Walking backwards in Coober Pedy

Letter #9 - Coober Pedy, South Australia

G’day!

Welcome to Letters From the Road, and letter number 9! Today we’re in Coober Pedy, still in Coober Pedy I should say, since letter number 8 also came to you from Coober. We’re not happy to be here, but we’ve really got no choice in the matter.

For those of you for whom this is your first letter, welcome! Good on ya for signing up and reading. Letters From the Road is the story of a family road trip in Australia, told one weekly installment at a time using my journal entries written during the trip. You’ll probably figure this out, but I thought I may as well mention that the quoted bits below are the journal entries, and the rest is me filling in the gaps.

It’s also worth mentioning that the special artwork included has been graciously provided by my super talented little brother Nick. You can find more of his art here.

And if you’ve just joined us and want to catch up, you can find the other eight letters here, underneath a pile of rocks. You might have to do a bit of noodling to get at them.

Let’s open up your letter!

Luke

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I’ve never had to use a piece of luggage for a pillow, and for that I count myself lucky. 

We’re led to believe that’s what happens when you get stranded somewhere. Every so often you see news stories about people stuck in airports because of weather or plane troubles or volcanoes spewing ash into the air, and they have to sleep on the floor, heads propped up on suitcases and looking miserable. There’s usually an interview with a rumpled and bewildered person who’s nonetheless somewhat amused to be on the news, and they report that they’d been there for at least 17 hours and that they’ve never seen anything like it.

I have not had the pleasure of being stranded like that. A few years ago, I was sitting with my wife Katie on a Los Angeles to Melbourne flight, waiting for takeoff. While waiting patiently for the other passengers to board, I looked out the window. My seat was situated right on the wing, and through the darkness I could see that the end of the wing was spewing fuel like a fire hose. It was a constant stream shooting out the end of the wing, like the airplane was relieving itself onto the tarmac. Meanwhile, a couple of men in hazmat suits stood around watching. It’s like when one of your kids needs to go to the toilet, but you’re conveniently somewhere with no bathrooms in sight. So you tell them to go behind that tree over there and pee. ‘Can you at least try to not let anyone see you?’ I could imagine the men saying. 

Needless to say we were put up at a hotel and told to come back to the airport the next afternoon, to catch a different flight. There was no urgency about the situation though - we knew that there would be another plane to take us back to Melbourne the next night and our only imposition was a day of fluffing around on the beach in LA.

So the experience and how it feels to really be stranded is not something I’m familiar with. Though I imagine it might be similar to the hopeless feeling I’ve had at some kids birthday parties I’ve been to.  

No experience, that is, until we were stranded in Coober Pedy. 

Coober Pedy is a little mining town in the middle of the South Australian desert. It’s known for the fiery little gemstones called opals that they have in copious amounts, for the fact that a good number of its inhabitants live in caves, and the related fact that it’s simply a weird place. I sent a letter last week that you can read if you want more gory details. 

One day prior to the start of today’s letter, we were about to leave to drive north to Uluru, when I noticed that our car was leaking diesel. The fix for the fuel system required a part that was only found in Adelaide, and so it was that we were stranded, waiting on the part to arrive. 

The best way I can describe the experience being stranded in Coober Pedy is that it is like being stuck in a hole. You can’t get out. The dinner options are limited. It’s dusty and dirty in there, because you’re in a hole in the ground. This isn’t some ‘Timmy fell down the well’ type of hole, where it would be cold and dank and there would be a better selection of beverages. No, in here it’s hot and dry, the light is dim, and it gets a bit freaky when the sun goes down. 

Feeling like you are in a hole is appropriate for a place like Coober Pedy, where holes are a constant theme. You’ve either been to a cave or mine recently or are headed to one. Holes are a lot of what makes the town what it is, but they are also a problem. 

The name ‘Coober Pedy’ comes from an indigenous word meaning something in the neighbourhood of ‘white man in a hole’, a fact that is great by itself, and yet doesn’t sufficiently describe the fact that the white man dug lots of holes in and around Coober Pedy in search of a fortune in opals. In 1999 it was estimated that there were upwards of 250,000 holes in the ground around town. That’s more holes than a bumper day at a Cheerio factory. So what to do about all those holes?

I see the Coober Pedy hole problem as being akin to climate change. The holes aren’t nearly as dire, they don’t really afflict all of humanity either, but let me explain. We humans are good at causing problems from our shortsightedness, and then coming up with ingenious and inspired but sub-optimal fixes after the fact. I have no doubt climate change will be one of these instances. It is crystal clear right now that we’ve got a problem with the climate and that the problem is only going to get worse. But things aren’t too bad right now, just a bit of an inconvenience here and there (though a bit more if there’s a forest fire burning down your house). 

If you are an energy company, though, there’s still good money to be made in coal and oil and gas, so why do anything different? And, if you are the government, people like driving cars, so let’s put in more roads and make the ones we have bigger. We’ll continue on this path, kicking the can down the road until things get really, really grim, and then come up with some amazing but less than optimal reactive solution to the whole thing, like changing the weather, a time machine, or hopping on one of Elon Musk’s rockets to Mars. As a side note that’s definitely worth mentioning, in 2008 NASA reported that it had discovered opals on Mars. So maybe for citizens of Coober Pedy, relocating to Mars would be a reasonable endeavour, and not much of a transition either. 

