A Short History of Coober Pedy Opal

Coober Pedy calls itself the opal capital of the world, and the title is earned. This one town in the far north of South Australia, ringed by more than seventy opal fields, has produced a large share of all the gem opal ever sold. Every parcel we ship comes out of this ground. Here is the longer story behind it.

A sea, then a desert

The opal is far older than the town. Around 100 to 110 million years ago, in the Cretaceous, much of inland Australia lay beneath a shallow inland sea, the Eromanga Sea, which is part of what geologists now call the Great Artesian Basin. As that sea retreated, it left behind thick marine sediments, the clays and sandstones known as the Bulldog Shale and the Wallumbilla Formation.

Long afterwards, deep weathering broke those rocks down and freed silica into the groundwater. The silica-rich solution seeped down through cracks, joints and old fossil cavities, and where conditions were right it set as opal: countless microscopic spheres of silica stacked in a lattice, splitting light into the shifting fire we call play-of-colour. Most of what comes out of the ground is potch, common opal with no fire at all. Only a small fraction carries colour, and that is what everyone is digging for.

The boy who found the field

On 1 February 1915, a 14-year-old named Willie Hutchison picked up pieces of opal lying on the surface of the Stuart Range. He was camped with the New Colorado Prospecting Syndicate, a small party led by his father Jim that had been looking for gold and, more urgently that day, for water. Within about a week the first claim was pegged.

The field was first known simply as the Stuart Range Opal Field. It took the name Coober Pedy around 1920, when the post office opened. Young Will Hutchison did not see much of what he started; he drowned in the Georgina River in 1920. A century later, in 2015, the South Australian Museum marked the hundred years of opal mining with an exhibition built around one extraordinary stone. More on that below.

What the name means

Coober Pedy comes from the Kokatha and Barngarla words kupa piti, usually translated as “whitefellas’ hole” or, more loosely, “white man in a hole”. The linguist Petter Naessan has traced the parts of it: kupa likely from the Barngarla side, and piti a word taken up for the white man’s new activity of digging a quarry. In 1975 the local Aboriginal community adopted an alternative name, Umoona, meaning “long life” and also their word for the mulga tree. You still see Umoona today on the opal mine and museum, the health service and the art centre.

A town that went underground

Summers here run past 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit), and the early miners learned quickly that the coolest place to be was inside the diggings. Men returning from the First World War, who had lived in dugouts on the Western Front, helped turn that idea into homes carved straight into the soft hillsides. Workers off the transcontinental railway added to the first wave of settlers.

The trick still works. A dugout holds a steady 19 to 25 degrees Celsius (66 to 77 Fahrenheit) day and night, right through the year, with no air conditioning. Around half the town lives underground, and the dugouts are not just houses: there are underground churches, including a beautiful Serbian Orthodox church finished in 1993, along with hotels, shops, a bookshop and galleries.

The world arrives

Opal drew people from everywhere. After the Second World War, a large influx of migrants from southern and eastern Europe came to try their luck, so many that at times around sixty per cent of the miners were of Greek, Italian and other southern or eastern European descent. The town proudly counts dozens of nationalities. Coober Pedy was formally declared a town in 1960, and through the 1960s and 1970s, as demand for opal grew and machines arrived on the fields, it boomed into a modern mining town.

The first miners of this country

People were here long before 1915. This is the country of the Antakirinja and Antakirinja Matu-Yankunytjatjara people, with connections also to Kokatha, Yankunytjatjara and Arabana groups, and Western Desert people had long come to the Stuart Range to quarry stone for tools. Aboriginal people worked in the opal industry from the 1940s, a history that has only recently been told properly. In 1946 an Aboriginal woman, Tottie Bryant, found a rich deposit that helped revive the field after a slump.

In 2011 the Federal Court recognised the Antakirinja Matu-Yankunytjatjara people as native title holders over roughly 78,672 square kilometres around Coober Pedy, a claim first lodged in 1995. Nearby, the striking mesa country of the Kanku-Breakaways Conservation Park has been co-managed with the traditional owners since 2013; “Kanku” means shelter.

How opal is won

In the early days a miner sank a shaft by hand and followed the opal level along with a pick and shovel. Much of that is now done with machines: Calweld-style auger drills punch shafts about a metre across, bulldozers strip shallow overburden, tunnelling machines chew along the level at a few metres an hour, and “blowers”, giant vacuum trucks, suck the loose dirt up out of the workings. Mechanisation took off from the 1970s.

Then there is noodling, the gentlest way in. A noodler works over the mullock heaps that other miners have thrown out, with nothing more than a sieve and a sharp eye, looking for the colour everyone else missed. Anyone can do it, and at Coober Pedy plenty of visitors try.

The great stones

Coober Pedy has given up some of the most famous opals ever found:

• The Olympic Australis was pulled from the Eight Mile field in August 1956, about nine metres down, and named for the Melbourne Olympics of that year. At 17,000 carats and almost pure gem opal, it has been called the largest and most valuable gem opal in the world.
• The Fire of Australia, a rough stone of nearly a kilogram found in 1946, is described as the finest piece of uncut opal known. It is held by the South Australian Museum.
• The Virgin Rainbow, an opalised belemnite that seems to glow as the light fades, came out of the Brown’s Folly field in 2003. It was the centrepiece of that centenary exhibition.

No photograph ever quite holds a stone like that, which is the honest problem with selling opal, and the reason we say so plainly on every parcel.

Coober Pedy today

For a town in one of the driest places on the continent, Coober Pedy is resourceful. It makes its own drinking water with a reverse-osmosis desalination plant that has run in some form since 1967, and it powers itself largely from a hybrid renewable station of wind, solar and battery, backed by diesel, that has at times run for days on renewables alone. The lunar landscape has stood in for other worlds in films from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome to Pitch Black and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, and there is still an open-air drive-in that dates to 1965.

Why the story matters to us

We tell this story because it is ours to tell. The chips we sell are not a commodity poured from an anonymous bin; they are dug, sorted and cleaned by local hands, out of named fields with a hundred years of history under them. When a parcel is tagged Black Flag or 17 Mile or Brown’s Folly, that is where it came from, and now you know a little of what that means.