The Crow Eaters Page 2
The first tests began in 1947 with parachute trials. Eventually more than 4000 missiles were tested at Woomera up until 1980, including fire-flash missiles from Meteor jets, surface-to-air missiles and ‘sea slug’ weapons for the navy. Now there are projects from the Australian Space Research Institute and it is open for ‘military and civilian’ projects, including a range of controlled explosions on buildings and research by the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency which is developing supersonic jets at Woomera.
The more recent history of Woomera is one that the locals are less open to talk about. In 1999 the Federal government decided to open a refugee detention centre out of town. It was supposed to house a maximum of 400 people, though during its three-year operation it crammed in more than 1400 people at a time – all of whom had to share five toilets and three washing machines between them in the extreme conditions.
I stop at the cafe and pick up a copy of the local newspaper, the Gibber Gabber – now onto its 68th volume. While I’m flicking through it over lunch (certainly preferable to the karma of Spud’s beef down the road) I discover why the town might look so deserted. There is a story in the paper about the arrival of the RAAF’s new Heron remotely piloted aircraft, being tested in Woomera. It is operated by someone with a joystick in an office (or even on their couch), while they track ‘people, animals and vehicles and identify disturbances in the ground, usually associated with Improvised Explosive Device (IED) emplacement’. The article informs readers that the people of Woomera are going to help the Heron crews by becoming ‘red’ during summer. Such is the commitment of the helpful townsfolk, they will be exposed to ‘fake enemy activity’ from the RAAF, and it shouldn’t be alarming to see ‘camouflage netting, unusual vehicles and fake rocket launchers placed around town’. More unusual than the rockets and missile launchers they already have in the park across the road I wonder? The kicker, though, comes at the end of the article: ‘there may also be a simulated “kidnap” scenario’. My impression of the post-apocalyptic ghost town I encountered on arrival makes sense now. It wouldn’t happen now, surely? Not at lunchtime in January? I shuffle off to the car and on my way out of town I notice that the boy on the BMX is now nowhere to be seen.
Hours pass and the road unfurls across the red scrubby earth. The gentle hills are covered with squat saltbush shrubs and the ripples of hot air drift across this landscape which opens up towards the centre of Australia. Driving these stretches is meditative. My mind wanders as road trains whoosh past and emus lope along the plains. As sunset approaches I begin to see mounds of fine earth on the sides of the road; first there are a few here and there, and then, within a few kilometres, the ground is full of the small hills that look like giant ant mounds and indicate the sites of old opal mines. ‘The desolate landscape looked as if everything had died a million years ago’ wrote Rena Briand in White Man in a Hole, and this is what I’m expecting as I approach Coober Pedy.
The Indigenous population had been traversing the red gibber plains around Coober Pedy for thousands of years before colonisation. Due to the desert landscape and lack of reliable water, it was a transitory place rather than one of settlement. It sits on the edges of Kokatha territory and Arabana country, whose people would source water from tree roots in some of the most inhospitable territory in Australia. The ‘land of the mound springs’ was marked for the Indigenous people by the escarpment on the western tableland near the town. The area where Coober Pedy now sits was known as Umoona, after the tree of the same name once found here, signifying long life.
The modern history of Coober Pedy began with the early exploration by Scottish explorer John McDouall Stuart. In an era when hardy expedition parties would perish from lack of water, go blind from scurvy or disappear without a trace (as was the case with Ludwig Leichhardt – whose attempted east/west crossing of the north of Australia, along with eight men, 13 mules, 12 horses, 50 bullocks and 270 goats, ended with his disappearance), the determination of McDouall Stuart and his inland explorations led to the discovery of the area now known as Coober Pedy. McDouall Stuart arrived in Adelaide in 1838 and was attached to Captain Charles Sturt’s expedition to the South Australian interior as a draftsman. They travelled with 15 men, six drays, 200 sheep and a boat (as they expected to find a vast inland ocean in Australia’s interior). Eventually, though, they were trapped for months in the barren, waterless country of the north. Sturt’s second-in-command died of scurvy – the chronic shortage of vitamin C which leads to a lack of collagen in the body, causing easy bruising, bleeding gums, slow healing of wounds, joint pain and blood spots on the skin. The party eventually retreated to Adelaide, defeated.
