Home Under the Range (Underground Town In the Outback)

WAY OUT IN AUSTRALIA'S OUTBACK, where the lakes are salty and the beer is warm, men with big arms and funny hats cook kangaroo and crocodile. River races are run in bottomless boats by louts scurrying Flintstone-style over dry bedrock.

One can easily grow jaded on the outback oddities, until arriving with a jolt in Coober Pedy, the underground town.

Marlon Hodges, of Alice Springs, recalls passing through a decade ago. "It was right after they filmed the second Mad Max there. We stepped off the bus, and everyone in town had a huge mohawk. It was bizarre, all these ten feet tall, mean-looking guys covered in tattoos."

The hair has grown back, but Coober Pedy remains weird as ever. The town of tunnels, where reclusive residents live in caves, has been seen in many movies. Besides "Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome," Coober Pedy’s credits include Wim Wenders’ "Until the End of the World." Perhaps most noteworthy is "Priscilla, Queen of the Desert," not for winning an Oscar, but because it’s the first film to portray Coober Pedy as anything other than a nuclear strike zone.

There is an eerie apocalyptic resemblance. Set in sun-scorched desert, Coober Pedy’s best feature is a field of conical hills. Tourists visit at sunset, when the golden glow frames small, pyramid-shaped silhouettes. It’s scenic until you remember you’re standing in a gravel pit, gazing at piles of dirt kicked up by the world’s largest opal mines.

Aesthetic concerns are pretty much on par with ecological considerations in this rough and tumble town of miners and drifters. Resident Trevor McLeod recalls a controversial proposal to level the hills to fill in the mining holes, partly because a few tourists tumbled down the 90-foot shafts and died. The idea got about as much support as suggestions to halt strip mining, which, like most things in this frontier town, remains legal.

"Anyway, those piles are nice to see on the horizon," Mr. McLeod says. "If we pulled them down, what would we look at?"

Dirt walls, mainly. About 70 percent of Coober Pedy’s 3,500 residents live underground. It’s simple survival, since summer temperatures soar above 55 degree Celsius. The boroughs remain cool in summer, and warm in winter.

Many are former mines, but some are underground mansions. "This is the kind of place where, if the wife wants another room, you dig her one," jokes Mr. McLeod. Some underground homes even have swimming pools.

Yet, the oddest thing about Coober Pedy is that the underground dwellings are by no measure the oddest thing here.

Coober Pedy’s golf course has no trees or greenery to mar what is essentially an enormous sand trap. Nine dreary holes are dug in dirt mounds of sand, diesel and oil. The fairway is marked by a grove in the moonscape. Once inside, players can tee off a tiny piece of Astroturf they carry.

At first, it was a local laugh, but every Easter, more than two dozen professional duffers play in a Pro-Am tournament. Dennis Ingram, who retired from the links to Coober Pedy, was pressed into service as resident pro. "My first impression was disbelief," he says. "This place gives a whole new meaning to golf."

While cinemas elsewhere may worry about customers toting alcohol, the local drive-in had to ban dynamite. In this town, tempers run thin and everyone packs a blasting cap or two. The Coober Pedy Times rubbed someone the wrong way and found its office firebombed. That case was never solved. Likewise the bombing of the local court magistrate’s office a few years before.

Yet neither incident irritated the community, certainly not as much as the fire bombing of Acropolis. "That was the best Greek restaurant in town," sighs one old-timer. "Now, that was a REAL crime. Who could have done such a thing?"

Such questions are seldom asked. Coober Pedy is a mind-your-own business place. It’s always been that way, ever since opals were found at Big Flat in 1915. Within seven years, hundreds of prospectors were tearing up the turf.

Depression drove them away, but a new find in shallow depths at Eight Mile in 1946 combined with massive immigration from Europe after World War II to set off a boom that has never completely subsided. Civilization started creeping into Coober Pedy in the 1960s, with the opening of a school and the Opal Motel.

