The Crow Eaters Page 3

  Despite all these hardships, Rudy wouldn’t have it any other way. He looks across the expanse of his old dugout and into the mine tunnels, ‘I enjoyed my life. Work was my hobby,’ he says. He’s not smiling, though. I suspect he doesn’t expect much more from his mining life in Coober Pedy.

  Looking for something to do during the daylight hours that won’t turn me into crackling, I go to the quiet visitor’s centre on the edge of town. While I’m brows-ing brochures I get chatting to Duncan – a man with slicked-back hair and faded tattoos, sitting behind the information desk.

  ‘How can I help you mate?’ he asks in a slow drawl, looking me in the eye. It is slightly unsettling to be sized up like this so immediately, though I tell Duncan what I’m doing and he slaps the counter with his big hands. It seems he lives for encounters like these with tourists who have questions and time to listen to his answers.

  ‘Do you want to hear my caveman theory?’ I really do. Duncan thinks that there is something fundamental about the desire to live underground.

  ‘We’ve spent 10 000 years being civilised above ground,’ he says, standing and walking out from his booth, addressing his audience of one. ‘What about the previous 190 000 years?’

  I don’t dare answer.

  ‘We were cavemen!’

  Duncan thinks that Coober Pedy reconciles modern life and our caveman past, ‘It’s warm, dry, there’s shelter and only one way in – plus you now have internet and hot water!’

  Duncan now has his own dugout and he’s ecstatic. ‘It’s a strange and satisfying thing to know you’ve just bought the place you’re going to live in for the rest of your life.’ Until he came to Coober Pedy, Duncan had lived a transient lifestyle in Sydney, ‘I never fit in,’ he says. ‘Then, one night I saw a program on TV about the men who lived in caves in the South Australian desert. It burned into my brain.’

  When he got a redundancy payout from his work, he sold his things and travelled to Coober Pedy. ‘The only thing I knew was that I wanted to live underground,’ he says.

  He mined and noodled for opals for a while, but he didn’t make any money and had to get a real job – just like many former miners here now. Despite his quirkiness, it’s nice to have a conversation with someone in tourism who is so enthusiastic about what his town and his way of life mean. Duncan offers to take me to meet a few of Coober Pedy’s most successful cave dwellers during his lunch break. I follow him over the road to the Outback Grill as he finishes his story over lunch – an entire trucker’s breakfast of eggs, sausage, bacon, hash browns and toast.

  While I’m at the Outback I meet Christo Pantelis – a modern cave-dwelling bachelor. His family owns the Outback Grill, which was once a humble service station, though it is now a multicultural restaurant with a bar, beer garden, room for a dance floor and apartments out the back. His dad, Kypros, used to cart water for the miners when he first arrived in the outback in 1973, and later he was a mechanic for Mad Max when George Miller and Mel Gibson filmed Beyond Thunderdome here in the 1980s. Kypros sits with an old friend drinking coffee and Christo starts asking his dad about what it used to be like here. It seems that they’re all fond of how it used to be here in the ‘good old days’.

  ‘There was more cash in the Coober Pedy Westpac than anywhere else in Australia in the 1960s,’ says Kypros. ‘One miner here made $30 million in the ’70s – in the ’70s! He could have bought whole suburbs of Sydney for that money back then. He now drives a cream-coloured Lexus through the muddy streets,’ adds Christo.

  They used to call it the Wild West here because people would escape from all over the world, looking for their fortune or just hiding from prying eyes. Christo thinks they had the odd war criminal from the Balkans here over the years, ‘I feel like I grew up in Europe, not outback South Australia,’ he says of the diversity which existed here when he was a kid, with Croatian miners, Serbian churches, Greek halls, Italian clubs and different languages being part of the town they grew up in. For a moment, men from three different tables chime in. They’re reliving it – as we all do – when we remember when things were a little wilder and more vivid in the past. I’m told of bags of cash and men picking up cases of opals and of delegations of buyers flying in private planes to do discreet business pick-ups in motel rooms on the edges of town.

  ‘Remember Theo the wrestler!’ one shouts.

  ‘He got $7000 on stage in one night once!’

  ‘And Machine-gun Joe!’ says another, finishing his sentence in Greek to the others.

  ‘Theo used to own the Acropolis Club,’ Christo tells me. ‘Police used to ask him for help if there was ever any trouble in town. I remember him throwing someone out a window once. It was normal,’ he says with a wistful smile.

  There were regularly explosions in the night, from mining and other business, and there was so much cash floating around they’d routinely have big music acts from Sydney and Melbourne flown in.

  As a result of Kypros’s astute business sense, his five sons now all have houses of their own, including Christo’s dugout on the way out of town. We pile into his car and speed along the dirt road to look at his underground pad.

  Inside it’s big and open. The walls are painted white and are rough, signs that it’s an original hand-dug abode. The kitchen has wood panels and a fan and a window letting the bright sunlight stream through the cave. I walk across his slate floor and he shows me his bar, the bedrooms where he often has couch surfers staying, and the hand-dug gym, complete with weights, benches, bars and a drum kit. ‘That’s the best thing about a dugout, it’s whatever your imagination wants. If I want another room, I can just dig it. I bought a cabinet a while ago and it was 20 centimetres too big for the space. I just dug out a little of the back wall and it was fine!’

