Tales from Coober Pedy.
Coober Pedy is the nearest to a gold rush frontier town that I have ever encountered.
Scowling, swarthy, leather faced men eye the stranger with suspicion, the last thing they want is another potential prospector staking a claim.
They mutter and glare darkly at attempts at conversation, and the fly strewn air means anything than a dash from shop to pub is as uncomfortable as trying to talk to one of the local prospectors.
It is so hot, dry and dusty here that people choose to live underground like the proverbial hobbit holes with houses built into or under the small hills and the deep earths.
Dust storms from the bush can last for days upon end, and it is no place for the claustrophobic or the meek hearted.
There's a strong, uneasy sense of the unlawful, of mistrust and hardened steel honed character, able enough to stand the demands of the life and deprivations of the prospector.
All this changes after a few beers and a dilution of the hardship of life with a generous glass of whisky.
Tall tales abound, of the opal that got away.
A potential prospector can buy a plot to mine for a mere eighty bucks. Many more earn their living by renting out machinery that can dig, extract and sort soil so that the prospector can pan for the opals rather than win it the way that the old, tougher, harder prospectors did.
The old timers did it by hand, digging down through the earth, carting the rubble up through winched buckets and pouring the slag into small hills that dot the otherwise flat landscape like giant termite mounds, throwing up the ugly innards into strangely sculpted shapes, eerily lit in the night by the harsh lights of late night miners.
Most people take day jobs, usually selling opals found by others to tourists and whoever, so after work they travel into the desert and continue their search for an opal El Dorado, dreaming of the day that they strike it rich.
And the tales are tall.
Around the crowded bar, the usual hubbub and rowdy hardy cheer is silenced only by the legendary stories that renew each prospectors faith, and acts like a lodestone to the wavering while they all nod their sun beaten faces in approval at the mantra being told and told again to the inquisitive traveler.
As the stories unravel, outside the hushed crowded pub, the occasional explosion can be hear as the latest prospector blasts his way into the bowels of the desert in search of the precious opal.
Here are some that I recall.
Martha was renowned for changing her house. We should clarify this, because Martha lived not in a house but in hole.
To be even more accurate, Martha lived in a hole in the ground.
This was normal in Coober Pedy, a frontier outpost in the middle of nowhere, a scorching hell of flies, sand and not an awful lot else.
Vast dried out salt lakes lie hundreds of miles away glittering like seas of ice, the closest thing to water that the land has seen for millions of years.
Among the sand flies and people there was one reason that drew people to live in this cruel wasteland.
Opals.
Opals are formed when tiny drops of water are trapped underneath a growing crystal, the trapped water acts like a prism so that depending on the angle the jewel changes and shifts like a shape changer, chameleon and resplendent in its Joseph's Coat of many colours.
Gently crafted, opals are weaned into shapes of great value, the greatest of them all being the black opal so called because the background provides the starkest contrast to show off the flawless form of the jewel that took thousands of years to perfectly form.
Martha had been prospecting for years, and had made enough to get by.
When Martha needed a new room, she merely dug one out of the rock, much like the Flintstones, hacking out a new space beneath the ground she called her home.
She was a tough lady, had lost a husband in an accident in a detonation and wore burns and scars that had put off many a potential husband, but Martha plucked gamely on.
She was well known for her fickleness with regard to her accommodation however and never stopped chipping out a new wardrobe or a new shelf deep within her subterranean home.
Her many friends soon learned that an invitation to dinner usually meant an hour or so’s chipping away at rock to create a new 'feature' for her home.
One day Martha announced that she was going to carve a new wardrobe out of the rock in her main bedroom, and invited some friends to join her for dinner.
Unsurprisingly, nobody turned up.
Martha was understandably upset, and having got rather drunk, decided to commence the hole improvement herself.
She passed out after a few hours of picking and drinking and fell asleep snoring on the floor.
The next morning, groggy and unsteady, she looked at the work she had achieved with little recollection of the endeavors she'd undertaken the night before.
She noticed a loose piece of stuck shrapnel and blearily shook it loose.
Underneath was an opal of unsurpassed beauty.
Martha had lived in her home for fifteen years, it had been mined out for decades, everyone knew that there were no opals there.
Eventually the opal was extracted.
Once polished and cut, it earned Martha over half a million dollars.
Her friends suddenly rallied round, she even had an offer of marriage,
but Martha had became reclusive, for no-one had helped her hack out her wardrobe.
Martha had discovered a handsome jewel yet lost that most precious jewel still, her friends.
Martha still lives somewhere in Coober Pedy.
yechydda,