Coober Pedy is a town in northern South Australia, 846 kilometres north of Adelaide on the Stuart Highway. The town is sometimes referred to as the "opal capital of the world" because of the quantity of precious opals that are mined there. Im told that 95% of the worlds opals come from here.
Coober Pedy is also renowned for its below-ground residences, called "dugouts", which are built due to the scorching daytime heat. Hotels accommodation, bars and churches have all built underground
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| My hostel built in the side of a hill |
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| Someone house. Note the ventilation into each room |
Today is a day of rest. Nothing much happening here and I'm cool in my underground room.
At 2pm i went to a working Opal mine and went underground. Really interesting how this works.
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| Drill a 60cm hole and see if there is a horizontal layer where Opal is found. |
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| Send a guy down on a rope seat. |
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When identified drill a larger hole and send the boring machine in to start tunnelling.
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| If you don't have a machine, make and use your own bombs? |
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| Send all the rubble up to search for opals |
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This is the other end of the vacuum.
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Sandstone is shaken in this type of rolling machine then stones sorted for size. Sound simplistic but I don't think its easy.
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There used to be about 2000 miners here but now its dwindled to about 200.
There are over 2,000,000 mine shafts (some 60cm wide some 2 metres wide) on the last count. At least one tourist falls down a mine shaft each year. Mainly by walking backwards when trying to take photos. A good lesson for me to take note of.
No big companies mine here, and lots of the work is done by hand. Very interesting process.
So much for remediation of the land. No such thing.
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