Pearls of the Eromanga Sea, Part Two, by MIKE GILLAM

Covering much of inland Australia, the Eromanga Sea provided the building blocks of tourism icons at the Painted Desert, Kanku Breakaways and the town of Coober Pedy. Plesiosaurs and Ichthyosaurs appeared in the fossil record from 100 to 120 Million years ago while reduced basin lakes continued to support lungfish, crocodiles and flocks of Phoenicontius eyrensis, the 1.5m tall Lake Eyre flamingo, until the Pleistocene epoch. A sign at the Umoona Museum, rich in fossil exhibits claims: “There are more different kinds of plesiosaur found at Coober Pedy than anywhere else in Australia.”

Fossil explorers from around the world gravitate to Coober Pedy, an enigmatic, idiosyncratic and at times quixotic community living in the seabed. Some never leave.

Historical writings feature petrified trees and the frequent discovery of marine cephalopods called nautiloids or ammonites. A giant ammonite (pictured), found in 1928 and reproduced as a cast on display at the Umoona Museum, was so large that Police Constable T. Jury “initially mistook the fossil for an old car tyre”.

While miners can be intensely secretive about their opal successes, a few reach eagerly for a water filled jar packed with wondrous opalized mussel shells, bivalves and belemnite pipes. This is their superannuation or a house deposit for their children.

In an unfortunate disconnect between Coober Pedy miners and the protectors of Australia’s palaeontological treasures, opalised fossils may be subject to heritage statutes preventing their export. Tragically, I’ve been told that larger and potentially significant fossils may be broken up into small parcels by miners wanting to optimise a financial return in opal.

Conversely some miners are incredibly generous, donating their rare and most valuable finds to public collections as reported by author Rena Briand in a 2012 reprint of her book White Man in a Hole: “Mining for many years, Johnny only found two stones of great value to collectors: one blue in the shape of an orchid, the other every colour of the rainbow in the shape of a fish. He never sold them, but left them to a museum so many people could enjoy looking at them.”

Briand’s observation is supported by my own, of miners who persist with little or no real reward, scraping enough to buy essentials, routinely borrowing from their mates to get by.

Life-long miners were often supported by their wives who provided the financial security of regular employment in tourism and service industries. The altruism of Johnny Kovak, an exceptional miner, contradicts my suspicion that most opal miners are gamblers at heart.

Beyond the mine workings, the varnished stones have been abraded over the aeons by flowing water, wind driven sand and dust. A geological memory, this epic legacy of depositional river flows, persist as pediplains, mud flats, bull shale, or basins that flood rarely. From tiny fragments of buckshot gibber to stone-scapes studded with objects of significant heft, this windswept grandeur inspired the colloquialism of ‘moon-plains’ and has attracted the attention of artists, writers and notably film-makers.

Walking through the heat shimmer curious shapes catch my eye, columns of stone, distinctive striations and rings, reminders of ancient arboreta in the form of petrified trees. Even the ubiquitous bearded dragons appear to be chiselled from rock. Conversely, in my wandering mind, some of the nocturnal wildlife resemble opalized ornaments. Translucent spiders create vertical shafts that may be settled by geckos of porcelain perfection seeking a temperature range that sustains dugout dwelling humans (about 22 to 26 degrees C).

Coober Pedy projects a desert of naked pyramids, rain harvesting gullies and dark voids.

Entrance to Crocodile Harrys’s dugout.

While the destruction of the landscape has created death traps for unwary tourists, it’s also true that miners have provided habitat enhancement for some species. Living amongst people, a community of owls, bats, and earth stained corellas rely on mine shafts to provide nesting sites and respite from the summer heat.

This gaunt and deceptive country also harbours the impossibly delicate thick-tailed gecko, Underwoodisaurus milii, that emerges after dark from beneath boulders, flung onto the windrow by a road builder’s grader. Shuttling back and forth from burrow to sun to shade, diminutive dragons climb onto stones to gain an overview of their horizontal domain. It’s difficult to imagine a predator succeeding but doubtless brown falcons or kestrels are a formidable foe of the cryptic earless dragons and flightless grasshoppers that resemble polished pebbles.

