Part 2 by MIKE GILLAM
Flights in a light aircraft enhance my perspective of the lower Lake Eyre Basin. This view of country recalls the epic presence of water in a landscape often portrayed as barren in Coober Pedy’s literature, film and art history.
In the surrounding desert there are certainly significant creeks with occasional coolabah fringed waterholes that in good seasons satisfy our traditional expectations of a billabong. But we must begin our journey hundreds of kilometres upstream to sense some of the contextual grandeur of Australia’s greatest treasure, the Eromanga / Great Artesian Basin, situated beneath the Lake Eyre Basin, and extending across 30% of the Australian continent.
Palimpsest and patinated, the surface terrain is both sparsely vegetated and yet deceptively rich in focal points, patches, swamps, colluvial catchments, micro basins and subtle intermont valleys. Fluvial processes, complex and vast continue, albeit diminished from a time when the Finke River flowed strongly into the Macumba and on to Kati Thanda / Lake Eyre, with the most recent flow recorded at 700 years ago. The desert pavements and dominant rocky features of generally low elevation defy my simplified rendering.
Overall, the land is intensely braided with micro-channels (normally dry) that feed into creeks and watercourses of growing stature. I look down as we pass over a circular feature with clearly defined concentric ripples cast in stone, surely some kind of mound spring, an “extinct” oasis once fringed with lush vegetation.
To my inexperienced eye, phrases such as “braided river channels” resonate but there are so many variations that I risk raising the ire of geomorphologists by using such phrases too loosely. Suffice to say descriptions such as anabranching, anastomosing, macrochannels, multi-thread river styles and much more are referenced in the literature of lacustrine and palaeodrainage devotees.
Crossing the border into South Australia the country reads as a heterogenous topography featuring clay soils and a complex of low silcrete regolith and uplands, surfaces sharply incised with micro channels and modest drainages, gradually trending southerly and feeding into a series of significant creeks, the Indulkana, Maryatt, Agnes that gather and grow as they feed into the Neales and Macumba, eventually reaching the terminus of Kati Thanda / Lake Eyre.
This vast country is intensely marked by the harvesting, infiltration and passage of water. Elevations are variable at a local scale but the southerly trend is very gradual overall.
The absence of higher elevation mountain ranges is beguiling so we don’t instinctively think of this country as a vast water catchment of more subtle horizontal relief. Minor drainages carry rainfall down the flanks of stony rises and across claypans into meandering creeks that combine to form major rivers, like the mighty Neale.
In this country, rivers and creeks are often comprised of numerous channels that can be exceptionally wide overall and slower moving than the deeply incised rivers we know so well; the headwaters of the Finke, Palmer, Hugh and Todd in the upper Lake Eyre Basin.
My aerial reveal is mostly the colour of dry clay, a few isolated pools, miracles in the middle of nowhere but the widespread presence of water in this variegated catchment remains episodic in nature.
Water moves inexorably towards Lake Eyre during flood events and there is barely a single hectare that does not carry the “recent” marks of water harvesting, collection or transport. Patches of darker vegetation mark those places where sheet flows lingers a while and water penetrates to the clay subsoils beneath. Trees appear on the banks of the largest watercourses such as the Neale, where hardy coolibahs replace the red gums of the headwaters further north.
Modulating, rushing and slowing down to a whisper, the wind in this landscape is an almost constant force of nature. That low rumble, the sound made by a vehicle approaching from a great distance, rising and falling in response to contours of the road.
Is this the drumming of rubber tyres on corrugations of gravel and clay? Parked up on a high point to admire the setting sun I’ve looked in the rear view mirror many times expecting the approach of a four wheel drive that never comes. At sunrise and sunset this is one of my favourite places, just east of Coober Pedy where the town’s margins interface with a hint of wilderness on the William Creek road.
Sound-shifting as it echoes through the complexities of an undulating landscape, a gentle yet forceful wind eddies and flows through ravines and over denuded mounds of crushed and exploded sandstone.
