The surprising abundance of Coober Pedy

By MIKE GILLAM

Capturing one of the largest internally draining river systems in the world, the Lake Eyre Basin occupies more than 16% of the Australian continent.

Deeper still, the Eromanga / Great Artesian Basin covers 30%. Within this landscape context of ephemeral rivers and epic wetland catchments there is much, much more to Coober Pedy than its promotion as “the opal capital of the world” or otherworldly manifestations of its lunar-cum-Martian landscapes.

Elevations here vary between 103 and 238 metres above sea level and the average annual rainfall, at 140mm is about half that of Alice Springs, 680 km up the road.

The opal fields of Coober Pedy were revealed in 1915 by Will Hutchison, a 15 year old travelling with a party of gold prospectors. His story is immortalised in “The boy who discovered opal”, an enchanting children’s book by retired teacher and local author, Sue Britt.

A rush followed soon after and the mining community variously expanded and contracted in response to world events, the opal market and availability of water. The opal field attracted returned servicemen after WW1 and boomed post WW2 with an influx of European migrants wanting a fresh start.

Coober Pedy, absorbed a great deal of this post war pain and trauma and the small frontier community received an abundance of education, ingenuity and creativity in return.

While a miner’s life was typically frugal, war impacted refugees from Europe found the peace they craved and I can well imagine the attraction of this small dot of humanity in the centre of the continent, far away from congested cities. For strangers arriving in a strange land, no one felt conspicuous in a town of 50 or so nationalities, united in their obsession for opal and an appetite for work.

“During 1920, Coober Pedy received its name. We formed a progress-cum-vigilantes group because of lack of law and order. The first night we met we decided on a name for the field; an old White Cliffs miner suggested Coober Pedy, which meant white men living in a hole. As 90% of us were living in dugouts we thought it very appropriate so we notified the authorities in Adelaide.

This is from the book ‘Wilful Murder in the Outback” by Arch Burnett. For those who view Coober Pedy in a negative light, I should clarify that Wilful Murder was the name given to the author’s model T Ford by the paying passengers he carted cross-country to the opal fields.

The White Cliffs connection does broaden the scope for the precise language origins of the name bestowed on Coober Pedy. Certainly, Aboriginal people were attracted to the area by the activities of white pastoralists and miners and the potential for paid work.

Some travelled from afar and this nomadic passion continues today. According to Wikipedia the name Coober Pedy may also have its origins from the Kokatha-Barngarla term kupa-piti but I can’t confirm a source for this.

At Innamincka, in the basin’s south-west, a 1906 Government report notes: “Aborigines are in the habit of crossing the South Australian border and seeking relief at the … depot, owing to there being no depot in their own state (Qld.) nearer than 200 miles.”  Station manager Artie Rowlands made it clear that any Aboriginal stockman was as good as a white, “and not to forget it”. (Circa 1924) from Fred Blakeley’s book Hard Liberty, published in 1938.

At first glance the opal mining town of Coober Pedy looks dishevelled, about as far away from the style and order of South Australia’s capital Adelaide as you can imagine.

Three wind turbines and a solar array make a statement at the southern entrance to the township and a local engineering invention, the legendary blower truck, greets visitors at the roadside.

The northern approach is perhaps more dramatic, a man-made pyramid desert with rhythmic echoes of Namibia. Its shallow reputation as the wild west fits the picture for those travellers who search out places of reassuring familiarity and predictable comforts and don’t bother to explore Coober Pedy for themselves. Endlessly stereotyped as a place of lawlessness and violence, winnowing fact from fiction is a daunting task.

It’s true, the celebrated opal wealth of Coober Pedy attracted rogues and others of criminal bent in the seventies and eighties but their presence has waned. It’s also true that an inadequate investment in policing and a tendency to summarily dismiss “minor” crime reports as “bullshit disputes between miners” allowed anarchy to flourish in the opal fields.

As their pegged claims were raided or machinery sabotaged, miners were often left to take matters into their own hands. On one memorable occasion two detectives arrived from Adelaide to investigate the use of explosives to destroy valuable earth moving machinery. They failed to locate the culprit while confirming a popular theory, that police attention is much more diligent if a national insurer is exposed to significant losses.

Viewed from ground level, through horizon touching days and infinite starry nights, the sky is ascendant here. Cloud formations tower above a natural landscape of heterogeneous hills, mere strokes of colour at the vanishing point. Maze-like with rubbly flanks and distinctive silcrete hard cap, larger formations may appear as plateaux remnants and steep sided mesas deeply incised with gullies and drainages.

Terra firma or more accurately T.infirma owes much of its character to the small scale workings of the Coober Pedy opal miners, of excavations, numbering in the millions. The tent sized pyramids created by miners hoping to strike it rich, form a rhythmic vista of light and shade, in pastels of yellow, white and red. Noticeably absent are the huge open cuts that swallow battalions of trucks with wheels as tall as a house and yet in combined surface area these workings do actually dwarf many open cuts.

