For those who missed the first post, I’m on a 3-night trip to Coober Pedy with my girlfriend (and her 16 year old son). Coober Pedy is a small opal mining/tourist town in the middle of the Australian outback, population 1,762 at last census. The tourism benefits from it being one of the few towns on the long haul through the outback from Darwin to Adelaide.
Man that’s a long drive. It mostly looked like this:
To be fair, there are some straggly-ass trees at points as well, but it’s really just different flavours of nothingness.
Having arrived, we settled into our underground lair. Many people in Coober Pedy live in underground dugouts to escape the murderous summer heat. (It being winter now, it’s very pleasant, sunny and low-20s (70ish F), although quite chilly overnight, down near freezing.) The sandstone is soft enough to dig out with hand tools, yet solid enough that there is no danger of collapse.
The first night we just relaxed and slept, then I woke up and checked out the outside of our lair.
Here’s the view across the street:
Sorry, that’s actually a screenshot from Mad Max 3: Beyond Thunderdome which was filmed partly in Coober Pedy. Here is the real view:
So, up and into town. Quite by accident, we ran straight into the spaceship from Pitch Black, which is lying around in the yard of a hotel basically. I’m probably going to rewatch the movie tonight.
Side note: Last night for the first time I watched Priscilla, Queen of the Desert which is an Australian movie from the 90s also filmed in part around Coober Pedy. It was a big hit here, I’m not sure if it was a thing in the US? Anyway it was a sympathetic portrait of drag queens, but it would be cancelled for about 5 different reasons these days. Just a CANCEL CULTURE side note. Anyway…
On to the Serbian Orthodox Church. This church was carved out of the rock in 1992 and features rock-carved religious sculptures by an NZ artist, each of which took a month or two as he has to be very careful. It was pretty cool.
On to Crocodile Harry’s. He was an eccentric who fought for the Germans in WW2 then became a crocodile hunter and after that an opal miner. He has 1,000 signatures of virgins in his bedroom. He used to charge people $2 to look around his house, and after he died in the mid 2000s his house was preserved. It was a bit of a letdown really, just a creepy messy mancave, but here is his collection of womens underwear in his bedroom:
Here he is wrestling a croc:
Visited a few other places: a museum, an old preserved opal mine and an underground house where three female miners lived back in the 70s. They were “business partners” and “friends”. I have speculations about what else they were, but I didn’t ask. No photos from there.
In the evening we headed out to see the Dog Fence, Moon Plain and Breakaways. The Moon Plain is sort of self explanatory:
Yep. The Dog Fence is a fence that stretches most of the way across Australia, built to keep dingoes out of sheep country. At 5600km (3500mi) it is the longest fence in the world.
The Breakaways are a series of oddly-coloured hills in the outback, one of those things that is impossible to photograph, but this photo came out quite nicely:
I’ll get some more photos of the town today. It’s 9:40am so we are gearing up to head out. One more night tonight then the long drive home tomorrow. I’ll probably wait until I get home to post the second part of the TR as doing this on my phone is a pain.
