IT’S THOUGHT THAT THE NAME COOBER PEDY IS DERIVED FROM WHAT THE LOCAL ABORIGINES SAW AS STRANGE ACTIVITY OF ‘WHITE MEN DOWN HOLES’
IT’S funny how the weather can affect things while travelling, either the best-laid plans get thrown out the window and you’ll head home, or you simply just change plans like in our case. Our base to explore was the unique outback town of Coober Pedy in South Australia. Known as Australia’s opal mining capital with underground buildings, a landscape full of mole hills and mines, it needs to be visited at least once on anyone’s travel itinerary.
History states that about 150 million years ago, inland Australia was covered by a vast ocean and when it started to dry up, the water and silica seeped in to the earth’s cracks and fault lines. Over time, chemical reactions happened, opals were formed, and in 1915 the first opals were found by Willie Hutchinson. Today, Coober Pedy’s many mines produce 85 per cent of the world’s most stunning opals … and they say, if you can’t find colour here,
