Coober Pedy is a location in Australia.
Overview[]
The name means "White Man's Hole." Not exactly a ringing endorsement. Coober Pedy is a torn-up, rusting, wild-wild-west sort of place. Opal mining takes place here. Because regular mining equipment destroys opals rather than actually mining them, the entire opal industry in Coober Pedy has been transformed from a corporate concern to an individualistic concern. Now individual Australians can get a mineral rights claim for an area in and around Coober Pedy. They are then free to use whatever means are at their disposal to uncover opals. Explosives are plentiful and common. Technology is wildly variable: a supper-cooled diamond drill derrick might share duty with a good old-fashioned iron pick. Opal miners are always teetering on the brink of utter poverty, tremendous wealth, absolute insanity, and nasty, explosive death.
The rule of law in Coober Pedy is a fuzzy concept. If people don't like something, they tend to blow it up. Once there was a gentleman who did not like the fact that his favorite pay phone was broken. He then set about blowing up all the other payphones in Coober Pedy so that the phone company would have to come out and replace them all. Trials in Coober Pedy have been moved elsewhere since someone blew up the courthouse because they didn't like the outcome of the legal process.
Men fly into Coober Pedy every week with briefcases full of money and fly out with briefcases full of opals. This is a tax man's nightmare. There aren't many permanent structures in Coober Pedy, but there is a beautiful soccer field, which is kept alive in the desert by irrigation funded by a local tax on beer. People live in caves formed out of old opal mines that have been sprayed down with some kind of hardening agent; a plastic covering that keeps the structure from collapsing. Walking though "downtown" Coober Pedy is like walking through a forest of stovepipes, chimney flues, and ventilation ducts.
The strangeness that is Coober Pedy is a combination of Aboriginal Dreamtime energies (as it is in the Outback), whitefella greed, and the ongoing ecological tragedy that is opal mining. Everyone has an angle, everyone has ready access to guns and explosives, and everyone is just coming off of or going into a three-day drunk.
Things get uncovered in opal mines. Strange things. One fellow came up with an entire case of Marilyn Monroe movies, all of them missing the third reel. Another miner found four ancient scrolls in bone tubes, inscribed with Aramaic. Skeletons of strange animals (not dinosaurs, that wouldn't be strange enough) keep getting found. And then there are many Aboriginal artifacts, which, somehow, do not make it back into the keeping of the Aboriginal governments. Many of these items are on display at various pubs around town.
There is no rail service to Coober Pedy, but there are regular road trains and many brave tourist buses that regularly stop here. One of the jobs you can get fairly easily is as a tour guide, because of the heavy burn-out factor of merely answering questions about opal mining rather than actually doing it.