Interleaved with panes of gypsum, deep earth cracks dry out, open, and shut where water collects in shallow basins of heavier clay and these sites include important refugia for rodents and therefore a hunting ground favoured by venomous snakes such as inland taipans. Coober Pedy’s ’moon plain’ is cited as a location for the endangered native plains rat, Pseudomys australis. The “glassy” sheets of gypsum, hydrated calcium sulphate, are formed mainly through the evaporation of sea water and compression.

In a landscape of prevailing flatness, machinery high points are claimed by nesting kestrels, cockatoos and crows. I’m charmed by the story of Brian Underwood, 79, who returned from holidays to discover crows had nested at the very top of his truck mounted elevator. A resourceful engineer, miner and pilot, Brian made an additional spar relocating the nest to one side of the mast, a modification acceptable to the crows. Next he moved the truck a short distance and the crows followed. In time he was able to continue work at various locations around the opal fields and the agreeable crows followed his meanderings year after year.

A place of refuge for hermits and loners, engineers and mechanics, a surprising number of pilots, writers, artists, photographers and fossil aficionados, it comes as no surprise that Coober Pedy can claim a film making history without parallel in Australia.

Author Colin Thiele of Storm Boy fame is less well known for The Fire in the Stone a cross-cultural teen adventure novel from 1974 that inspired the first feature film made in Coober Pedy a decade later. From Mad Max classics of the 1980s there are apparently upwards of 35 feature films, documentaries, children’s classics, mini-series, dramas and reality television survival challenges that owe much to the subterranean society of Coober Pedy. Wikipedia lists just seventeen.

Ivan Sen’s black and white Limbo rises above most in my estimation. The master of gritty locations he captures the essence of town and landscape in a slow dance of bleak subjects conveyed with extraordinary choreography and acting. Subsistence living and moments of great tenderness are elevated by the austerity of the landscape and pulverised mine sites that are never far away. Sen borrows from the true case of a young Aboriginal woman that we know has been murdered, her body vanished by person/s unknown, a cold case that haunts Coober Pedy to this day.

Chris Butler recalls some of the book keeping challenges when she took over management of a service station in the 1970s. Account customers insisted on using nicknames such as Axle Ivan, Peter Rabbit, Machine Gun Joe, The Captain, Crocodile Harry, Long Hair and Short Hair Steve, their real names deemed indecipherable in a land of Smith, Brown and Jones. It’s widely believed that Harry, aka Arvīds Blūmentāls inspired the Hollywood blockbuster Crocodile Dundee but the film more likely borrows from a composite of characters, notably “bushman” and “survivalist” Rod Ansell who died in a shoot-out with Northern Territory police.

In Coober Pedy it’s not unusual to hear stories of desperate flight from communist regimes but Arvīds Blūmentāls was linked to the German SS in a 2017 essay entitled “the hero and the crocodile” by PhD candidate Harry Merritt.

Crocodile Harry makes the headlines in Europe.

At just 17, Arvids joined the Nazi-occupied Latvian forces on the Eastern Front in 1942. According to Merritt, “in 1943 he was transferred to the Latvian Legion … in the German Waffen-SS … the remnants of his unit ended up near Berlin, where in April of 1945, he and some comrades tore off their SS insignia.

“With the help of a Latvian doctor, he removed the Waffen-SS blood group tattoo on his arm and told Allied authorities he had been a forced labourer in Germany, to avoid becoming a POW. Along with about 200 other Latvian Legion veterans, Blūmentāls joined the French Foreign Legion in 1947 and served for several years before coming to Australia.”

Merritt viewed Crocodile Harry, and “morally bankrupt” others, as a fallen hero, a “mercenary adventurer” but the migrant miner saw his war record very differently and the truth probably lies somewhere in the murky middle. In an interview for German Stern magazine Harry is described as an ex Wehrmacht soldier who joined up to fight the Russians in his occupied homeland of Latvia. Merritt concludes: “In his older years, he seems to have settled down a bit, marrying a German singer named Marta and spending his days sculpting” and in numerous discussions with community old timers who knew him well, a great many Coober Pedy women insist he was an absolute gentleman. Harry would march in the Anzac day parade in uniform, his SS association and conscience clearly reconciled. In Latvia “a statue of a crocodile has been erected in his honor” and it must be said that statues tend to attract acts of protest and vitriol.