McDouall Stuart was convinced he could open up more of the country than his predecessor, so he set out again in 1858 with an Indigenous tracker and sufficient financial backing to help him mount a four-week scouting expedition of 500 miles (800 kilometres). On this trip he discovered 103 600 square kilometres of usable sheep country and named the area the Stuart Ranges. McDouall Stuart was determined to blaze a trail through more of the scorched interior and he set out again in 1860. Despite suffering scurvy and losing the sight in his right eye, he named Central Mount Stuart, planted a flag on the spot where he surmised the centre of Australia to be and declared it, ‘a sign to the natives that the dawn of liberty, civilization and Christianity was about to break on them’. McDouall Stuart was known as a loner and a heavy drinker, though he still had enough sway to entice financial backing and supporters to keep exploring right up until 1863, when he had to be taken 650 kilometres back to Adelaide, ‘more dead than alive’ on a stretcher between two horses, teeth falling out, blind from scurvy again, dehydrated and exhausted. His companion, William Patrick Auld, noted that the only thing that got him through the last trip was a ‘magical’ jelly concocted by the cook to give him a final burst of energy. After six trips through the interior, McDouall Stuart returned to Scotland and he eventually died in 1864 of a ‘softening of the brain’ – no doubt influenced by the dehydration and malnutrition endured during his brutal excursions in South Australia.
One of the lasting markers of McDouall Stuart’s discoveries was the ranges he’d named previously in 1858. In 1915 a party of gold prospectors set out from Marree, hundreds of kilometres to the east. They were led by James Hutchison, his 14-year-old son Bill and two other expedition helpers. They had six camels and 530 litres of water for the trip as they didn’t expect to find much en route. When they stopped to search for water one scorching summer day in February around the Stuart Ranges, young Bill was left in charge of the camp. When the men returned in the evening, the boy was nowhere to be seen. Just as they were about to start searching the dark foothills, Bill returned to camp and threw a sugar bag down on the ground in front of them, ‘Have a look at that, Dad. I think you’ll find some good stuff in there.’ He had found the first opal in Coober Pedy.
Bill’s discovery of opal was complete luck, and unlike many other forms of precise mining, opal discovery has remained a game of chance for those willing to gamble their lives to find it.
The first ‘dug out’ underground home, which has come to define the troglodyte living arrangements of Coober Pedy for more than 100 years, was hand scooped in December 1915 by miners Fred Blakeley and Dick O’Neill. Despite the temperature being 43°C outside, they mainly dug it to escape the flies, which were so thick, they could not see in front of them and their boots would leave imprints of crushed flies on the dirt in the evening. They ‘lived on rabbits and saltbush in hard times, and carried their water for fifty miles on bicycles, or bought it from camel-teamsters at £5 a hundred gallons’ wrote Ernestine Hill, in The Great Australian Loneliness, of their trials.
In the early years of Coober Pedy, it was surely one of the most brutal places in Australia. There was no water source, no facilities and the men would live in poverty, ‘content to be chained forever to the slavery of a precious stone’ buried in the fine soil to push them through the hot, airless days. It wasn’t a
ll misery, though, as many commented on the ethereal beauty of the vacant landscape, of the ‘barren sands and buried bones of the oldest continent’ which would shimmer during the hottest days.
‘There were 47 nationalities here. Until the Eskimo died,’ says Debby. I look up from my note-taking and she waits, stone-faced, until my brow creases in confusion.
‘It’s a joke’, she says with a smile, hoping I get it. They’re used to having ‘fly-in, fly-out’ journalists here who come to capture the ‘quirk’ of Coober Pedy in a lightning visit from Adelaide before flying back as soon as they can, so the locals have fun with it and test out whether you’re a FIFO journalist or not. I take the hint and put my notepad away.
During my time in Coober Pedy I’m staying at the Comfort Inn. It doesn’t sound like an inspiring choice, though once I enter the motel dug into the side of a hill, I see that it is every bit as grand as a cathedral inside. The salmon-coloured sandstone walls are streaked with veins of limestone and glistening with the echoes of opals. It is in the 40s outside, though immediately as I enter the motel it drops to 23°C, which is the constant temperature underground here no matter what is happening outside and above ground. The walkways of the motel wind down 20 metres to the long corridors where there are dining rooms, TV viewing lounges and the bedrooms, all lit by fairy lights and lamps.