  As we head back into town a dust storm rolls across the desert. We wind the windows up just as it hits and I ask about the future here. Christo isn’t sure what will happen. It used to be a much stronger community, even if it was rough around the edges, but things are changing. Christo thinks there should be information around Coober Pedy about all the people who’ve been here – from Mel Gibson and Crocodile Harry to Vin Diesel and Stephen King – to celebrate how Coober Pedy has drawn so many people in over the years.

  Christo drops me back in town and I find myself taking another gasping run for sanctuary into a local opal shop where I meet Stella Boussious and her family who have run ‘Opalios’ in Coober Pedy for 30 years.

  The Boussious family came up here in 1973 in the hope of finding their fortune. Stella’s grandkids run around us in the poky store with toy bulldozers and cars, squealing before they disappear out the back on another imaginary adventure.

  Despite the oppressive heat, the isolation, the work and the enormous hours they put in, Stella is very clear with me when I ask what it’s like bringing up a family here, ‘I wouldn’t change it for the world. Not for a million dollars.’

  The original settlers here all want to stay it seems, despite the changes that others of later generations, like Christo, have noticed more keenly. Stella says that it’s not just families that have persisted either; there are still lots of single men here who never married, ‘They were too obsessed with the opals. We’re their family now. We still see them every day,’ she says.

  I ask what it is about the opal that draws people and keeps them here.

  ‘It’s the gambling,’ Lyn, Stella’s daughter, says without hesitation. ‘Dad doesn’t gamble like you do in the cities, though he gambles on opal. It’s all there, maybe just underground,’ Lyn says of her father’s obsession. Lyn learned the opal business from her mother and Stella taught herself, with 44 years of practice she adds. She’s cut thousands of opals over the years and has now passed the knowledge on to her children. That’s also partly why Lyn came back to Coober Pedy with her family. They relocated to Adelaide for a few years, though ‘I was sick of working for other people,’ she says, and they recently bought their own three-bedroom dugout in Coob
er Pedy.

  ‘There’s something different about working for the family business,’ she says.

  ‘What’s the future hold?’ I ask.

  ‘Nobody knows. This is my future, coming to the shop,’ Stella says.

  ‘I wouldn’t know what else to do with myself,’ she adds, and when I hear about the 70-hour weeks she still puts in here, even when it’s mid-40s outside, I believe her.

  ‘I don’t do holidays. I always want to come back. I have three days off a year: Christmas, New Year and Easter Sunday,’ Stella says.

  It seems her husband isn’t the only one who has been drawn into the lure of the opal. ‘I was home for 14 years with the kids when they were growing up,’ Stella says. ‘I don’t need to go out for coffee and shopping. This is paradise for me.’

  Despite that enduring passion, she admits that things have changed a lot in Coober Pedy. ‘I remember when they used to bring water in the trucks. Whatever you got, that was it for two weeks. Now we have internet shopping and you can get everything at IGA across the street,’ Stella says. ‘It’s better for women now also,’ she adds, referring to the boys’ club that used to exist here in the 1970s and ’80s. ‘The town is getting better, but it’s also getting smaller’, she says, suggesting that I’m lucky to experience Coober Pedy now before their time comes to an end and it changes completely. Stella presses a little bag of opals into my hand, as I leave, to give to my family as a memento of my visit and then she goes back to polishing her gems on the counter.

  The 2015 Coober Pedy Centenary Cook Book I find at the local (underground) bookshop tells the history of the town in a strange way. There are recipes for pineapple cheesecakes, baklava, Vietnamese vermicelli noodles – the culinary story here reveals the diversity of the town. Even in IGA there are tins of dolmades alongside the Vegemite and white bread; the Outback Grill has succulent lamb yiros on the menu; and the local pizza restaurant is run by some recent arrivals from Sri Lanka.

  On my last night it seems that the joking advice of Debby Clee when I arrived was right. I came here looking for the story of a white man in a hole, though Coober Pedy isn’t really about what’s underground. The history of European dreamers, the Wild West, the families determined to continue on and the opals which brought them all here, one way or another, in the first place is what it’s really about. I travelled here preoccupied with the parched landscape, with water and the mantra that ‘if you’re thirsty, you’re already dehydrated’, so it seems fitting that I finish my visit with a drink. I climb up the hill behind town and go out on the balcony of the Italian club, now run by a Croatian, for a Japanese beer. The lights flicker on in town and people come out on the streets as the sun goes down across the orange plains. They exit their underground homes and shops and walk out into the breeze blowing above ground in the early evening. ‘Night in a cave, deep down in a maze of grave holes,’ wrote Ernestine Hill of her impression of the town from a visit in the 1930s, though I’ve realised that while the troglodyte ways of the people is what put Coober Pedy on the map once upon a time, it’s something much more significant that keeps it there.

