A trip on the Ghan
 |
Coober Pedywritten by Jim Downes photography by Berthold Daum |
 |
When white men began to dig for opals
on the eastern edge of the Great Victoria Desert, they found their shafts
and drives were more comfortable places to be than their surface tents and
shacks which baked all day in fierce sun and froze all night in desert cold.
So
the miners made their homes underground, and the Aborigines of the region,
who’d never seen anything like it, were much amused. In their experience
only animals lived in holes in the ground. They described this extraordinary
behaviour by white men in words that sounded like ‘Coober Pedy,’
and that’s the name now of the richest opal field in the world. Coober
Pedy means something like ‘cave men,’ or ‘people living in
burrows.’ It’s about eighty kilometres east of the railway line.
And there, people have created — not built, but excavated — an
underground township.
Miners and their families have made neither primitive dugouts nor caves,
but homes as comfortable and well fitted out as any surface house anywhere.
They enjoy a year round temperature which ignores the extremes of the Great
Victoria Desert a few metres above their heads. And from their nearby diggings,
they mine one of the world’s most sought-after gem stones...
|
|
