2006/06 Australia trip - Coober Pedy |
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Friday June 9th
Friday was to be mainly a driving day. We hoped to get north of Coober Pedy and camp in the Painted Desert area, off the Oodnadatta Track. But first we needed to pack up and get on the road. The ranger came around as we were leaving, posting “Reserved” signs on almost all the campsites. We were coming up to a long weekend, celebrating the Queen’s Birthday, and, of course, we didn’t have a reservation. I called home and reached Christina, who was looking for our tax return for her school’s financial aid department. Hopefully I pointed her at the right box. She said that Michael had started his new job, but hadn’t yet given up on Schmitt Music, just in case the new job didn’t work out. She reported that nephew Ayden had said his first word, “OK”. Guess that’s a lot better than “Nope” or “Shan’t”!
Leaving the park, we drove to Port Augusta, the crossroads of South Australia. We left the zone we’d been in, squeezed between the sea and the mountains, briefly saw tidal waters around the town, and then we were suddenly in the Outback. The land north of Port Augusta is classed as “arid” rather than “desert”, but it’s mostly small shrubs growing in red soil, with the occasional valley of desert oaks. From what we could remember, it would be much like that for the next thousand miles. The map shows a number of lakes, but these are salt lakes, with no fresh water. Most of the Outback gets its water from deep aquifers, and even these are contaminated with salt, OK for washing but no good for tea.
Towns in this area are hundreds of miles apart. We passed Pimba, “gateway to Woomera”. Woomera was much in the news in my childhood, as a place for launching rockets and exploding bombs. I guess that British politicians would rather have eight thousand miles of Earth between them and the atom bomb tests. Probably safer than letting them off on Wimbledon Common. On one of these trips we’ll have to take a look at Woomera, but we haven’t so far.
We moved into a cloudy zone, even finding a few showers. A distant rainstorm was just large enough to give us a rainbow in the desert, a single shaft of colour against the downward streaks of rain.
As this was the Friday before a long weekend, the road was busy with holiday traffic, and we must have seen as many as five cars in the last hour of driving.
We settled on camping in Coober Pedy as we weren’t going to make it to the Painted Desert before dark. Coober Pedy is the 
opal capital of South Australia. We had thought about just pulling off the road to camp, but the opal miners are very fussy about claim jumpers so we ended up at a commercial campground instead.
Saturday June 10th
Surprisingly, it rained for much of the night. It was probably just as well we hadn’t made it to the Painted Desert as rain can be a problem on sand tracks.
Our neighbour at the campground was a chocolate engineer, working at the Cadbury chocolate mines in Hobart, Tasmania. This desert stuff was all new to them, and they were having trouble coping with the distances involved in traveling in the Outback.
The morning was bright and windy as we headed into Coober Pedy to find an Internet connection. The town only exists because of the opal mines, though in recent years it has cashed in on the tourist traffic. The opal is mined by sinking a shaft down about 30 feet and then digging tunnels looking for seams of fire opal. The miners soon found that the tunnels made good homes in a place of very hot summers and cold winters, so most of the community lived underground. So now all the cafes and hotels and stores advertise themselves as “underground” even though most of them have simply piled dirt on top of an ordinary building. We did the mine tour and ate “underground” on our last trip there in 2002, so once we’d dealt with our e-mail, we were off, north again.
A group of aborigines was wandering through town. They looked much like refugees in their own country. A couple of them were walking up to cars and asking for money, but they didn’t seem to be having much luck. We couldn’t help but contrast the Aborigines with New Zealand’s Maori. There is still conflict between the Maoris and the Europeans, but they seem to be quite well integrated into modern society, with Maoris owning businesses as well as working in them. Australia’s aborigines only seem to work in government-sponsored projects, with very few in charge of anything. Given how many of us Whites like to go walkabout in their bush, maybe they’ve made the right choice!
The land around Coober Pedy looks like it’s been taken over by giant moles. There are heaps of dirt everywhere, tailings from
the opal mines. It’s a very dangerous area to visit. The active mines are defended by the miners. The inactive ones are a maze of heaps and mine shafts. The shafts aren’t filled in when the mines are abandoned, so it’s all too easy to step back and disappear for ever.