Coober.

Coober Pedy, South Australia.

It has long been one of my favourite two-bottle theories that We Are The Aliens ... that we are the little green men we’re looking for. It makes perfect sense, trust me. We have space craft. We travel in Space. We’ve got incredible powers of invisible communication. We can hover. We have laser beams. We have doors that open by themselves. We boldy go where no Man has been before.  

Coober Pedy supports my theory.

This opal mining town sits where the dirt tracks from William Creek and Oodnadatta meet the bitumen of the Stuart Highway. You notice the spoil- heaps first off. A lunar, or martian, landscape of conical waste heaps created by the famous Coober ‘blowers’. 

The town sign proudly displays a blower – a huge diesel engine atop the bed of a truck, with a conveyor linked to an upturned oil drum spout thing. It’s an invention of necessity. And looks exactly as it was conceived on the table-top of a pub. There’s a crude simplicity to the blower, which speaks volumes of Coober itself. 

It is a mining town. The spoil-heaps from the opal mines radiate toward the horizon as far as the eye can see: pink, white, grey, small, large, enormous. Each heap is the evidence of ‘a white man in a hole’, which ‘coober pedy’ means in a local Aboriginal language.

Kent wastes no time in taking us to the main look-out over the town. There’s a huge bucket suspended in the air: The Big Winch. The wind is getting up, but the sky is as blue as anything. We look out across the golden landscape. We are on another planet.

Coober Pedy is a rich town. For some. 

It’s a gambling town. The only game in town is Opals. But the wealth, like the town, is all hidden, quite literally: a lot of the houses, businesses, hotels and churches are ‘underground’. I dispute this fact with Kent: they seem built-in to the rock rather than under the ground. (I know I’m being pedantic.) Officially, it’s to avoid the high temperatures of summer – up to 50 degrees apparently. I can’t help suspect it was just a lot safer to live in a vault-like cave, too, during the opal-rush of the last century.

Opals are big money. We hear stories about people who have invested hundreds of thousands of Australian dollars in the hope that the next dig will be the big one. One guy we speak to has been keeping a team of miners going for three years, full pay, bed and board … with no find. It’s an investment, he assures us. One day he’ll get it all back and more. He sounds like someone playing stick or twist who can’t help twisting. 

Like many in Coober Pedy, he lives underground. He invites us to look around the rooms: immaculate time-capsules from the 1970s, show-homes of mining wealth. 

In his underground shop he shows us several firey, pale opals: this one is worth fifteen thousand; this one twenty-five. Why? It’s very rare back opal, he says, and caresses the jewel fondly. He slides the tray back under the counter quick enough.

The many opal shops of Coober Pedy are destinations for happy couples, looking for that special something. Men in khaki flannel nod nervously as their partners try on rings, earrings and necklaces, and check themselves out in the mirror-mirrors on the wall. 

Then there are the stories of the travellers just randomly finding opals in car parks. Or the miner who stopped working his pit, only for someone else to continue and strike it big and who now owns an island off Fiji.

It’s fair to say Coober won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. It isn’t a pretty town, but it is fascinating. Subterranean. Wild. A strange place to be. I was up early on the morning of our departure to take some footage and stills of the main drag and its many bright ‘Opal store’ signs in the morning light. I had the street to myself, other for a lone back-packer who was walking up and down looking for somewhere for breakfast with a look on his face that said “Where the hell am I?”

Away from the opals, you can reach the Dog Fence pretty easily from CP. It’s the longest fence in the world. Not quite the Great Wall of China – I doubt the little green men will see it from space: it’s more of a six-foot chicken-wire affair – the fence stretches nearly 3,500 miles, and keeps the dingoes of the north from the cattle and crops in the south. I can’t help think it marks a change in our journey too.

On what has to be the windiest day on Earth ever, we go to see the Breakaways: an outcrop of rocky mesas that tower above the outback. Sheer drops are no place to linger in gusts that take the hat off your head and your feet from the ground, but the Breakaways are well worth the visit. Again: it’s the sense of scale they deliver that words cannot do justice to. 

Some trick the eye. There’s a mass that looks very much like a sleeping camel. Another that looks like its topped by a fairy-tale white castle. It’s easy to let your imagination go with the weird wonders before you.

Then there’s the Moon Field. An expanse of boulders, this plain has been used as locations for the Mad Max films and other blockbusters in need of a suitably alien landscape. 

We drive back. Welcome to Coober Pedy, says the sign.