This Pyramid desert opalises our first impressions of Coober Pedy and its industrial spirit; a contradictory experience that taunts my mind’s eye as it oscillates between absolute destruction and windswept beauty.

Patterns of time, wind and erosion, the horizon touching pyramids somehow transcend stereotypical vistas of mining devastation. In truth this desert has been turned upside down and the spoil of exploratory drilling reveals the colours of the cross bedded marine deposits up to 90 feet deep.

Filtered through a fine haze of airborne dust, shadows are open and soft in the midday sun, and the white highlights of the conical peaks retain a vestige of detail. Thanks to the legislated modest size of exploration drilling parcels at a maximum 400m by 400m and actual mining leases of just 100m by 50m, the mine workings retain a vestige of human scale. Not-withstanding these limits, I’m reminded by my miner friends that the nature of opal hunting is more about nuance, knowledge and phenomenal luck, than having huge machinery.

It’s undeniable, I have an aversion to mining, amplified by stories of sacred rivers mined and diverted, of priceless aquifers threatened and wildlife lured to their death at tailings dams across the inland.

Once, a friend discovered a dense carpet of budgerigar carcasses around such a dam at a gold mine near Leonora, WA where a poisonous drink of cyanide had destroyed a super flock. I wonder how many of these events are reported to compliance authorities and how mining corporations can justify their profiteering short cuts, underwritten by such failures? Thankfully, I’ve not encountered such negligence within the Coober Pedy opal mining fields.

The town’s industrial aesthetic is further enhanced by old blower trucks, drill rigs and conveyors of every conceivable make and vintage. Improvised, grafted and hybridised, the distressed machinery layer of Coober Pedy creates a gallery of public sculptures, engineering surprises and inventiveness in every street, marvellously free from a curator’s oversight. Time, rust and decay help to blend ecological and mechanical realms with mosaics of cracked paint that speak of arid country and the forces of nature.

Beyond Coober Pedy’s impact zone, the unscarred topography speaks of earlier epochs, a time of shallow estuarine environments, of basins and low rocky headlands. Breeding colonies of water birds flourished here feeding on squid, crabs and mussels. These intriguing life forms persist in the fossil record, often imbued with the opalised colour so highly prized by collectors. In 1987 an almost complete 2.5m skeleton was discovered by a Coober Pedy miner. The carnivorous reptile was duly named Umoonasaurus demoscyllus, an aquatic species from the early Cretaceous, approximately 115 million years ago.

There would be no Coober Pedy if not for the events of the Cretaceous Period (146 to 66 million years ago). Deep layers of muddy and sandy sediments formed beneath the shallow Eromanga sea and marine biota flourished. Over time the ocean gave way to plains, lakes and rivers, until tectonic movement exposed the Eromanga rocks to strong chemical weathering.

During the Cenozoic (66 million years ago to the present day), the global climate became more arid and unstable. Major rivers covered the Eromanga rocks in sands and gravels until about 42 million years ago. After that, a long history of alternating cold, dry glacials and warm, wet interglacials created the landscape we know today.

During weathering events, dissolved silica moved in groundwater beneath the landscape and hard silcretes formed. Elsewhere hydrated silica spheres captured in faults and voids, retained rich and colourful catchlights. These are the hidden treasures sought by miners within formations of opal bearing potch.

More valuable than opal, the bed of the vanquished Eromanga Sea would ultimately form the confining layers of Australia’s greatest treasure, the Great Artesian Basin. This marine legacy also formed the building blocks of Coober Pedy’s unique social history and development. Certainly the sedimentary sandstones and patchy layers of chalky white Alunite can be viewed within the walls of most underground buildings.

Experienced drillers talk of the locally variable rock, of layers often jumbled, from the striking jasper that can occur in reddish clay, bands and hard caps of silcrete, calcrete, and gypsum higher up, with layers of sandstone beneath that are soft in places where moisture is present and harder lower down with higher concentrations of silica. Mudstone lies at the very bottom of this typical sandstone profile.

Out of every opal hunter’s reach lies the Kanku-Breakaways Conservation Park (above), a place of airbrushed beauty, of sculpted formations in whites, yellows and reds. Giant sandstone dingos are represented by two starkly different hills, one white and the other tan, sacred ancestors resting side by side. Kanku forms part of the traditional country of the Antakirinja Matuntjara Yankunytjatjara people. At 15,000 hectares the untouched fragility and sweeping lines of Kanku are a wonderful contrast to the disturbance of the mining leases that cradle the town.

The Breakaways are a culturally rich example of pristine uplands in the surrounding desert catchments. These striking landforms reveal a picture of watershed and movement best appreciated from the air. Where localised runoff infiltrates surrounding gibber plains and shallow basins of cracking clay soils, disjunct swamps and ephemeral wetlands appear as isolated green smudges. The heterogenous silcrete formations, eroded and only sparsely vegetated, harvest rainfall across vast landscapes of low topographic relief.

