Coober Pedy

Where it sits. Coober Pedy sits on the Stuart Highway in the middle of the South Australian desert, 846 kilometres north-west of Adelaide and 688 kilometres south of Alice Springs — close to the exact midpoint of the sealed road between them, which is why almost everyone driving the centre stops here. The town occupies a low rise on the edge of the Stuart Range, surrounded in every direction by a moonscape of white and ochre mullock heaps, each one the spoil from a shaft. There are said to be well over a million shafts in the field. Walking off the marked tracks is genuinely dangerous, and the signs saying so are not decorative.

The story behind it. Opal was found here on 1 February 1915 by a teenage prospector, Willie Hutchison, travelling with his father's gold-seeking party. The field proved to be the richest source of precious opal on earth and still supplies the bulk of world production. The name comes from the Kokatha words kupa piti, usually rendered as "white man's hole" — a description of what the newcomers were doing rather than a place name. Returning First World War veterans, some with tunnelling experience from the Western Front, worked out that living underground solved the heat problem, and the town's characteristic dugouts followed. The 2021 census counted 1,437 residents drawn from an unusually wide range of nationalities: Greek, Italian, Serbian, Croatian and Aboriginal families among many others.

Life underground. The record high here is 48.3°C and annual rainfall averages 144 millimetres. A dugout excavated into the soft sandstone holds a near-constant temperature in the mid-twenties year-round without any mechanical cooling, and modern examples are full-size houses with bedrooms, bathrooms and ventilation shafts rather than caves. Visitors can stay in underground hotels, drink in an underground bar, and see two subterranean churches — the Serbian Orthodox Church of Saint Elijah, carved with relief icons into the rock walls, and the Catholic Catacomb Church. The golf course is played at night with glowing balls on a course with no grass whatsoever, and holds reciprocal rights with the Royal and Ancient at St Andrews.

On screen. The landscape's total absence of vegetation, greenery or visible horizon-line vegetation has made Coober Pedy the default Australian stand-in for other planets and for the end of the world.

• Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985) shot its desert exteriors here, including the crevasse country outside town.
• The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) filmed in the town itself; the sequence in which Adam is set upon by a hostile local crowd was staged in Coober Pedy.
• Pitch Black (2000) used the opal fields and the Breakaways for the three-sunned alien planet, with the bleached ground doing most of the work.
• Red Planet (2000), Ground Zero (1987), Wim Wenders' Until the End of the World (1991), the 2021 Mortal Kombat and the 2023 series Stars on Mars have all worked in the district.

What you actually see today. The Breakaways Conservation Park, 33 kilometres north, is the visual centrepiece: flat-topped mesas of white and orange rock standing above a stony plain that was seabed 70 million years ago, best photographed within an hour of sunrise or sunset. The Dog Fence, the 5,600-kilometre dingo barrier that runs from Queensland to the Great Australian Bight, passes close by and can be visited on the same loop. In town, Umoona Mine and Museum gives the clearest explanation of how opal is actually found, and several working mines run tours. Noodling — fossicking through old mullock heaps for missed stones — is legal on designated dumps and is how a surprising number of residents first arrived.

Getting there and timing. Long-distance coaches run the Stuart Highway daily and there is a small airport with charter and light-aircraft services. Driving from Adelaide takes nine to ten hours; from Alice Springs, about seven. Fuel is expensive and stations are far apart. April to September gives workable daytime temperatures; from December to February, the sensible schedule is early morning, underground midday, late afternoon. Water is piped from a bore field 24 kilometres away and treated by reverse osmosis, so it is drinkable but metered and costly — a detail that explains a great deal about how the town lives.