Coober Pedy is a small Australian mining town 846 Km north of Adelaide. The dusty, dry, scorching hot town is often referred to as the opal capital of the world; in all it has 70 opal fields to its name. In fact, the majority of the world’s opals still come from the roasting bowels of Coober Pedy.
The town’s population of 3,500 consists of 16% indigenous Australians and 60% Europeans from Southern and Eastern Europe who arrived after WWII. In all there are 45 nationalities represented.
The spaceship below was left behind by the producers of the film Pitch Black. It adds an extra facet of weird to the town. The moon-like area around the town has been used for a number of movies including Mad Max Beyond the Thunderdome, Priscilla Queen of the Desert and The Red Planet.
Coober Pedy has a network of “dugouts” carved into the hillsides where most of its residents live to escape the intense heat of the day. There’s pretty much no point being outside during the midday sun because you’d pretty much catch on fire immediately; in the summer it’s regularly 35+ degrees in the shade.
The cost of the dugouts is about the same as the cost of building a standard home but the dugouts remain a fairly constant temperature and don’t need costly air con running all the time, so they seem like the sensible option. You don’t get many views, but I guess there’s not that much to look at.
Here’s the local church:
The name ‘Coober Pedy’ actually comes from the Aboriginal term kupa-piti which means “white man’s hole”.
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More pics on the next page…
The town was founded in 1915, and by 1999 there were 250,000 mine shaft entrances dotted across the land. Large scale mining projects are discouraged and prospectors just have a small plot of land each to dig around in.
The town’s Orthodox Serbian church…
Nowadays tourism is as important an income as the opals with travelers popping by on their way to other places to have a nose about. One attraction is the golf course, people mostly play at night so that they don’t melt, so they have to use glowing balls. There’s no turf so each player carries a small divot around with them for the purpose of teeing off. In fact, the area has virtually no plant life at all thanks to the hot days, cold nights, dry weather and low quality top soil.
As for getting there and away, Manguri Siding (40 odd kilometres from Coober Pedy) has a couple of trains that arrive per week going north or south and daily coaches to Adelaide. The post gets delivered twice a week.
So if you’re looking for the type of holiday where there’s very little to do, no one can contact you and it’s hot all of the time, Coober might be the ideal location.
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