“Silcretes are hard silica-rich duricrusts that occur widely across the Lake Eyre Basin. Their key geomorphic characteristics are their capacity to protect underlying softer rocks from erosion, and the water-shedding that can significantly influence flow hydrology. Silcretes form during weathering … (and)  were exposed at surface by erosion of softer overlying regolith during continental aridification two to four million years ago … (Silcretes occur) as semi-planar rough layers, lumpy boulder piles, or broad areas of rounded rocks (gibber plains or stony mantles).” From: Gresley A. Wakelin-King, Landscapes of the Lake Eyre Basin: the catchment-scale context that creates fluvial diversity; Transactions of the Royal Society of South Australia; DOI: 10.1080/03721426.2021.2003514

From steep sided redgum creeks such as the Maryatt, Agnes, Indulkana and Alberga, floodwaters converge in the mighty Macumba before coursing onwards to Munga Thirri-Lake Eyre. The hard surfaces of colluvial slopes harvest rainfall and combine with sheet-flow, gathering into the Arckaringa Creek and Neales River.

From the air these can appear as a wild complex of channels, twisting and tangled, like long tresses of human hair. The flood prone nature of this hard country and the Neales River in particular inspired construction of the spectacular Algebuckina railway bridge, an engineering marvel and testament to the dynamism and force of ephemeral waterways it was expected to weather.

From 3000 feet, reefs of gypsum glint in the sun and I recall the curious nature of such country when viewed at ground level. Amplified by glittering sheaves of gypsum, the heat shimmer flows in a visible wave that evokes an incoming ocean tide meeting a gravel beach.

Trees, birds and mountains are distorted by the shimmer wave, a painterly texture that helped me to resist the example of my desert friends beguiled by the lure of seaside retreats. At Coober Pedy, in this land of raking shadows, beneath an immense sky of drifting colour and gradations, the Eromanga Sea is sublime and yet unfathomably, this place is seriously under-valued.

On this visit the springtime seed load has consolidated after several wet years and the ancient lagoons are now awash with flowers. Bright magenta Swainsona, blue bush with burnished copper discs and pop saltbush, its seeds protected within a “marshmallow” foam designed to float and disperse during rainfall events. The birdsong is sparse but captivating, led by the wonderful electronic calls of dusky wood swallows as they converse with each other across the gibber plains.

Photographers and film-makers often portray Coober Pedy as a stony wasteland: that much celebrated “moon plain”. Conversely I delight in the incredible transformation that comes with modest rainfall, a vegetative mantle of blue, yellow and every hue of green, crowned by a riot of wildflowers. A tiny herb with yellow star flowers catches my eye and I must endlessly confront the limitations of my plant knowledge. Fortunately there is a field guide, Wildflowers of Coober Pedy written by Tim Webb, a retired mariner who lived here once.

Is it my imagination? Are these larger than life flowering plants more desperate to attract pollinators compared to their relatives inhabiting the MacDonnell Ranges, where vegetation luxuriates in a rainfall regime twice that of Coober Pedy? The blue bush spines are huge, perhaps a defensive response to kangaroo ancestors such as Protemnodon viator or rhino-sized Diprotodon related to the southern hairy nosed wombats that still occur in palaeoenvironments near Kingoonya, two hundred kilometres further south.

Scattered mulga occurs throughout and within a few kilometres of the town in any direction, dry creeks and occasional waterholes support graceful coolibahs, the shadiest of the local trees, their nesting hollows a haven for budgerigars. A spectacular form of Pittasporum (inedible “native apricot”) occurs here, its bright yellow fruits, fabulous baubles that would look right at home on a Christmas tree.

Within 50 metres, the plant community changes in response to soils, drainage and light. Trees, sparse and stunted, are replaced by low shrubs such as Witchetty bush and Eremophillas, that offer pools of precious shade if you’re a diminutive dragon or cryptic invertebrate.

Denied adequate old growth hollows, corellas frequently nest in rock niches, crows colonise machinery masts and power poles, while kangaroos, owls and bats thrive in temperature stable mine shafts. Several of our friends have “pet” kestrels that perch under verandah roofing and most provide water for clouds of zebra finches that gladden the collective spirit of this community.

Ptilotus (Mulla mulla) in soft pinks or green, crowd subtle indentations, creases and gullies concealed by the stubble plain of native oat grass. A mass of Parakeelya (above), tens of thousands of succulents, tall delicate stems supporting showy flower heads that wobble and sway in the hot breeze. Hot pink petals surround the yellow centre and within this dancing multitude a single plant, pivots like the prima ballerina, its petals an attention seeking snow white.

Links to stories by MIKE GILLAM in the first half of 2024:

Survivor of atomic crimes in The Centre Apr 30, 2024
Night drive Apr 19, 2024
Moving closer to that elusive miracle of life and light Mar 24, 2024
Flash flood of budgerigars Mar 18, 2024
Following feathered dancers into the desert Mar 13, 2024