The major finds are remembered mainly in museums nowadays, although flashes of color can still be found in the fields. Increasingly though, the town has turned to the motherlode of tourism. The signs are everywhere, literally: Opal Mine, Opal Cave, Backpackers Cave, Opal Factory and Opal Centre. The Red Sands Restaurant and Nightclub sits above a Mobile gas station-roadhouse-opal shop. The Desert Cave, opened in 1989, offers luxury underground rooms.

Still, the offerings rarely keep visitors beyond an overnight stop between Adelaide and Alice Springs. A short distance outside town is Australia’s own Great Wall, the "dingo fence," a 9,600-kilometre barrier that runs the length of the country, from sea to sea.

Another attraction featured in all the brochures, is the Big Winch, which, upon even a cursory inspection, turns out to be just that, a really big winch.

Coober Pedy’s cave homes are far more engaging. Boring machines can dig a four-bedroom abode in a day. The cost is 20-30 percent less than conventional housing, but the real saving comes in energy. While several air conditioners struggle to cool a normal house to under 30 degrees in summer, Coober Pedy’s caves remain a comfortable 25 degrees, year-round, free of charge.

In many ways, housing construction is a cracker-jack trade here. Mr. McLeod tells of a friend who built a 17-room house. "He found enough opals during excavations to pay for the entire place."

Indeed, luck - good and bad - is what brings most people to Coober Pedy. For gamblers and gits, it's a second-chance city, the last exit on the road to nowhere.

Ron Gluckman is an American reporter who is based in Hong Kong, roaming around the wild parts of Asia for a number of publications, including the Wall Street Journal, which ran this piece in the summer of 1995. Mr Gluckman has a warm spot for wacky tales and odd characters, a quirk that dates to his reporting days in the unconventional Alaskan Bush. However, aside from North Korea, which he rates as, "easily the five weirdest places I've ever been," Mr Gluckman has never been anywhere quite as wacky as Coober Pedy - unless you count Japan's Indoor Beach.

Sunset in Coober Pedy.

The cinema had to ban dynamite. Sounds like a fun town!

I was surfing the Internet and came across this article and had to share it. I have GOT to visit this place sometime! LOL!

“”””men with big arms and funny hats cook kangaroo and crocodile”””””

The operative word here is “men”

No spritzer sipping Volvo drivers here.

Coober Pedy is an Aboriginal name that translates roughly as "White man in a hole." It's been the world's most prolific producer of so-called "light" (as opposed to dark or black) opal.

I considered going there to mine in the "boom" days of the early 1950s. I chickened-out when I learned daytime temps often neared 130F., the only water available then had to be trucked in, medical service had to be flown in from Adelaide -- if your radio worked! And the flies, swarms of flies, that caused some of those "funny hats" -- the kind with many corks dangling on strings from the brim whose movement helped shoo the flies away from the wearer's eyes.

It was a very dangerous place too. When a miner was "on opal," as they say, he told no one and kept his treasure as much to himself as possible. Theft of opal stashes was common and often resulted in murder. "Ratters" sneaked into mines in the dead of night to illegally dig opal in mines known to be producing. And the numerous abandoned holes in the ground were fine places to dispose of troublesome dead bodies.

Some of those practices continue in various opal mining areas around Australia. But in the 1950s and 60s opal towns like Coober Pedy and Andamooka were wild and virtually lawless.

My wife and I spent a few days there on our honeymoon.The opals are beautiful and the people friendly.Alice springs is another good place as well.Hell,all of OZ is neat so if you can swing it you wont be disappointed.Ayers rock is another awesome place.Just get a boonie hat with cork bobbs dangling on it and you will be all set.

I was there a couple of decades ago with a solar racer team from Crowder College (Neosho, Missouri). Coober Pedy is an interesting place.

I sat with some team members in a pub there and listened to a real character (looked like Gaby Hays and drank like a hero) tell us about being raised by the abos. He generously offer to sell us some tracking shoes (moccasins covered with what he claimed were emu feathers, looked more like chicken to me) for a mere $100. Wearing those, no one, not even he could track you through the outback!

I didn't buy his shoes, but I did buy him several beers. Which suited him better anyway.

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