It really is the wind of an ancient shore line and the rusty detritus of the miners, their excavators, trucks and conveyors, listing and abandoned, do resemble ship wrecks teetering and trapped on a treacherous reef. Here and there corrugated iron verandahs, shacks and old buses serve as modest porticos to fabulous underground homes.
Is it any wonder that the occasional restless sailor, retired from a life on the ocean finds solace, serenity and the freedom of uncultivated vastness in their final years at Coober Pedy. The birds and kangaroos that share this place are more than enough company for hardy people, jaded and restless, refugees from cacophonous cities and crowded suburbs.
Overlooking Kanku Breakaways and the Eromanga Basin the light show is always changing. At day’s end, rank after shifting rank of alternating shadow and light stretch tens of kilometres to the horizon. Horizontal lines and highlight waves that reflect shifting shorelines and river flows of the Cenozoic or perhaps the relentless push pull between south easterlies and northerlies.
Overhead, a pair of kestrels somersault and soar while in the far distance a line of emus following the dog fence (the subject of a future essay) materialise from the heat shimmer.
Located 850 km north of Adelaide and 680 km south of Alice Springs, Coober Pedy clings doggedly to its claim as Australia’s opal capital and many of the 2,000 residents were bitterly disappointed when the NSW State Government took the initiative to create an “Opal Centre” at Lightning Ridge.
Designed by revered Australian architect Glen Murcutt, yet I can’t help thinking, in the parlance of Coober Pedy, maybe the town dodged a pit fall. Visitor centres are notoriously expensive to operate with costs rarely covered by the funds they generate from tourists.
Of more desperate need, perhaps a generous philanthropic entity might employ Murcutt to design an aged care centre, where the Octogenarian miners might be sustained socially as they seek comfort in the rich languages of their childhood.
On a positive note, Purple House has established in Cobber Pedy, offering renal dialysis services to all residents who would otherwise be forced to travel to a major population centre.
Recently there’s talk of a film history centre and my concern is aroused once more. Coober Pedy still has an operational drive-in cinema, one of the last film venues of its type in the Australian inland.
I can’t help thinking all that film industry memorabilia could be simply arranged in a perimeter arc at the drive-in, some protective shelters added. Unlike the monolithic approach taken at Lightning Ridge, the town’s ad hoc built environment, like a shell midden on an ancient shoreline, lends itself to a dispersed scatter of attractions, with existing surface and subterranean options in abundance.
I can well imagine a film festival, with the drive-in cinema as flagship supported by improvised indoor spaces and inspiring underground venues, showing different classics from Coober Pedy’s unparalleled film history and revealing new Australian releases.
The built environment eschews the orderly grid of town planning principles. The predictable main street is named after Hutchinson, the boy who famously found opal. However the road network at large has adopted the unofficial tracks made by miners with their ready access to earth moving machinery and little patience for the formalities of civic survey.
This gives the town a large degree of anarchic flair and the popular navigation aid Siri uses language such as “slide right” to guide me through the maze of “goat tracks” to find a reclusive miner at his or her dugout.
Intriguing place names like Ice-cream Hill, Potch Gully Road, German Gully road and Tom Cat Hill have proliferated, a clear indication the community of Coober Pedy have chosen to ignore dignitaries and immortalise the banal. Even then as I search out my friend I must look for a certain derelict blower truck signposting the correct driveway and the house beyond, jack-hammered under the brow of a small hill.
Impressive architecture exists alongside impoverished suburbs of vernacular construction that don’t always meet modern building codes but add so much richness and verve to the town.
A fascinating array of commercial and domestic dugouts have been carved with laser precision and others with flamboyant curves and a touch of Raiders of the Lost Ark abandon. Indeed many of my favourite Coober Pedy creations are officially unapproved but I have no doubt they will outlast compliant residential towers of less maverick charm that crowd our cities.
With its vaulted and scalloped sandstone ceilings, a tribute to the skill of tunnelling machine operators, the underground Serbian Church is beyond extraordinary and the Desert Cave, a touch of luxury conceived by Robert Coro of a pioneering Italian family.