Most books and articles featuring Coober Pedy seem to focus disproportionately on alpha males, especially extroverted and performative types, more easily rendered in two dimensions. “Larrikin” male escapades were the life-blood of frivolous discourse during the 60s and 70s and the wild, grog soaked reputation of Coober Pedy softened in the late 70s as the gender imbalance slowly began to correct.

Crocodile Harry’s dugout reveals themes of hyper masculinity, of Viking strength and adolescent sexual fantasies that entertained tourists and dominated popular frontier culture in the 1970s.

Harry cultivated the persona of a great womaniser, his dugout decorated with women’s undergarments, and unfortunately this is how he is remembered in popular folklore, much less so for his creativity. Crudely re-cast, Harry’s cultural “style” lives on, spawning a decorating trend that smothers the interiors of most Road Houses with hats and other paraphernalia “contributed” by tourists. It reminds me of the banal graffiti that inundates heritage buildings as so many individuals struggle to be noticed in Melbourne.

Writer Rena Briand first entered this place in 1969, living amongst the white miners for a decade, imbibing the dominant mining culture but also observing the “magic in the otherwise inhospitable desert country surrounding Coober Pedy. We see 20^thcentury troglodytes … their drinking bouts, their love-making and their brutal fights. All nationalities seem to be represented at Coober Pedy. There are educated men and illiterate men, crooks, crackpots and vagabonds.”

The back cover of Briand’s White Man in a Hole, first published in 1971, continues in a similar vein: “Violence and robberies are almost a way of life, since Coober Pedy is a well-known haunt for criminals and tribal outcasts. Gambling and prostitution thrive. Men disappear mysteriously. Tribal killings baffle the authorities.” The reputation of Coober Pedy was set in stone and subsequent writers have been inclined to regurgitate tropes of lawlessness and violence ever since.

Swainsona.

Briand’s descriptions of country resonate for me, “serene beauty of the hills never failed to overwhelm. I could hear soft indistinct murmurs from within them … when a sudden storm was roaring it sounded like the voices of a million ancestors wailing and groaning.”

I remain conflicted however by Briand’s revelations about Coober Pedy’s human inhabitants because the great many I know and respect don’t resemble her cast of characters from 50 years ago. The actions of alcoholics are rarely edifying and their recurring juvenile or violent antics dominate a little too strongly and perhaps uncomfortably in her story telling. There’s a fine line separating character and caricature, and that line was comprehensively crossed as Briand and her subjects consumed an ocean of alcohol.

The author’s laudable attempts at cross cultural understanding don’t always stand the test of time. She portrays “poor hygiene” among indigenous people as a cultural legacy of desert nomads without clearly linking the prohibitive costs and scarcity of water in the town.

Mentioning that one Aboriginal man had not bathed for 66 years, Briand trusts the reader to recognise the absurdity of her informant’s claim to know that some-one never bathed, swam in waterholes or not. Her descriptions of offensive and racist behaviours are jarring, and some examples of petty actions by police against sleeping itinerants scarcely believable. The warmth, dignity, industry and sobriety of her photographic subjects contradicts a pervasively harsh narrative and provides critical balance, as do the captions.

For the 2012 reprint of her book Briand writes a thirty years later preface that is quite beautiful in her description of caring for opal miner Johnny Kovak. With a brain tumour that had left him almost blind she describes the still active miners death: “In March 2011, a few days short of his 82^nd birthday, Johnny’s pick hit the bottom of an old shaft that had been backfilled, and he was buried in a cascade of rubble up to his neck … unable to breathe, his end probably was mercifully swift … it was the way he wanted to go. He had a horror of being put in a home.”

Chapter 7 “Children of Morpheus” shines in its description of an inspirational artist / teacher and the creative endeavours of his pupils. Chapter 12, “The  Aboriginals” is also worthy, the positive photographs including front cover, less burdened by the human desolation and poverty that sometimes dogs Briand’s writing.

While I personally dislike the focus on sexual depravity and drunken violence I remain in awe of Briand’s courage and searing honesty in writing such a book and returning to Coober Pedy to face the music! Clearly every writer must make choices about the truth and tone of the word pictures they assemble, made difficult by the incredible complexity of towns like Coober Pedy. Multiple truths inhabit every layer, mediate and infuse every issue.