You can see that attitude played out in Coober Pedy, where there’s a clear example of less than optimal can-do fix after the fact. After years of turning the town into swiss cheese looking for opals, a solution was put in place: signage. All over town and especially along the highway where tourists could possibly wander off into the desert to look for something to put on Instagram, there are large signs warning one of the dangers posed by all the holes. 

The signs say ‘DON’T RUN’, which is illustrated by a picture of a stick figure running and then falling down a hole. Then: ‘BEWARE! DEEP SHAFTS’, followed by a picture of someone falling down a hole. And finally ‘DON’T WALK BACKWARDS’, with a picture of a stick figure walking backwards and falling down a hole.

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Resigned to being stranded, we eased into our extended stay in Coober Pedy and started looking for ways to keep entertained.

10th October 2019 - Coober Pedy (again)

This isn’t exactly where we would have picked to be stuck up for a few days, but I guess it could be worse. We could be in the middle of nowhere. 

But everyone else seems to be leaving. This isn’t really a place you stay for four nights. 

I went running this morning, for the first time since Iowa, over 3 weeks ago. It felt good, though I can tell I’m out of running shape. That’s been one of my greatest whinges about the past nine months, is not having enough time to run. It's not that we’ve been inactive, we hiked a good bit and I got a few runs in here and there, but I know I’m not in the same shape I was. I also feel like I have put on a few kilos and am getting a belly, though Katie disagrees and would argue that she’s shrunk my clothes while using the dryers at various people’s homes we stayed at. 

I thought that this would be a good response to the wife or husband who comes to you asking, ‘Do I look fat?’. 

‘No. It’s not you, it’s the dryer.’

While running out into the desert outside of Coober Pedy, I came across a bore. 

A bore is the Australian name for a well. This one was little more than a pipe coming out of the ground, a valve, and a dirty blue hose that trailed off into the sand. A hand painted sign provided instructions for use: ‘Turn on and off slowly. Only open valve half way’ it said. Some seating - the rusted frame of a chair and a milk crate - completed the setup. Water pooled on the ground around the leaking pipes.

I have to admit being a bit put off by water leaking all over the place in the middle of the desert, much less not having a better place to sit down and rest. It’s a bit lazy and more than a little daft to not take better care of your water in a town that’s not far from the driest place on the continent, Kati Thanda - Lake Eyre. But maybe that’s because people think they have plenty of water, which might be the case because there is more than just opals underneath Coober Pedy. 

Deep inside the earth beneath Coober Pedy is something called the Great Artesian Basin. Also known as the GAB, the Great Artesian Basin is a massive layer of water trapped in the rock. It’s one of the largest and deepest aquifers in the world, with an area that’s as approximately as large as a fifth of Australia, spanning from Coober Pedy all the way to the tip of the continent in northern Queensland.

Tentotwo, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

In general, the aquifer replenishes itself from rain that hits the eastern edge of the GAB, along a mountain range called the Great Dividing Range that runs from New South Wales up through Queensland. Water then flows runs south and west through the aquifer, popping up through the ground at springs and seeps all over eastern Australia. Settlers have been tapping the basin since the late 1800s, and having this as a reliable source of water has been essential to the growth of Australia. Places like Coober Pedy wouldn’t exist without it. 

Unless you’re a bit odd and curious like me, you’ve never thought much about water seeping out of the ground. But there are all sorts of things that are amazing about the GAB in particular. First, because of the large area the GAB covers, and because a lot of that area is beneath remote parts of Australia, some of the springs are still being found. 85 new ones have been discovered just this year, and living in these environments are macroinvertibrates that have never been seen before. 

Also, just down the road from Coober Pedy is a town called Roxby Downs, which is home to an enormous mine called Olympic Dam. Olympic Dam sits on top of the largest deposit of uranium in the world. At some point, the plentiful waters of the GAB crosses paths with all that uranium, and then bubbles to the surface at places like the Paralana Geothermal Springs. Paralana is a hot springs, and the water there is heated by decaying uranium. Some of the pools also release radon gas into the air. This isn’t the case for all the hot springs in the area, and surely not the one feeding the hot tub located in the desert along the Oodnadatta Track that we had soaked in the day before we arrived in Coober Pedy. Surely not? Happy to report that there have been no signs of radiation sickness yet, no extra teeth or toes on the boys, and my thyroid feels fine. 

Thinking of myself standing there, breathing hard from my run and considering the little puddle of water around the bore because one gets thirsty when running in the desert, one more interesting thing about the GAB comes to mind. Rainwater on the high plains in Queensland that filters down into the GAB doesn’t make it to Coober Pedy with great haste. Carbon dating puts the age of some of the water around Coober Pedy at nearly 2 million years old. You’d think that we’d have a bit more respect for something that’s 2 million years old, welcoming it back to the surface with something better than a milk crate, a busted chair, and a weathered sign written with bad grammar. 

