Coober Pedy

It rained hard all day as I drove south from Alice Springs.

As in Western Australia this latitude is empty country. There are a few Aboriginal communities dotted about and widely spaced cattle stations. The scenery is boring; for although there are still flowers around, I have been looking at them for weeks now. Even beauty can become monotonous.
I hit the border of South Australia and cooked up all my fruit and vegetables rather than throw them in the quarantine bin as requested on the signs. I was prepared to put up a strong argument about the food being sterile. Nothing eventuated, of course, but it would have been “just my luck” to have been caught. The stewed mixed fruit was yummy; I’ll have to do this more often.

I did some longer stretches on the road as there really was not much to stop for; and the weather was still grim. At least fuel was getting cheaper the further south I got. The highest price had been at the turnoff to Uluru at $170 a litre. I reckon they were counting on lots of punters who thought it would be even more at the Ayers Rock Resort. I certainly fell for it, although only bought half a tank full. At the resort, fuel cost little more than in Alice Springs.

Just before Coober there were huge areas devoid of trees. Visually, the Nullarbor was nothing compared to this. I was driving on top of a kind of table land or plateau made up of small rocks and gravel. I imagine there was hardly any topsoil, having been eroded, blown and washed away into lower regions.
One or two little pyramids of white gravel were appearing in the landscape and suddenly, as I drove over a crest there were thousands of them, stretching to the horizon. A bit later open cast mines scarred the landscape. It was still 50 Kilometres before Coober and I was struck dumb by the scale of the mining that was going on.

The town itself was horribly scruffy. People took pride in making their property as ugly as possible. Rusty wrecks of old mining machinery and vehicles adorned their front yards as though to prove they were real locals. I have never seen so many scrap yards in one place in my whole life. There were some bargain old vehicles to be had for collectors of vintage cars. Some dating back to the thirties.

The most obvious status symbol for miners is to have one of those “vacuum” trucks parked in the yard. You see them everywhere; hundreds, if not thousands of them. Before these things were invented the rubble had to be winched up by hand in bucketfuls. I saw several vacuum trucks working in the field; they were difficult to miss as they blew a huge plume of white dust into the air. The rocks are collected into a large drum at the top of the boom and when full, a lever pulled and the rubble dumped on top of a neat pyramid. Hence the hundreds of thousands of pyramids. [I wonder if Dyson got his ideas from here?]

Underground it is wonderfully cool; no air-conditioning required. I was told by several locals that it is a constant 23 degrees Celsius. About 50% of people live underground and new houses are being built all the time. The central outcrops are pretty much riddled with them and people are now moving out to the rocky suburbs. Literally sub-urban.

I spoke to a miner now retired, who preferred to live on top. “There’s no way I want to spend my leisure time in the same environment as my work” he said, adding; “Anyway I have no problem keeping cool; got 3 large air conditioners.” Obviously not concerned about Climate Change, but why should he be at 70 years of age?
I visited a couple of underground houses although they were no longer lived in. They were lovely and cool but when the lights go out it is pitch black; something that unnerves me. Although there are small window piercings here and there much of the time you are living in artificial light. You have to put a timer on the lights to know when it is day or night, otherwise your body clock gets out of sync.

I’m standing in the bedroom, there are no windows. A slightly domed ceiling of rock, with drill marks still visible, supports thousands of tons overhead. I have to turn off the light when I get into bed. It is deathly, deathly quiet.

[Actually it is never quiet for me, as I have Tinnitus and I am always accompanied by whistles, clicks and hisses in my waking hours]

It took me a couple of days to see the place but could not live there. No greenery apart from a few scrawny bushes in gardens. Water is expensive since it comes from a desalination plant. There are pyramids of rubble for 50 Kilometres in any direction, so nature takes second place around here.
Besides it looks like an outlaw place to me although the locals swear it is safer than Eden. Hmm. Why do they keep finding bodies in shafts then? I know it is dangerous but it would be so easy to make murder look like an accident. Just whack somebody on the head with a rock, take their opals and dump the body in a remote shaft. They may never be found. Nor would the murder weapon. It’s like looking for a rock in a stony desert.
Out here the saying is “It’s like looking for bones in a shaft.” No, I just made that up. Fortunes have been made here but many more have been lost.
Actually there is little evidence of wealth here, the majority of people just getting by. I only saw a couple of large houses; for most people, immigrants from different countries, life is basic and means living in little more than a shack.

Coober

Endless pyramids, blinding white and pink stretch to the wide blue.
Stony plains pocked and pierced to gouge the sparkling rock.
Picked up, picked under, dug by jarred hand to feed greedy mind or hungry mouth.
Jewel of fortune shines on few who promptly leave to live elsewhere.
Those who stay burrow in to shape their homely grave or oven bake in tin.
Old time miners live on top with triple air, not for them the deathly night of Troglodyte.

Indigenerations wait until white rabble has consumed their land.
What else to do but obliviate Balanda world?
Theirs a different scale of time that counts the cost of lives.
The trashed machines remain for spears and clubs when they’re alone once more.
When glistening seams are gone and greed has blown away like dust
They will remain to tell another dream.

It was raining again when I drove further south the landscape looked like Rannoch Moor in Scotland on a driech day. I caught a wee glimpse of the great salt lakes in between the curtains of drizzle. They all had water in them.

It cleared a bit when I got to Woomera but it made no difference; there was still nothing to see. No wonder they used this area to test rockets, there’s nothing to destroy. Did they explode a nuclear device here, or what? I vaguely remembered something about Aboriginals being found wandering about where they thought there were none.

I walked into town, camera slung over my shoulder. Perhaps the Rocket Museum would be worth looking at. Empty houses stood in regimented ranks, their black windows looking like eye sockets in a catacomb. A lone, bowed figure of a man with his eyes cast down shuffled by on the other side of the road, a mongrel dog on his heels.

He did not look up to say “g’day”, but shuffled on his lonely way.
The sombre clouds loomed with rain. I turned on my heel and left.

At the roadhouse a grey stubbled old man sat in the cold wind. He had spiky greasy hair, a long threadbare overcoat, bandages on his legs and a walking stick. He asked me which way I was headed.
“I want to go north, back to Coober Pedy” he told me in a thick, mid European accent. His car had just been taken away from him by the police. Drink driving. He came from Hungary but had lived in Coober for 35 years.
Inside sat a policeman chatting to a well to do woman with heavy gold jewellery. I wondered if it was the same cop I had seen parked next to the highway as I drove into Woomera the previous night.