Traveling overnight on the train we arrived at Manguri Station around 8am. When they were building the line there used to be a small settlement here but all that’s left now are a couple of concrete slabs. We caught our bus here to take us to Coober Pedy some 40 minutes drive away.
The name Cooper Pedy is a corruption of two aboriginal words that translate as white man who lives in a hole. The Opal fields run for around 35 kilometres either side of the town. The first sign of a building we struck was originally a service station on the old Sturt Highway in a place they call 8 Mile. There has been so much mining here in the past that the ground is so riddled with tunnels it is considered unstable and mining in this spot is now banned.
The countryside as far as you can see is just miles and miles of spoil heaps from the underground tunnelling. A standard piece of mining kit is a truck mounted vacuum cleaner that sucks the spoil up from the mine and deposits it in heaps. Just imagine an ancient flat bed truck with a motor on the tray and a frame at the end supporting an object about the size of 44 gallon drum on an angle about 12 feet in the air with pipes running to and from it. They look very Heath Robinson.
We journeyed to the town where mining is also now prohibited but there is still apparently a bit of digging going on to install cellars or septic tanks which of course is perfectly legal. We visited the Serbian Orthodox Church which is underground. Very impressive.
We also saw an underground house. These structures are in the main built into the side of hills so you have a front door and front windows opening out at street level and the rest of the house is dug back into the hill. Each room has an air shaft dug up to the surface with a cap on top to keep out the rain so the hills behind these house fronts look like a sea of mushrooms.
We also had a wander around an old mine then went for lunch in a more modern underground mine where they had created large caverns to host dinners.
After lunch we headed out to the Breakaways National park. The early part of the park is known as the surface of the moon. It really is an apt description. There is nothing but dirt and small rocks spreading as far as you can see. NASA has used it for training astronauts.
Once through this area we came to a remarkable Australian construction “The Dog Proof Fence. This is a continuous fence running some 5300 Kms from South Australia thru New South Wales to the Darling Downs in Queensland. Portions of the fence are over 120 years old and it is buried as deep into the ground as it is above it. The parts of the fence that adjourn private property have to be maintained by that landowner but they are reimbursed their costs by the state governments and levies on other graziers.
Traveling further into the Breakaways we came across a spectacular range of ancient flat mesas. Climbing to the top of one, the views of the surrounding vast empty country that stretched as far as the eye could see in all directions was truly awe inspiring.
We got back to the train just in time for dinner and shortly after the train pulled off into the night on our final leg to Adelaide.
Hardys’ Travels 