  CHAPTER 3

  MARALINGA

  From 1956 until 1963, the ‘Maralinga guinea pigs’ – men from the British, New Zealand and Australian militaries were ‘volunteered’ by their superiors to stand in the forward zone of South Australia’s nuclear testing range as atomic bombs more powerful than Hiroshima exploded in front of them. They would wait only four seconds after the blast before turning towards the hot wave of energy rippling across the plains; they would then set off in their shorts and knee-length socks to inspect the radiated material by ‘rolling around in the dirt’ to test the fallout from the nuclear explosion in the outback. Things did not end well for them.

  Despite South Australia having a small population, one thing it has in abundance are roads. It is calm and peaceful as we leave before 5 am on a road lit by orange lamps and the last stars. As American author Ted Conover writes, ‘Being on the road is one of the ways I have always felt most alive in the world.’ There is a freedom to taking a trip like this: no passports or suitcases, no phrasebooks or elaborate plans. We have a ute filled with tents, a camp stove with enough food and water, and spare tyres and puncture kits for the unknown road ahead. The air is cooler now and the gates to what was once one of the most secretive places in Australia are open.

  I’m travelling with my dad, it is a rare opportunity to chew up the road together – and to camp like we did 30 years ago – as Maralinga is now only open to those with a 4WD and the fortitude to sleep in a van or on the red dust, camping in the former nuclear village.

  As far as tourism experiences go, this is also one of the strangest in Australia. Dark tourism is the tourist fascination with sites of death, atrocities and conflict. This is a term we normally associate with places like Auschwitz or the Killing Fields in Cambodia – only recently has this become a possibility as tourism in Australia.

  The road to Maralinga also reveals how large South Australia really is. Before we left we were given a handsketched mud map to find the former nuclear test site: 170 kilometres past Ceduna take a right on an unsigned mining road; 70 kilometres later take a left onto a dirt road until you hit the crossing of the Trans-Australian railway – along the longest straight stretch of rail track in the world at 478 kilometres; next, the map takes us on a weaving trail over claypans, dry lakes and into the Maralinga Tjarutja lands. We then have to drive for another hour through saltbush scrub until we reach a locked gate. Robin will be waiting for us there.

  We travel the equivalent of the entire length of the UK, from Adelaide, driving across the Spencer Gulf and heading straight on a trajectory towards the Indian Ocean. This is farming country: hundreds of kilometres of wheat fields, cattle stations, sheep milling around clumps of grass; and a strange assortment of towns, each trying to outdo each other with a collection of ‘big’ things: the big windmill in Penong, the big wombat at the Tjilkaba Indigenous community and the big galah which sits on the side of the road in Kimba like an unsuccessful hitchhiker. We sleep in Ceduna by the jetty and the Norfolk pines, which hang over the calm ocean community on the edge of the Great Australian Bight. It seems big and a place full of people and industry, though in reality it is hundreds of kilometres from anywhere else and the town ends a few streets back from the water.

  Our last stop before the Nullarbor Plain is at Nundroo, an isolated roadhouse where bleary-eyed travellers wearing socks and sandals for driving comfort buy either rum or milk off the shelves for their onward journeys. The roadhouses out here are the lifeblood of the travelling nomads. Along the way I see family-run fuel stops everywhere. The culture of the owners wafts through the doors as you enter: there are Indian samosas and curries cooked at one place and meat pies and specials on bourbon at another. There’s no fuel once we turn off to Maralinga, so we fill up and take the right turn as instructed on our map. The road continues past the end of the dog fence: at 5400 kilometres long, it is another marker of the enormous scale of things out here, though for all the things I’ve read about the fence’s length and importance, up close it looks like any other farming boundary and I wonder how much it is about the narrative behind the fence rather than the vermin it has kept out. I make a note to visit this later.

  As we approach the rolling mallee woodlands, it’s my shift in the passenger seat. It gives me time to soak in the surroundings and the significance of the place we’re visiting. Blue haze ripples low on the horizon; saltbush and stunted trees dot the country. There are no animals, no people and no signs of life except big, steel-coloured storm clouds spreading over the hills. Appropriately, Maralinga means ‘thunder’ in the extinct Aboriginal Garik language – it seems apt considering the devastation that tore through the land here not so long ago.

  During the Cold War, the British were concerned that they’d be left vulnerable by the nuclear weapons programs being developed in Russia and the United States. They searched for an appropriate
testing site within their empire to begin their own program. Canada was initially touted as a partner – though the government there baulked at the potential environmental damage. The remote bush in South Australia was identified as a possibility and the Prime Minister at the time, Sir Robert Menzies, even agreed to pay some of the costs, something not requested by the British. The British conducted nuclear tests in Australia between 1952 and 1963 – and at Maralinga from 1956. It was nuclear colonialism played out in one of the most remote areas of South Australia.

  Robert Menzies decided to ‘lend’ Australia to the British for wide-ranging nuclear tests without getting the permission of the Australian people or even discussing it with his Cabinet. It is thought that Australia wanted to maximise the value of its uranium deposits and that a move like this could protect them in the case of an actual nuclear war.