Personally, I did not recognise the town of Briand’s description, the frequent violence, prostitution and prevalence of syphilis that I accept was a reality in her time but also a useful lure to attract an audience. Vestiges of Briand’s Coober Pedy may be found in every frontier town but readers of her landmark book may rest assured, some 50 years later, a culturally richer and gentler community overlays the old.

Zebra stone carving by Dave Davison.

Skirting around worn out cliches and instead illuminating elements so often overlooked, I feel compelled to contribute to some kind of identity reset for this remarkable town. I hope to write something that honours the lives of contemporary residents while informing, shaping and perhaps softening the skewed perceptions of outsiders. White Man in a Hole captures a frontier opal mining town during a crazy, often repugnant and intensely misogynistic era. High journalistic values of this book aside, I’m uncertain it would pass today’s cultural and morality standards and ever find a publisher.

From the 1970’s Coober Pedy was the culinary capital of inland Australia, an unofficial title it held for several decades. The Italian club was always packed. Nobody was speaking English until my immediate circle would graciously include me in their conversation. From a phenomenal Greek Taverna Restaurant operated by the Kiossos family to the fabulous roof top Umberto’s restaurant that served toffee nest deserts.

Around the corner, a patisserie that eclipsed any facsimile I’ve ever encountered. Roland Weber established his Last Resort Cafe above the legendary Underground Bookshop created in the early 1980s by Peter Caust and the two friends formed a complementary tourism experience without peer. Regretfully, both original owners moved on and while the Underground bookshop persisted for a time it did grind to a halt a few years back. The town was still home to 48 nationalities in 1971 when Peter Caust was involved in the population census.

For a town dogged by local Government scandals and struggling financially, I’m struck by the concern of the people for all sentient life, both wild and domesticated. In my experience islands of kindness exist in the most impoverished and desperate communities and in this regard Coober Pedy is a rare sanctuary for the lost and vulnerable.

The community of Umoona is home to celebrated painters whose work is widely exhibited and may be viewed at the newly opened art centre. Unsurprisingly, a number of miners turn to sculpture, crafts and painting to counterbalance the physical and economic demands of mining.

Community leader, painter and miner of more than fifty years, George Cooley, aged 71, bridges the gap between opal mining and the indigenous artists of Umoona. From the Kanku-Breakaways to the “Painted Desert” Cooley’s sun drenched palette knife and broad brush landscapes portray a pristine view of country, of sharp textures, light and shade, of reverent quiet and stillness.

Umoona resident and dedicated kangaroo carer, Dawn Brown and her family made space for Wendell, the towering male red kangaroo and cherished family pet of six years who could easily hop over the garden fence but chooses to stay at home in the suburbs.

Wendell (pictured) did briefly return to the adjacent wild. Checking on the red kangaroo’s progress, family members discovered he was not faring well on the outside so they invited him home. Resembling a boxer’s punching bag, a rag bundle hanging from the verandah provides Wendell with high kicking entertainment. I wonder if future generations of Australians might choose a rescue wombat, a bandicoot or glider as a family pet in preference to the carnivores that have captured our hearts for so long.

Coober Pedy has a remarkable rescue service for stray dogs and cats that is run by Dawn Jones, a stoic volunteer of 45 years. Compassionate and dedicated, Dawn and her team of volunteers spend their available time and collectively, an eye watering amount of money on this demanding civic need.

The number of dogs transported south to be re-homed is astounding, about 1,000 per annum. They’ve established a go fund me appeal to help with the purchase of a property and development of a care facility and boarding kennels. Reflecting on the lack of civic support for this vital service and the growing budgets allocated to Government Administrators and consultants, most of my readers will want to join the long suffering residents of Coober Pedy and cry.

Far eclipsing the treasury of opals that lie beneath, the hardy people whose company I’ve sought over many years, truly are the pearls of the Eromanga Sea; a great endorsement of migration’s capacity to refresh our communities and enrich regional Australia’s world view. In this post Covid downturn, I believe a new generation of migrants might be key to the town’s renewal. Filipino couple, Kaysy Clet De Leon and Cherry Anne De Leon opened a new bakery a few years ago to enthusiastic acclaim. And at the time of writing, Sri Lankans appear to dominate “front of house” in hotels and hospitality. Could a new wave of Asian migrants and their descendants revive the town’s culinary scene?