Debby Clee busies herself around the hotel as I settle in; she’s the owner, front desk manager, room attendant and I imagine she’s also the security and Ms Fix-it when the need arises. Debby’s parents, Deane and Valerie, lived in Adelaide, and Deane was an accountant who had many clients in Coober Pedy during the ‘wild west’ days of the 1970s. He said that they would spend more time here than in Adelaide, so in the 1990s they moved to Coober Pedy permanently, drawn by the colours of the desert, the excitement of living underground and by the ‘elusive gem that might just be inches away’ in the sandstone. They bought an abandoned mine in town and started digging it out, sliding down old mine shafts ‘in pitch black with only a torch in our hand to discover more old mine tunnels’.
They dug out the space for their Revival Fellowship church in 1991 and followed with the motel in 1996. They gradually dug through the sandstone to extend the motel, creating new rooms and hallways as they went. As they dug out the rooms they also found seams of opal, seashells, snails and ancient corals all embedded in the walls of the motel. As they extended, they found 141 pieces of opal in all. In 2007 Debby came up from Adelaide to help out her parents for a few months, and, ‘I’m still here ten years later,’ she says, because there’s so much to do to maintain this underground motel in the desert.
Debby’s son-in-law, Ben Manning, now lives in Coober Pedy and works part-time at the inn. Before I explore the town he offers to take me to see their new excavations here. A motel tour is normally a stuffy walkthrough of plush rooms and ornate dining facilities. Not in Coober Pedy.
‘Here, take this,’ Ben says as he passes me a torch and opens the back door at the dark edge of the accommodation, where the fairy lights stop. They used an old opal shaft to begin the plan for the motel and gradually extended it out with 14 metre by 7 metre rooms. We crouch in the dusty corridors, our torches illuminating the round scours on the walls and the vacant rooms that reach out in the subterranean darkness.
‘When we were excavating here it was on an angle because of the boundary,’ Ben tells me as we pick our way along the corridor. He illuminates our path by switching on a string of fairy lights as we continue in the muffled silence.
‘One 14 metre room we were clearing was too close to the boundary, so we made the wall 13.5 metres long and stretched the other wall to 7.5 metres to compensate. And that’s when we found them,’ he says. Inside the wall they found $280 000 worth of opalised seashells. These became the Desert Sea Collection and were dated at more than 120 million years old.
The Desert Sea Collection became even more infamous a few years ago when it was stolen from the front room of the motel in a $400 000 robbery. ‘It was opportunistic,’ Ben says as we notice the curved walls of the original excavations here that narrow the further in we get. ‘They didn’t know what they were doing and opals and cash were taken from the safe.’
It was a shattering discovery for the Clees, who had never invested too much in security and had trusted the nature of the community here, even going so far as to display the Desert Sea Collection for the town, rather than cashing in on their sale.
‘The thieves were only caught because they gave one of the shells to an eight-year-old girl to sell on the street the next morning.’ Unfortunately for the thieves, the girl decided to try her luck selling it to an opal dealer on the main street of Coober Pedy and the police were called not long after. Of the 25 spectacular opalised shells they had in the collection, only three were returned. Five locals were arrested and charged with the theft. In a curious twist of fate Ben now works for a community welfare organisation in Coober Pedy with the girlfriend of one of the thieves who is about to get out of prison for the crime. ‘If they just took the cash, they wouldn’t have been caught,’ Ben says matter-of-factly.
We continue winding through the tunnels, the silence broken every now and then by the rattle of small stones falling down the ventilation chutes, 20 metres above us. ‘There’s still opal here,’ Ben says as he bends down with his torch. He runs his hand along the stone and finds a greenish bubble in the wall. Some of the opal is not worth removing, so they leave it here to illuminate the hallways. In the soft glow of the fairy lights this red cavern of treasures looks like something from Petra in Jordan, not the bowels of a motel in Coober Pedy.
We find a pile of rubble from the latest dig and spend a few minutes ‘noodling’ through the dirt to see if any opals have escaped. Ben finds an old explosive fuse in the dirt, though nothing of much value. In one disused corner he says they found an old hydroponic set-up. ‘There was plastic lining, water drippers and lights. It was literally an underground drug set-up,’ he says with a smile.