But I still wasn’t going to drink it out of that muddy puddle, so I kept running. 

I’m an introvert, always have been, so I thrive on solitary pursuits. The two main activities that I love are running and writing. Both let me get up inside my head, where I enjoy hanging around. They also take time: in my prime, I was running around 20k at a go, which takes close to 2 hours. And when I get into a flow with writing something, I could go for ages.

Unfortunately one thing that’s in short supply when travelling in close quarters with the family for a year is long stretches of solitude. Good luck. And so I don’t write or run enough, and I would love it if I could. 

Today, here in Coober Pedy for yet another day, I both ran and wrote, so let’s say that despite none of us wanting to be here, it was a good day.

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11th October 2019 - Coober Pedy (again)

9.34 a.m., and the morning exodus of people leaving the Oasis is about complete. Except us, we’re still here. The replacement part that we needed to fix the fuel leak did not arrive in Coober Pedy this morning.

As I sat looking out at the empty car park, blinding in the bright sun, I was deflated. We did not plan on staying anywhere for five days, much less a dusty former glory town where the only thing open on a Friday night is John’s Pizza, and maybe the Italian Australian Miners Club and the BP Station. But stay we will. 

Staying longer in Coober Pedy gave us more than enough opportunities to see the sights. We went to the Old Timers Mine and Museum, a place which covers all the Coober Pedy tourist highlights in one go: it’s a former mine, it used to be an underground house, and it has an opal shop. The museum used puppets and mannequins to portray miners and the former occupants of the home, most of which were really odd looking, which I think scared the boys a little. And me. 

No amount of stuffed animals could bring happiness to this room.

We also tried our hands at noodling. Most places around town allow it, and some even encourage it. Katie didn’t enjoy noodling and probably wouldn’t do it again. I thought it was fun, and that Katie would enjoy it more if she was more open to trying new things. Henry and Oscar loved it - our boys usually got into things like noodling. 

To be clear, I’m not sure why the word ‘noodling’ is used to describe picking through piles of discarded rock in the hopes of finding opals, but it’s a common activity in Coober Pedy. Do a google maps search for noodling and you’ll find 8 different options, though one is the Opal City Chinese Restaurant. I have no doubt that they would not mind if you want to do a little noodling around back after you’re done enjoying some special fried rice, a couple wontons, and a Tsingtao.  

For us, seeing one mine and a cave in Coober Pedy was enough, so we also spent a lot of time festering at the Oasis Caravan Park. The boys occupied themselves by wandering around the Oasis grounds throwing rocks and dirt at each other. Apparently Western Australians use the word ‘boondie’ to describe a chunk of dirt that you throw at your friends, but I’m not sure what word they use in South Australia, so I’ll stick to ‘dirt’ until we cross the border. 

We all went to the swimming pool. The pool at the Oasis is a curious place. It is situated inside something resembling a round concrete bunker with an opening in one end. This made it quite dark inside, and if you weren’t careful you’d run into one of the walls while swimming. It also made the water quite cold, a big contrast from the world outside the bunker.

There was one other underground attraction we checked out. Coober Pedy has an underground book store called Underground Books. I should say ‘had’, because it seems to have closed since we were there. The rooms were roughly hewn from the rock, which made it awkward to line with straight shelves and racks of books. The lighting, for being a cave, was surprisingly good. We purchased a book for Oscar, who’d had a voracious appetite for books while we’d been travelling. I suspect that part of the reason he went through them so quickly is because he read while we were driving, and we drove a lot. I consider this a super power, as reading while driving had a way of making me vomit. 

They say that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but that does not extend to any book with a cover that features a Chuck Norris knockoff, Scully from the X-Files with a rifle, and the tagline ‘Bad dudes get baked in Alaska!’ Oscar was not disappointed with ‘Able Team: Skinwalker’ by Dick Stivers. 

All of the sightseeing was not the highlight of my day, however. 

There was one bright spot. Henry’s well known in our family for being a little skittish when it comes to the unknown and things not going to plan. When we were in Argentina, there were several occasions when Katie and I had to hunt for a bus stop, which is a bit of an art form in Buenos Aires. If this went in for more than two minutes, Henry would explode with an angry ‘we’re lost!’ And then move on to telling us to call an Uber, or a taxi, or a helicopter or anything.

I expected as much after our latest setback, having to stay yet another night in Coober Pedy because the part for our car had not yet arrived. But he surprised me by shrugging it off with a laugh and giving me a hug.

Sometimes him growing up is not such a bad thing.

Five days in to being stranded, and we were all a little numb. What’s another day? If things kept on like this, maybe we could just stay? Find our own little square of ground, put the boys to work digging, and spend our afternoons noodling?

Without a part for our car, and with the repair shop having no control over when the part actually arrived, nothing was certain.

Nothing, except the fact that the sun was going to set sun again set over the rocky hills of the town, it would rise again tomorrow over the holes, and that in between I’d be sleeping with a proper pillow under my head.