Legacy

There are many areas in Australia that opal mining is going on in.  Each area seems noted for different types of opals.  Black Opals from Lightening ridge, milky opals from the white cliffs, and the most classic type from an area called Coober Pedy.

Roughly translated, Coober Pedy is an aboriginal term for “white man in a hole”  In 1848 the area now called Coober Pedy was  a wide spot in the road and small gathering area for the struggling owners of sheep stations.  It was also a shipping terminal for the sheared wool.  Shipping was by mostly horse and wagon that is.

It was indeed a struggle, all the more usable areas for raising sheep had been earlier homesteaded, and this area was the leavings for those desperate to homestead something.  One of the main reasons it was a struggle was a lack of water in general, not much rain, and arid and hot.

Enter one Joseph Brewster, who was supposed to be a water wizard when it came to finding water.  He used dowsing sticks and other means to locate it. He charged a fee of course for his services.  He headed out into no mans land so to speak in search of water.  Said he’d be back in two days one way or another. Four days went by and Joseph hadn’t yet returned.  Everyone figured that he had succumbed to one thing or another and someday someone would find his bleached bones.

To everyone’s surprise, Joseph did return, it was on the fifth day.  He had marvelous news; he had found a good water supply.  Somewhat of an artesian well some say.  But water would have to be hauled from it. As it wasn’t a lowing stream.  That didn’t bother anyone as they were used to doing it the hard way; they were glad there was now a water source.

Joseph’s good news didn’t stop with the water.  He’d brought back a sack full of rough opals also.  Opals were extremely valuable and made the sheep business by comparison a waste of time.  So the great Australian Opal rush was on a year before the great California gold rush.

A mining town sprang up over night almost.  Prospector’s and others in great numbers came to profit from the discovery. Joseph himself filed a claim on the site of his discovery.

Now as it has been noted, this area was extremely hot and arid.  Relief from the heat could only be found under ground.  Miners had to be young and strong, and healthy to survive the heat while engaging in intense manual labor getting their holes dug.  The mining was primarily an under ground affair and miners had to use picks shovels and small dynamite charges to  make a shaft on the average of about six or seven feet in diameter to sink a shaft through mostly solid rock for about twenty feet down; from which point they would begin tunneling on a horizontal plain.

Rock was taken out very laboriously using big buckets, ropes and pulleys.  They were moved by wheel barrow to the vertical shaft area.  Each piece removed would be sledge hammered to crumbles to make sure no piece of opal got over looked.  Of course all this excavation created space and rooms and more tunnels and more rooms as opal was mined and removed where it was found.

One of the first things a miner would do even though rain was infrequent, was to take the hand crushed rock, crush some of it to a dust.  Then mix that mess with water as a sort of cement and form a dam around the top of their shaft.  The dam would usually be about twenty inches wide and twenty inches high.  A roof would then be set over that a few feet off the ground.  No one wanted a flooded mine; especially since their work area also became their living area out of the hot sun.  Down there it was about a constant sixty five degrees.  Fairly stable and nice.

As nature would have it, women eventually appeared on the scene and family’s got started.  Children were pretty well raised and home schooled under ground.  The miners accumulated considerable wealth.  They paid a price, a lot of ruined health and early aging from too much back breaking work.  Their heirs fared better, especially those smart enough to sell the inherited claim and go to the big city and live the life of ease.  Others just couldn’t get enough wealth and generations of shortened lives were the result of unbridled greed.

Then by 1920 that wonderful source of water that Joseph Brewster had found started to dry up. That started a bit of panic, but the Australian government didn’t want to see those mining operations have to be abandoned.  So the government brought in the materials to the town area and built several huge metal reservoirs to catch and contain the rain water when it came, albeit not to often.  That worked for a while, but more people still kept coming in to the area of Coober Pedy to try their luck.  Shafts doted the landscape for miles in all directions.  Because of increased demand, water had to be rationed at one liter per day per person.

That was tolerable for those with a cool place to go; but for newcomers starting to dig a new shaft, that just wouldn’t cut it.  A black market water business seemed to spring up over night.  Source of product was suspicious.  No one ever found out apparently.

However necessity being the father of invention, it was finally figured out that when there was rain it wasn’t all going into the fabricated reservoirs.  So most all of the miners picked out a room in their digs and dug down another level to create an in house reservoir.  Then thy made a breech in the low side of the shaft entrance dam, put in a sluice gate  to control flow and ran a four inch pipe down the shaft into their personal reservoir.  When it was full they would close the sluice gate.

Of course there was little social life, because individual and families were somewhat isolated down below in their combination mines/homes.

At night things were a whole lot cooler.  People would meet on a scheduled basis at the shack of a town hall to discuss community business.  While there was not much daily interaction; a community of sorts existed and they were all concerned with the common good.  At one such meeting someone mentioned that the children were not growing up with sufficient social interaction.  That was true, a by product of isolation and home schooling.

It was suggested that a claim be filed in the name of a public school and a shaft sank and large room created.  A small side room also as living quarters for a teacher. That sounded like a plan and everyone voted aye, except for single men who abstained from the vote.

A teacher was hired and offered a salary to make it worth his while to leave the city comfort for an under ground classroom and living quarters.  Now there was the matter of any opal down in the school area.  It was jointly decided to carve it up this way.

Whatever was found would be divided as follows, 50% as a perk for the teacher.  Then 25% for school supplies; and 25% as rewards for students who maintained a B average or better.  That worked out quite well.  It also caused the school room to be enlarged on a regular basis, which then could accommodate more students.

Now we fast forward to 1945.  In 1945 an Aboriginal women by the name of Toddy Bryant on the edge of the Coober Pedy mine areas was quarrying by hand, pieces of stone to build a shelter for herself and her children.  The whole landscape was pretty stony, so she dug as close as possible to where she wanted to erect the shelter.  Now a hand built shelter by an Aboriginal was very rudimentary, small and crude.  But it provided shade and a place to sleep.

Now Toddy knew what opal was.  And about two feet down in getting rock to build the shelter, she struck one of the biggest veins of opal in history, and unusually close to the surface to boot.

An educated missionary had converted Toddy to Christianity a few years before.  That’s how Toddy had contact with a caring person in the know so to speak.  You see, like the American Indian of that time period, most still lived on a reservation, and were not permitted to own land off the reservation.  They could however own other things, like a dog, a horse, tools, a wagon, etc.  Now other things were the loop hole that the Missionary, one Reverent John Peabody used to make sure Toddy got a fair share of the pie.

He pointed out quite successfully to the courts that ownership of “Discovery Rights” and Mineral Rights” were not exactly the same as ownership of land.  Therefore Toddy was entitled to those other things.  Toddy reaped enormous wealth from it all.  She was paid handsomely by a large mining consortium.  She used much of it to improve the lives of her fellow Aboriginals, especially in the area of schools built and higher education.

A final fast forward.  Toddy’s find was the largest ever.  Today most of the underground mines/living quarters are still inhabited and productive. But the richest area is mined by more modern techniques and equipment.  Underground living is no longer an absolute necessity.  A choice for some; but with the advent of air conditioning, strung electrical lines to the area, and best of all a several hundred mile pipeline bringing plenty of water to the area.

Today’s underground miner is more savvy than his fore fathers, inasmuch as he will start mining  by age twenty five and retire at age thirty five.  That way the hard manual labor hasn’t destroyed his health and he has accumulated enough to live well the rest of his life.