Modern facilities including a theatre and the Big Winch restaurant overlooks the town and attracts a sunset viewing crowd of locals and tourists. In the absence of “big” supermarkets, the local IGA is outstanding and he prehistory exhibits of the Umoona Museum are a tribute to the outreach efforts of the South Australian Museum.
Another neighbour sits outside, in the shade of a modest verandah. He moved to Coober Pedy for the dry air that agrees with his lung and heart troubles. His home is hidden, although airshafts poking through the rocky roof suggest a spacious building envelope beneath the silcrete rubble.
This unique habitat of desert dwellers has created subterranean suburbs that provide a great sense of space because so much of the surface still reads as buffer zone and open “bush”. On matters of sustainability, Coober Pedy is a shining example.
At least half the town’s residents live underground and require little or no power for air-conditioning or heating. During my visit in January 2019 the evening news reveals disheartening failures in a western Sydney suburb, officially the hottest place on earth!
An aerial perspective reveals a neatly conceived suburb with charcoal grey corrugated iron rooves, minimal eaves, heat storing block walls and narrow interspaces between neighbours.
There’s little potential to plant a shady tree anywhere and a distressed migrant being interviewed on the verge, observes that he can’t continue or afford to live in his house. Doubtless the split system air conditioning is running flat out while the adjacent verge is clad in heat retaining green astro turf.
“At 48.9 degrees, Penrith was officially the hottest place on Earth on January 4, 2019. But heat loggers placed at 120 locations around the local government area for heat research commissioned by Penrith City Council found that on that day the mercury rose to 52 degrees in the suburb of Berkshire Park, 51.5 in Agnes Banks, and 50.1 in Badgerys Creek.” (Angus Thompson, Sydney Morning Herald, posted 5-12-2020).
This moment exemplifies the tragedy of Australia’s failures to address climate change, of Government planning and Council regulators, that enabled commercial imperatives to triumph over science.
The cost is borne by society at large but most acutely by those conned into buying or renting a corrupted version of the great Australian dream. On this day the temp at Coober Pedy, a supposed cauldron in the desert was in the mid 40s with negligible humidity and I was exceedingly comfortable in the cool of my dugout.
Lines of clouds, an ever passing parade, immense thunderheads, the drift of virga and the artful tracery of cirrus against an impossibly blue sky, tantalise the senses. Hovering on a distant horizon, the stratocumulus formations over a thousand metres high are measured by the thickness of my index finger.
Rain out of reach more often than not. To those who live in arid country, they offer luminous beauty or towering grandeur but not misplaced hope. Distance and visibility are too great; rain is rarely expected (a clear advantage for well situated outdoor events) and disappointment a fool’s occupation.
At sunset the light creates a dramatic step change, slender highlights growing in colour and intensity and then finally collapsing back into shadowlands. In the “fields” surrounding Coober Pedy the sharp-edged square silhouettes of warning signs come to the fore and combine with a backdrop of black pyramid mounds set against a shiraz sky, a startling Nolan sunset for this photographer.
Sunsets and sunrises, those daily phenomena in colour and choreography, are appreciated by every resident in much the same way that coastal denizens are nourished by the transient moods of the ocean.
As any jaded photographer can attest, colourful clouds, even when they’re crowning the soft hues of crushed sandstone are unworthy. And yet Coober Pedy seems to feed the inner child. Is it really possible that I’m photographing the night sky and sunsets with the abandon and excitement I felt looking through the lens of my very first SLR camera?
The sky truly is ascendant here and for Coober Pedy’s surfeit of dreamers, for its pilgrims and worshippers of every faith, for atheists and agnostics, for every seeing person, resistance is futile.
PHOTO AT TOP: Serbian underground church in Coober Pedy.
Earlier stories by MIKE GILLAM
The surprising abundance of Coober Pedy Jul 12, 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
Smelling, hearing, and reading country. Wonderful.