AT first sight, Coober Pedy is just a desolate town in the middle of nowhere. Adelaide is 800 kilometres to the south on the Stuart Highway, Alice Springs 700 kilometres to the north. In either direction there is nothing but low-lying scrub and dry, red desert. The town sprawls over low sandstone hills. Its main street houses a collection of stores, cafĂ©s, motels and service stations. Scattered about is the detritus of the mining industry: drilling rigs, beaten-up dump trucks, and huge heaps of white soil â the spoil from the opal mines that are Coober Pedyâs life blood. It rarely rains and there is scarcely a trace of green. In the searing summer heat, giant dust storms engulf the town and blot out the sky.
But pay a little more attention and youâll notice something very strange about Coober Pedy. Take a drive among its hills and, here and there, youâll find timber-framed doorways set into the bare rock. A mine entrance? Not at all, for cut into the rock beside the doorframe are square, glass windows. Occasionally a doorway is shaded by a long verandah, complete with chairs and tables.
These are the entrances to underground homes. Coober Pedy is one of the worldâs most unusual towns with about 60 per cent of its population living below ground. According to the District Council that works out at around 2500 people. The council says there are 800 houses underground and 600 above. The precise figures are hard to come by. Coober Pedy is a frontier town with many of its residents on the run from officialdom, wedlock, or both. The last thing they want to do is fill in census forms and say where they live.
Advertisement
Besides the underground homes â or more accurately âdugoutsâ, so called because they are dug horizontally into the hillsides rather than excavated vertically â there are underground shops, motels and a bookshop, appropriately called Underground Books. Even the townâs five churches are underground: âit makes the burials easierâ, quipped one resident.
There are several good reasons for burrowing into the hillsides. âI donât want to be exposed to the extremes of weather,â says Piet Lamont, a part-time miner who runs a shop selling opals and fossils. Outside, summer daytime temperatures range from 35 to 47 °C while in winter, nightime temperatures under clear skies can plummet to near freezing. But inside a dugout the temperature remains a steady 20 to 26 °C all year round. âThere is no noise, itâs a very secure feeling,â explains Peter Caust, who operates tours of the central Australian outback and runs Underground Books, âItâs like living in the bowels of Mother Earth.â
Itâs also not too complicated to build your own home. Once people used picks and dynamite. Now, youâd probably send for Otto Hartweg and his partner, Darren Zechner, who claim to be the only dugout builders in town. A bulldozer usually starts the job by slicing a sheer face in the hill. Then Hartweg and Zechner bring in a tunnelling machine complete with revolving blades to dig straight into the hill. Once inside, the machine can be manoeuvred to create rooms and openings for doors and windows. Closets and cupboards appear with help of a shovel.
Just how big and complicated you want the structure to be depends on how much money you have. Some underground homes are elaborate with as many as 20 rooms occupying up to 8000 square feet (740 square metres). At least one house has its own swimming pool.
There is not a lot of detailed planning and, as yet, not too many building regulations. Hartweg works to plans drawn up by the owner (the land is purchased freehold from the South Australian Department of Environment and Natural Resources for about A$5000 (around ÂŁ2500).
House plans are normally little more than a sketch done with a ruler and pencil on a piece of paper. The size of the rooms is marked in feet and inches. The price agreed for tunnelling is invariably scribbled on the paper. A house covering 500 square metres will cost about A$15 000 to tunnel.
Experience and expertise are what matters during the actual construction. âIf you are building a structure of bricks and steel, you can work out the stresses,â explains Hartweg. âBut you canât do that underground â tunnelling is largely common sense. We make sure we donât make the rooms too wide. The columns supporting the room should be no more than five metres apart. Any more than this and the structure may become unstable.
There is talk of engineering approval being required before a dugout is built with the tunnellers assuming liability for safety. âThe people pushing that line have no idea what is involved in building a dugout,â says Zechner. âYou simply canât test the site. We donât know what is there until we tunnel into it. If we find a fault, we can work around it.â
The hills are geologically stable but there may be small areas of weakness within them. âYou either donât touch these areas and change the plan or you cut around them,â says Hartweg. In a few cases, when the tunnellers work around faults, the rooms end up being long and narrow. âItâs becoming more of a problem,â says Hartweg. âThe good sites are almost all gone and people are tunnelling in more marginal areas.â But no residents have been killed by a cave-in, although, says Hartweg, there have been one or two lucky escapes.
One unfortunate man did lose his life while excavating a dugout. He drove his tunnelling machine into a vertical mining shaft full of loose dirt. The dirt engulfed the machine and he suffocated and died.
Hartweg and Zechner have modified their machine so that they can extend and retract the blades over about 10 metres. That keeps the rotating blades which cut into the sandstone well away from the cabin where the operator sits. Any loose rock falls clear of the operator and is carried away on a conveyor belt. The main problem faced by the tunneller is the swirling dust which surrounds the machine as it inches forward.
Timber frames are used for the front door and for the windows set into the hillside. Ceiling air vents may incorporate a skylight as well but dugouts normally require plenty of artificial light. But at least you donât have to worry about wallpaper. The sandstone walls are honey coloured with a pleasing pattern of whorls from the action of the tunnelling machine. A coating of a lacquer called lockcrete on the walls adds the final flourish â it stops them shedding tiny particles of sand. Once you have your underground home, youâre also safe from dust storms. A fan sucks air into the dugout through a filter, creating a slight pressure difference that prevents dust entering from the outside.
First World War soldiers returning from the battlefields of Europe started the trend for underground living in Coober Pedy. In 1915, a 14-year-old called Willie Hutchison was looking for gold with his father when he stumbled across opals instead. Lured by the promise of riches, demobbed soldiers arrived soon after, bringing with them their experience of living for many months in trenches hewn from the countryside. So at Coober Pedy the soldiers also went underground, building rough-and-ready homes in the sandstone hills next to their mines.
These early activities gave the town its name. Coober Pedy is a European corruption of the aboriginal words âkupa pitiâ which mean âwhite manâs burrowâ. The opal miners either work on their own or in partnerships with one or two others, no large companies are involved.
The stones are a form of silica and acquire their special, milky iridescence from the water in the mineral structure. Their value is determined by colour, water content, clarity or brilliance, and weight. Opal mining is a risky business because there is no way to pinpoint exactly where opal will be found. Miners have to dig and hope for good luck. Often, they will live on credit or savings for many months before they find the elusive stone. The industry teetered on the brink of collapse during the Depression but revived in the 1950s when impoverished European refugees streaming into Australia felt the pull of the opal fields. Today the townsfolk come from at least 48 countries, including Eastern Europe, and Australia is the worldâs largest supplier of opals.
Coober Pedy is also beginning to experience a tourist boom, attracting retired people from some of the big cities. And there are local government officials with plans for bringing industry to the area. Hartweg is wary of additional red tape. But others believe that Coober Pedyâs frontier days are over and regulations are an inevitable part of progress. One of the townâs leading figures, Robert Coro, whose family owns the Desert Cave, a four-star hotel which boasts 19 underground rooms, says the town will have to change or stagnate. âFamilies are moving in,â he says. âPeople want services. But they will have to pay for them.â
That does not mean the town will ever become ordinary. âWhere else in Australia could one be transformed from bankruptcy to a millionaire over night?â reads one of the pamphlets put out by the Desert Cave. There are stories of people expanding their dugouts and finding opals worth half-a-million dollars. And when the Serbian community built its underground church last year, their faith was rewarded with an opal find of $A6500.