An hour underground at Tom's Opal Mine

We took a tour of Tom's Opal Mine, on the Stuart Highway just out of town. Tom's mine was not mine.

It is a genuine opal mine, worked through the eighties and nineties and now kept open for tours. Our guide was a real character, telling us a great deal about the mine and nearly as much about himself. We had hard hats; he had bare feet. As a fellow barefooter I was impressed, and a little alarmed on his behalf, in a working mine.

He handed us each a black light, which is what miners use to pick opal out of the rock, and walked us through how a hole like this gets dug. Underground it was cool and still, which is the whole reason Coober Pedy lives below the surface.

The digging is done by a blower, also called a sucker: really a truck parked on the surface with a wide pipe running down the shaft, working like an enormous vacuum cleaner. It draws the broken rock up the pipe and drops it into a hopper on the back. We watched the underground end of it pulling rock up the tube. Every mullock heap (the piles of excavated rock and dirt) around Coober Pedy came up through one of these, and there are thousands of them.

In a town where the houses, the shops and the churches are all dug into the ground, we were fascinated to learn about the machinery that digs it out.