We exit out of the tunnels through a door halfway up the hill above the motel. Because of the flatness of the earth here, I can see far across to the horizon in all directions from the vantage point. There are three storm fronts swirling around us, walls of grey building and blowing towards town. It only takes minutes before big sheets of rain fall across the red dirt. Pebbles tumble down the ventilation chutes and puddles form in an instant. This is meant to be the parched red desert, though the rain signifies the change in a predictable climate that is occurring here as I watch the storm attack the dry earth and the thunder crack in the distance towards Alice Springs. It is clammy and humid, something much worse than a 50°C day according to the locals.
Next to the motel is one of the more unusual places I find in town. The Revival Fellowship Hall and Sunday School was part of the Clees’ plan when they bought this abandoned shaft. Adjacent to the diggings, which dated back to 1925, they found a room that was 18 metres by 8 metres, one of the largest underground spaces in Coober Pedy. They converted it into a church. I enter after the rain stops and step over the flooded entrance. Inside is a light switch chiselled into the wall and I flick it on to illuminate the room. It is streaked with peach and white limestone, blood-coloured swirls of stone near the altar and a sunken baptismal bath. The silence inside is consuming. There is no wind, no traffic, no voices. It is dense and distracting to feel the silence press on my busy mind like this. I sit and look for a moment, noticing the dark passageways that lead to the Sunday School cavern at the back and the display boards around the room with information about their fellowship’s links around the world, which proudly displays its success healing followers with everything from AIDS to loneliness. Religion and salvation seem to be quite a theme here in the desert, with Serbian underground, Catacomb Anglican and Greek Orthodox churches also in town. I wonder if the oppressive conditions here, the silence of the desert and the time many of the people have here inside their quiet caves promotes introspection and the desire
to find meaning and purpose beyond their search for opals?
The next morning it is above 35°C before 9 am. The dusty streets are empty. I walk up past the motel, past the lookout over the town and the moonscape props on the side of the road, left over from when the 2000 film Pitch Black was filmed here. There is a mix of above-ground homes in town and more of the dugouts on the outskirts. An old ute trundles past with an ‘explosives’ sign painted in red across its roof – harking back to the old days when everything was done with a stick of dynamite and crossed fingers. The main street is colourful, with restaurants, opal dealers, a supermarket and art galleries. It is busier here, with backpackers walking to the IGA and mobs of Indigenous people sitting in the shade to catch any passing breeze to cool themselves.
After 30 minutes in the heat I feel like I can chew it, so I head underground for some relief. At the Umoona mine I meet Rudy, a former miner in his eighties from Austria who now runs tours under the opal shop. Rudy hobbles down the steps and passageways to show me something of the obsession which has consumed most of his life. Tiring of the monotony of factory work as a mechanic in Europe, he came to Australia on a boat in 1962 to search for opals, and he hasn’t left. There was something about the unexpected and the unknown that drew him here, away from the manufacturing plants, the furnaces and the notion that his life would never amount to much where he was born. ‘Back when I arrived there was no water and electricity down here,’ he says of his first Coober Pedy dugout, though this didn’t deter him. As part of the tour Rudy takes me to his old apartment, preserved in the cave like a living museum. After his wife died he moved above ground, ‘I don’t want to live in a hole anymore,’ he says, and he promptly found a girlfriend to keep him company up there. He also says that the dugout smell is something he can’t handle anymore after years of living in the stagnant limestone grottos. Back in the old days three men would scamper down here with torches and sticks of dynamite, ‘I dug about 50 mine holes by hand – we could shovel 12 feet [3.6 metres] a day – and some of our mines would go down 64 feet [19.5 metres].’ Rudy says that he did find lots of opals over the years, ‘Some parcels of $1000, a few of $100 000, though opal mining is pure luck. I know that now,’ he says, swinging his leg to get his stiff hip moving. Rudy doesn’t seem to have much to show for all his years mining here, though it is hard to tell, as people aren’t showy in Coober Pedy – they literally keep their wealth buried in their dugouts. ‘Everything is cash. I bought my house with cash, a D9 Caterpillar (a large bulldozer) in cash,’ he says.