If there was a nuclear war, chances are the people of Coober Pedy would never notice. If there was a nuclear strike on Coober Pedy, chances are the visitors would never notice either, aside from the rather crispy locals. You can see a hell of a lot of nowhere from Coober Pedy.
Our trip to this sprawling metropolis starts in Wilpena Pound, in the Flinders Ranges, and then passes through Port Augusta, the so-called crossroads of Australia, which is the meeting point of the three major highways leading to Perth, Darwin and Adelaide respectively. This is where you fuel yourself up, because once you leave, the petrol prices increase as rapidly as the population decreases.
It does not take long to get out of town, and about 15 minutes down the road, you can get some idea of what you will be travelling across – very little. Scrubby plants, sandy soil (aka sand) no water, clear blue skies, and that’s about it. According to a display in Coober Pedy, when this road was designed (the main road from Alice Springs to Port Augusta was only completed in the late 1970s), they put in occasional random turns and drops just to keep drivers alert and interested - a 550km straight road would arguably have more traffic fatalities than the winding one. You don’t ever drop below 100km/h on the road, and even at this speed it still takes a few hours of continuous driving before you hit the only major town before Coober Pedy – Woomera.
Woomera was a rat fart of a town before the 1950s, when Great Britain and the United States started looking for somewhere remote and lifeless to (a) test top secret rockets and missiles, and (b) test top secret atomic weapons. The place was kitted out for military personnel, and all the locals had to have passes to move backwards and forwards; they even needed written authorisation to have cameras in their homes, in case they photographed something they shouldn’t.
Some of the old barracks housing still remains (it actually backs onto the caravan park in the town), but what’s left is about 1000 people stuck in a desert with not a lot to do, though there are still rocket tests here occasionally, thanks to the European Space Program, and the Japanese. We arrived just before sunset, and despite being offered the use of the ‘lawn’ to pitch our tent (sand with a half dozen blades of grass is what passes for lawn out here), we decided to set up the car for the night, and had a relatively restful night’s sleep.
Despite our urge to get to Coober Pedy, we did stop off at the local museum before leaving – it’s got a lot of the history of the rocket testing in Woomera, and barely a word about the atomic testing. The only reference to the atomic testing comes in display about local history, which relays the astonishing fact that not all of the isolated Aboriginal tribes of the region could be contacted and evacuated before the atomic explosions took place, but they went ahead regardless. A proud moment in Australian, British and American history indeed, though I guess it’s no more than an extension of what all three countries had been doing for the past century or two anyway.
The run to Coober Pedy was another 300km of very little, which we ate up at a speedy rate, only stopping for lunch and a couple of amazing viewing points. There are lakes mentioned on the maps of this region, but it’s only when you stop that you get some impression of the size of these lakes, and that fact that they are completely dry salt beds – the glare from the white salt is quite amazing. As you get closer to Coober Pedy, the landscape gets bumpier, from the discarded rocks taken out of the mines.
We stay in the world’s only underground campsite, at Reba’s Caravan Park, just a little way out of town, along a rather dusty track that winds through the mines. Pitching a tent underground in an old mine is pretty tricky – those tent pegs don’t penetrate rock as well as you would expect, so we’re relying on our (broken) dome tent to stay upright. Fortunately the lack of breeze in the underground cavern means it stays up okay, though several other campers don’t bother with tents at all, just throwing down airbeds for the night. After an evening tour of the mine under the site, we settle in for a relaxing night. This is not easy, since (a) the cavern is a great amplifier, making every small noise into a sonic boom, and (b) at least two of the other campers snore. And boy, do they snore. They may be 100 feet away, but they sound like an asthmatic bear with a megaphone is curled up next to your sleeping bag.
Rather dopey the next morning (hell, what’s new?) we head out to explore the town proper. Our first visit is to the Big Winch, which is, unsurprisingly, a big winch on a hill overlooking the town. You get some idea of the size of the place (tiny), and the scale of the mining (vast). A lot of the homes are dug into the hillsides and edges of the mine dumps to keep the temperature down (40 degree days are considered cool for the summer here).
We visit another mine, a self-guided tour this time, and it is here that I learn to appreciate the practicalities of mining, and the benefits of being one of seven dwarves when it comes to walking around a mine. Doubled over like a mountain gorilla with knuckles scraping the floor, your respect for miners increases greatly (as does your respect for mountain gorillas).
We also manage a trip to one of the underground churches in the area. Since the old Catholic Church has been closed recently for renovation, we head to the Serbian Orthodox Church which was recently constructed. Even if you’re not a religious person, the hush of the church, and the work that’s gone into carving it out of solid stone is something to behold, and the friendly Serbian caretaker who keeps popping up to show us around gives us a thorough tour (even if his English is as good as my Serbian).
Being film geeks, we also take time to photograph the props left over from Pitch Black and Mad Max II, because that’s just what we do folks. After a while, the underground gimmick gets, well, gimmicky, and so we scoot through the Underground Book Store, and the Desert Caves Hotel before stopping for an overground meal in the local pizza restaurant. Having filled up the car (hint – don’t buy petrol for a gas guzzler in the middle of a desert), we head back to the campsite, for another beautiful sunset and awesome night sky.
Coober Pedy is an impressive place, good for a couple of nights stay, but ultimately a working town that soon tires of tourists. And the whole time you’re there, you’re covered in an inch of dust – nothing stays clean for long, and even in the winter, it’s dehydrating. But there’s nowhere like it in the world.
