Coober Pedy

This is the country of the Antakirinja Matu-Yankunytjatjara people, and the town's name comes from a local term usually written kupa-piti, generally translated as white man's hole. On 1 February 1915 a party prospecting for gold camped here, and one of its members, Willie Hutchison, found opal. The name Coober Pedy was settled on in 1920.

Miners arrived in numbers, among them soldiers returning from the First World War who took work in the expanding mines, and homes were cut into the hillsides. It was the only sensible answer to the climate: rooms bored into the soft rock hold a steady temperature while the surface bakes. Water was the limiting factor for decades, carted in or raised from deep bores and always expensive, and the town's growth was slow and irregular, tied to the price of opal.

Mining slumped in the early 1940s and picked up after a local Aboriginal woman, Tottie Bryant, found a large deposit in 1945; the decades that followed brought refugees, veterans and miners from southern and eastern Europe, and Coober Pedy became known as the opal capital of the world. Sealing the Stuart Highway in 1987 turned a punishing detour into a stop on the main road north, and film crews came for the treeless plains around the town. Opal production has since declined, the number of working miners has fallen, and tourism and highway traffic now carry much of the local economy.

Coober Pedy is a mining camp that became a town, and it still behaves like one. People came from dozens of countries to dig, mostly in ones and twos on small claims, and the habits of that work — secrecy about a find, suspicion of outsiders on a claim, luck talked about as a shared subject — remain part of conversation. Nobody is surprised by machinery in a front garden.

The immigrant communities built underground. The Serbian Orthodox church was carved from sandstone in 1993, with saints in bas-relief on its walls, and the Catholic congregation dug its own church on Hutchison Street; families from southern and eastern Europe shaped the food, the clubs and the cemetery. Aboriginal residents, Antakirinja Matu-Yankunytjatjara and people from further west, are a substantial part of the population, and their art and tours are part of what visitors see.

The town has an outsized film reputation. Its plains and mullock heaps have stood in for post-apocalyptic and other-planet landscapes in several well-known productions, and props left behind have become local sights. Other local institutions are just as improbable: a golf course with no grass, played in the cool of night, and the last drive-in cinema in South Australia. The practical customs matter most: keep off claims, stay on tracks, and never step backwards while framing a photograph.

Fewer than two thousand people live in Coober Pedy, and a large share of them live underground. A dugout is cheap to extend — another room is a matter of cutting one — and needs no heating or cooling, holding a temperature in the low twenties Celsius through a summer that regularly passes 40°C outside. Ventilation shafts on the hilltops and a door in a slope are often all that shows from the street.

Opal still underpins the town, but far fewer miners work the field than in the boom years, and most of them operate alone or in pairs on small claims. Tourism, road transport, government services, the school, the hospital and the council make up much of the rest of the local economy, and a wind and solar plant beside the town supplies a large part of its electricity.

Water shapes daily routines: it is pumped from a bore into the Great Artesian Basin, treated and metered, and it is expensive enough that residents use it carefully. Supplies arrive by truck, fresh food is limited and prices reflect the distance. Dust, heat and the constant traffic of road trains along the highway are the background of the place. The long-term worries are a shrinking opal industry, young people leaving for the cities, and the cost of power, water and freight.

Eating here reflects who came to mine. Miners from southern Europe brought their own cooking, and the town's pizza bars and cafés built a reputation on generous toppings, including kangaroo, emu and camel for those who want the outback version. Several dining rooms are underground, cut from the same rock as the hotels above them, and a meal in bare sandstone with no air conditioning is part of the experience of the town.

The supermarket matters more than any restaurant. It is the only full grocery store for hundreds of kilometres along the Stuart Highway, stocked by truck, and travellers load eskies here before the long drive north or south. Fresh fruit and vegetables can be limited and dearer than in the south, and roadhouses at intervals along the highway cover the gaps with fuel, pies and cooked breakfasts.

Native and outback ingredients appear on menus in a modest way: quandong, the tart desert peach, in pies and jams, wattleseed in baking, and kangaroo as a lean red meat cooked quickly. Cold beer is the drink of the place, drunk later in the day once the heat has gone, and in South Australia a strongly flavoured iced coffee from cartons is a regional habit that travels well in a hot car.