of 13, found a huge amount of opal in his father’s mine by 15 and his family was swindled by his father’s business partner, who ran off with the profits. He was sorting through opal as he told us his life story. His misfortunes began when he set his house alight as a child, then as a young teen he fell 87 feet down a mine shaft. He survived that somehow, and also a burst appendix (no small deal in Coober Pedy hundreds of kilometres from anywhere). He then had a life-threatening infection and is now battling bone cancer. He was such a character – the kids thought he was hilarious describing his 2 brothers: “One is a druggie and an idiot, and the other one is just an idiot”! He told us where to go to “noodle” for opal (and where not to so we didn’t fall down the many open mine shafts) and recommended the restaurant next door for dinner. We hadn’t eaten out at all on the trip, and as the wind was still doing its best to polish the town with outback sand, we thought that a long meal would be a fine plan! The food was great (and even if it wasn’t, it seemed like it was after 2 months of caravan meals!), the servings were huge (Jackson had to go outside and walk up and down before he could finish his lasagne!) and the door was firmly closed against the wind! Miraculously, the wind had dropped a little by the time Ella was almost asleep, so we headed back to see if our tent was still there.
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| Some of the opal on display at Umoona |
We awoke the next morning to a clear, calm morning so we cancelled our retreat plans and went to visit Umoona.
Umoona was a working mine until the Council decreed in the 70s that there would be no more mining in town. Our guide told us that lots of the old timers still think most of the opal is buried in town. As people enlarge their underground homes, it is common to find thousands of dollars worth of opal in the process! We watched the informative movie in an underground theatre, toured an underground home and spent ages in the underground museum. We thought we'd continue the underground theme, so visited the Boot Hill Cemetery, reasoning that a town like this would have an interesting graveyard. It did! The 40 nationalities who live here were well represented with unusual surnames and one story in particular caught our interest. Karl Bratz was dying of cancer when he decided that as everything he'd ever built was made of corrugated iron he wanted a corrugated iron coffin. His headstone is a keg!
Coober Pedy was named in the 1920s, from the Aboriginal words kupa piti meaning “white man’s burrow”. The Aboriginals were amazed at the crazy white men who were trying to live underground in a place so far from water. Water continues to be a huge challenge to the town, but things have progressed slightly since the 1920’s when each person had a 2 gallon ration for the week! Half the town’s inhabitants live underground, so there are not many houses, nor are there any trees or grass. It is a truly bizarre, incredibly interesting frontier town!
These photos are of the main part of town. Coober Pedy only got street names in the mid 80s, as everything referred to the hill it was dug into eg Postman's Hill.
These photos are of the main part of town. Coober Pedy only got street names in the mid 80s, as everything referred to the hill it was dug into eg Postman's Hill.
Cheetah the cat lived at the office, so Ella went over to get a cat fix before we went out on the second morning. She said he had his own "spinny chair" in the office. The kids were really keen to try some noodling, so we went to the public area for a scratch around. The kids “pegged” their claims and started mining with a gleam in their eyes! They were not keen to leave, but we drove out of town to The Breakaways, part of the Stuart Range. The views over incredibly barren gibber plains (Moon Plain) were so other worldly that you could see why many movies have been filmed here. Mad Max and Priscilla Queen of the Desert are probably the best known. We also followed part of the longest fence in the world, The Dog Fence, which was built to keep the dingoes out of the southern sheep country. The fence was easily visible, as the tumbleweeds had built up on the southern side!
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| The two hills are dogs in Aboriginal legend, Moon Plain in the background. |
Many of you have been asking about the busking. The Haystack Mountain Hermits have been the Haystack Mountain Historians so far! However, we’ve bravely booked to busk in the Todd Mall Markets as we pass back through Alice on Sunday. Rehearsal time (other than in the Blunderbuss whilst driving along) is hard to come by, so we drove back to the noodling area to have a much needed practice and entertained the local dogs and birds, who all joined in! The kids were dying to noodle again, so we stayed there for a few hours while they searched. We were about to give up when Lachlan found a small chip, which encouraged another half an hour of frenzied digging! The sun went down and we were forced to give up, but we dropped by to show Nathan our finds. He said Lachie’s was able to be cut into a stone. The other chips were definitely opal but too small to be worth anything. He then gave us a couple of uncut chips so everyone had something to stop fights! We were genuinely sorry to say goodbye to him.
The Umoona Aboriginal Community has a bus, which they hail wherever and whenever they like. The Umoona Bus and the Blunderbuss are exactly the same. Everywhere we go in town we leave a trail of very annoyed locals, wondering why the bus didn’t stop for them. Three very inebriated men tried to get into the bus as we were leaving Nathan’s shop and were not pleased when we kept driving! Much longer here and we’ll have a rock thrown through the window!
After another freezing night, we were up early ready for the 685km drive back to Alice. As I can’t play the double bass as we travel, I took the wheel for the first 260 kms to Marla, which meant we could run through our songs. We passed by our last free camp which we dubbed “Windy Camp” in the manner of the early explorers, and for once it had nothing to do with Marcus! At one stage, we had to stop on the highway for a herd of fat herefords to cross to better grass on the other side. They were in really good nick – we even saw some green grass in the outback! Dave drove on from Marla and I plugged the computer in to the inverter to catch up on the blog. Writing on the go is making it easier to keep up and I post when we get broadband reception – which hasn’t been often lately! So if I am getting too verbose, apologies – but gentlemen, we have the technology!
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| Crossing back into the Northern Territory |
After driving 100kms through burnt out but still smoking bushfires, we arrived in Alice to find that the Henley on Todd Regatta was on this morning … which meant we drove what seemed like another 685kms looking for a van park spot! We got one in the fourth place we tried, got sorted and the kids bolted off to play on the jumping cushion until well after dark.
Stay tuned ...
Stay tuned ...
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