An Ambitious Journey to Australia 2: Search for Opals

When I was a kid, I heard that Australian opals were mined in Coober Pedy, and other places. At 16 years old, I visited Coober Pedy with a trucker selling gasoline. This was in the 1950s. I was told a lot of folks lived underground. And that, after a rainfall, native people would walk around the tailings left over from the mines and search for opals the miners had missed. This became one of my goals for our Aussie trip, especially since Kim is a rock-hounder and is interested in new kinds of stones.

Each conical pile of tailings is from one opal mine.

Before the trip to Coober Pedy, my brother Clive’s son, Matthew, and his wife, Melanie, arranged a “family” party, meaning Clive and Sarena’s family. It was at Matt’s lovely home in the Barossa Valley, and his sisters Alyse and Jodie were able to come. Matt and Mel have three boys under 10, and Alyse and Sam have a young son aged one. Cousin Sharon and husband Myles, with their two kiddos, and cousin Andrew, also drove up from Adelaide for the gathering. Clive and Sarena had a previous engagement and were unable to attend. The food and cake were terrific. Thank you Matt and Mel for putting this group party on.

Coober Pedy.

Coober Pedy is in the north of South Australia, in the middle of a flat desert that gets very hot in summertime. Opals were discovered here in early 1900s, but mining is a hit or miss proposition. There are fewer miners here now than in the 1950s. Good opals are rare, but they are the best in the world, so they are expensive. Australia provides 80% of the world’s gemstone-quality opals.

My middle brother Clive, kindly offered to drive us from Jamestown, where he lives, to Coober Pedy. The town has only 2,000-3,000 people who live there, and half of them live underground in so-called dugouts. Each underground room of a dugout has to have air circulation which is provided by a white ventilator: see the white pipes in the picture.

I booked us into an apartment called Pop-n-Nins, which was completely underground. The photo is looking along the entryway towards the living room, kitchen and bedrooms. The sides and roof of the entryway are raw rock. But the rock is sandstone and gypsum and is strong and hard – there were no supports at all for the roof or walls.

On the next day we took a five-hour afternoon tour by Noble, which included a modern 3-bedroom house that was completely underground. No heating or cooling is needed because the underground temperature stays almost the same all year long. But in summertime, the outside temperature is often more than 100F, so living in a dugout makes a lot of sense.

The Serbian Church.

We visited the Serbian Church, which is completely underground. The guide made a funny when she said the voluntary workers who dug out the rooms were not paid, but probably snuck in their pockets any opals that they found while digging.

The Working Mine.

We also visited a working opal mine. Kim put on a miner’s hard hat and in we went. She said at one point she reached the end of a mining tunnel and suddenly felt claustrophobic, and had to turn around and rush out of there.

The photo shows a mining machine used for above-ground mining. The bucket at the top of the outdoor mining equipment is for catching the dust and fine dirt particles before they blow everywhere — instead they are captured in the bucket and dumped onto a conical heap of tailings.

But they use a different machine for mining underground. You can see the cutting teeth in the other photo. They cut away a sheet of rock-face but its only about an inch of rock, before they go to the rock face with a handpick to cut out any opal they see. The labor is intensive, and of course its hit-or-miss as there is not a lot of opal to be found.

Opal may be found in a thin seam that comes and goes. Or it may be found in an isolated pocket, where the opal is thicker and more prized. Some opal is formed in fossilized critters, like clams which are roundish. Another kind of fossil has a stem-shaped body which becomes the shape of the opal. These bullet-shaped opals are also known as pipe opals. They come from the hard skeleton of extinct squid-like cuttlefish from the Cretaceous period.

And then there is the ammonite, a spiral fossil that swam around Coober Pedy 100 million years ago, early in the dinosaur era. Kim and I bought the one in the photo for Mary Ann. Although it’s not an opalized fossil, it has been inlaid with opal by a clever jeweler.

In the South Australian Museum lies an opalised skeleton of a 20-foot-long plesiosaur, which also lived in the Cretaceous period. It was found in an opal mine in Andamooka in 1968. It is the finest known opalised skeleton on Earth. I cannot imagine how much it is worth.

The Joey Kangaroo.

We stopped in a gallery in Coober Pedy and found out we could see a baby kangaroo, called a joey. The mother kangaroo had been hit and killed by a truck on the road. But the trucker saved the joey, and the gallery agreed to care for it. It wasn’t big enough to stand by itself, and had to be fed milk in an artificial pouch. Joeys live for typically six months in their mothers’ pouch.
The photo shows Kim holding the joey.

Digging for Opals at Night.

I purchased a new black light (UV light) from the tour guide for $20. These lights shine short-wave ultra-violet rays, and at night opal shines brightly under black light. My goal was to dig for opals in the piles of tailings on the outskirts of Coober Pedy. We had to charge up the black light, but didn’t realize the battery was enclosed by plastic, so it didn’t get charged. By now, its 7:30 pm on our last night, I’m feeling tired, and suggest we stay at home. But Kim wouldn’t give up – this is our last chance, she said.

So we charged the battery and off we went a bit after 8 pm. It was pitch dark. We trundled over a couple of piles of tailings, selected a random pile, and started to dig a hole.

Kim held the black light while I dug, and then we traded places. After three different holes, Kim said, I give up. When she says this, I know from past experience we are close to achieving the goal. I gave her the shovel, and I took the black light. After the next couple of shovelings we saw a gleam in the black light — a small double opal seam that the miners had missed. Maybe worth $50 as is, but when cut, polished, and mounted — maybe $1,000. I was very happy as my goal was met. We packed up soon after and went home. That was our last event in Coober Pedy.

The Takeover of Mintabie.

Kim and Clive and I were eating a meal outside Jonathon’s restaurant – a pizza place that was recommended. A large man in working clothes covered with dust said a cheery hello to us, as he was waiting for his to-go order. He said he was an opal miner, called Fred, working near Mintabie, an adjacent opal town.

He told a story that I had never heard, about an uprising by indigenous Australians that took over the small town of Mintabie in 2018. A scathing government review exposed severe law and order issues, including illegal residency, illicit drug and alcohol trafficking into the native lands, and predatory credit (“book-up”) practices by a local store operator targeting Indigenous residents. The government had agreed to transfer the town’s lease on Pitjantjatjara land back to this tribe’s owners.

According to Fred, the revolt was started when a three-day waiting period was extended for an additional two days, by the state government, to get the whites out of there. But the locals decided to move in without waiting. They burned down parts of the town. Fred had talked with the indigenous leaders before the riot. He had earned their respect, he figured, because when other mining machinery was damaged in the riot, Fred’s was not.

On the way home.

Clive handed the keys to Kim on the way home, a 6-hour drive. For someone from the US, the car is driving on the wrong side of the road. And the driver sits in the right-hand side of the car. To change gears, you have to use the left hand, not the right hand. To change the flashing indicator lights you have to use the right hand, not the left hand. Kim was up to the challenge and she drove for 100 miles through the outback desert.

After we got back to Dallas, the very next day, Kim started driving her own car on the left side of the road, like they do in Australia. I thought I was going to die. I had to yell at her to tell her we were now driving in the US……


Kim and I owe a special thanks to Clive for taking us in his car to Coober Pedy. He was a generous host, and stopped us from getting lost in and around the town of Coober Pedy.