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More Than 70% Of The World’s Opals Come From Coober Pedy

By: Christina Pfeiffer

Around 70 per cent of the world’s opal is chipped out of the ground in Coober Pedy. So it comes as no surprise that the South Australian Outback town is a regular stop for savvy opal dealers from Hong Kong who travel there several times a year to choose the best stones.

“It’s not uncommon for 20 to 30 Hong Kong buyers to be wandering around town each month. Most of us own dugout homes and keep cars here,” says Jacky Lam from Hong Kong’s Wing Wah Opal Company.

Opal was discovered in 1915 but it wasn’t until the 1960s that hundreds of enthusiastic young men from Europe flocked to Coober Pedy to mine small parcels of land.

After decades of mining, the opal fields are covered with mounds of debris from prospecting shafts and the hills are a warren of underground dwellings. These homes range from one-room hand-dug bed-sits to rambling subterranean mansions furnished with swimming pools, solid gold bathroom fixtures and wine cellars.

More than 60 per cent of the town’s 3,500-plus residents live underground. In summer, when outside temperatures reach a sizzling 50°C, these underground homes keep cool (around 22 - 26°C) while in winter, the snug dugouts keep its occupants warm without the need for artificial heating.

One of Coober Pedy’s attractions is Faye Naylor’s Underground Home, which was dug out 40 years ago by a single woman. Naylor was the first to come up with the idea of turning her cramped bed sit into an underground home. Today, her display home has five rooms, a wine cellar and a swimming pool.

Visitors keen to shop for opals will not be disappointed as there are several underground opal shops in town. At the Umoona Opal Mine & Museum, visitors can wander through underground tunnels and scour display cabinets in the showroom for rings, earrings and necklaces.

Opal mining is addictive. “Once you find opal, you just can’t stop”, says Guenther Wagner, a former travel photographer from Germany. Guenther visited Coober Pedy on a photographic assignment 38 years ago and is still there. He runs the Down ‘n Dirty Opal Tour where visitors armed with hard hats, torches and hand picks are allowed to hack at the walls of the Opal Quest Mine for a chance of finding opal.

Over 45 nationalities live in Coober Pedy. There are two a-la-carte restaurants, a Chinese restaurant, pizza parlours and cafes. The popular Tom & Mary’s Greek Taverna is a hub of activity at dinner time. Also worth visiting are the underground churches and art galleries.

Almost everything is brown, including the 18-hole Coober Pedy Opal Fields Golf Course which provides reciprocal rights for its members to play nine holes in St. Andrews’ Balgove course in Scotland. The catch is this only applies during the month of January when the Scottish weather is inclement.

The one patch of green luxury in town is the football field, which is put to good use during the annual Opal Festival. Croatians, Serbians, Bosnians and Greeks can be found relaxing over a friendly beer while cooking lamb on the spit.

To capture the ambience of opal mining, wander through the tunnels in the Old Timers Mine, an opal mine discovered in 1916. The dimly lit tunnels are a mining museum filled with life-sized mannequins positioned to educate visitors about the daily life of an opal miner. It’s an eye-opening experience to learn how miners crouched in tiny grottos, climbed shafts using rough foot holes hand-picked into the walls and wheeled around heavy barrows of dirt.

Coober Pedy’s stark landscape has captured the imagination of apocalyptic filmmakers who left props (such as a huge alien spaceship which sits parked in front of the Opal Cave underground complex) from movies such as Red Planet and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. For movie buffs interested in walking in the footsteps of Olivia Newton John, Mel Gibson and Val Kilmer, Coober Pedy might be just the spot.