Coober Pedy

I have been curious to see Coober Pedy since I arrived in Australia 20 years ago and heard about the town and how people here live underground.

Coober Pedy is an opal mining town in Australia (see Lightning Ridge post for the other one). Coober Pedy doesn’t have the expensive black opals that Lightning Ridge is famous for, but does account for 85% of the world’s opals!

We spent just over a week exploring the town.

Landscape

Some people say that the landscape here is like a moonscape. There are piles of dirt everywhere – leftover dirt from where they have dug mines. The name “Coober Pedy” means something like “White man in hole” in the local Aboriginal language.

It’s really dry here as you can see, and there’s not much water available. The first people to come here were actually looking for water and many people have died here of dehydration. Now, there is some water available from a desalination plant outside of town that pumps water from the artesian bore. We had to pay $1 for 40 litres of water and fill up our caravan tanks before pulling into our spot and the showers at the park were on a 5-minute timer.

Living Underground

We drove all around the town to see how people live. It’s sort of hard to get an idea about the number of people living here because you can’t see their houses and can only see their car and a door.

We did get a look inside what a couple of the underground houses look like when we went to various museums (see below).

Downtown

There is one main street in town that has all the shops, tourist info and caravan parks on it. There are a couple of other accommodation places on the other streets too, but all up, the area is pretty small.

Here are some views of downtown:

Churches

One of the main things to see is the three underground churches in town.

Our first stop was the Catholic church:

Next up, the Catacomb church:

And finally, the most stunning – the Serbian Orthodox church:

Umoona Opal Museum

This was a museum about Coober Pedy, its history and all about the opals found here. It was also an opal shop. The museum was built in an old, underground mine.

Old Timer’s Mine

This was an old mine no longer in use. However, when they decided to create the museum in the 1990s, they discovered a seam of opal there that they ended up just leaving in the walls. They also had some opalised fossils still in the walls too, but they didn’t really come out in the photos.

This museum starts with a self-guided tour of the old mine tunnels:

It then continues up a tunnel and into a couple of the old houses above the mine where people lived – including a house where children lived up until the 1990s!

Faye’s House

Faye was a woman who came to Coober Pedy in the 1960s looking for adventure. She ran a small cafe for miners. Unfortunately, her cafe was blown down by a dust tornado (a ‘twirly whirly’ as they’re called here). Not knowing what to do next, she decided to dig a mine in the front yard of her underground house. She struck opal – lots of it! And became a millionaire (although no one around here ever admits how much money they actually make…).

She used some of this money to add a pool extension to her house (the only room above ground). Apparently, she threw notorious parties here with lots of booze (and clothes were optional in the pool…). For a town where there is no water, the locals thought she was nuts to have a swimming pool!

Faye went back to Queensland in the 1990s and died in the early 2000s. Today, you can visit her house and mine.

Her mine:

Her house:

After Coober Pedy, we decided to take a side trip up north to see Uluru.