Outback Opal Mines Offer Loners Escape

“Most of us are running away from something--family, wives, money problems,” said Max, clutching a cold can of beer in one hand and trying to keep his beat-up van on the rough desert road with the other.

“It’s easy to hide up here. Everyone’s known by their nickname. I don’t know the surnames of half the town.”

Andamooka is a good place to lie low. A fair way past the back of beyond, the township in the southern Australian Outback has one road leading into it and only the trace of a track out the other side.

On a cool day the temperature hovers around 80 degrees. During the summer the 250 inhabitants of Andamooka, surrounded by parched, rock-strewn wasteland, quietly bake.

The reason people are prepared to put up with such an existence--and why Max has kept coming back for 20 years--is simple. Opals.

Andamooka sits on one of the world’s richest opal fields, and locals claim the gems that are carved out of German Gully and White Dam are the best quality opals in existence.

From the air the first sign of the settlement among the salt lakes and dark red earth is a line of white hillocks, the remnants of 60 years of excavating and crushing the area’s rock.

Opals were first discovered in Andamooka in 1930. Australia is the source of about 90% of the world’s opal supplies, with Andamooka and Coober Pedy, also in South Australia, providing the major share.

Mining is a haphazard affair where luck, local knowledge and a “good nose” decide who will become an overnight millionaire.

Anyone willing to travel the 375 miles from Adelaide can buy a claim measuring 100 by 50 yards for $23, pick a likely spot and start digging.

Miners used to use shafts, but modern bulldozers, costing about $70 an hour to hire, have speeded up the process. But opal mining remains the province of the small-time operator.

“We’ve had companies in here with heavy equipment and drills but it doesn’t work,” said Max. “The only way you can do it is to walk behind the ‘dozer and watch for that flash of opal amid the rubble.”

That flash can mean a lot of money. Rough opals can bring more than $3,000 an ounce and polished, high-quality gems earn up to $230 a carat.

Behind heavy bars in the town’s newest opal gallery Mary Schultz will sell you a clear opal no bigger than a fingernail, flashing with myriad colors in the sunlight, for $1,200.

Not surprisingly this lure of wealth attracts its share of sharks to a township where those who have made it live in air-conditioned bungalows and cool dugouts while the rest make do with converted buses and shacks.

“We’ve had buyers coming through with suitcases stuffed with money,” Max said. “You show them what you’ve got, they pick out the eyes (best stones) when you’re not looking and then tell you they’re not interested.”

However, an Outback town with four bars, a raging thirst and time on its hands does not need outsiders to stir up trouble.

Careering down the main street--a dry creek bed impassable after heavy rain--Max tells stories of the Pink Pussy bar “a plonky (cheap wine) pub where everything was bolted to the floor” and other drinking holes that mysteriously burned down.

In Andamooka even the women feel naked without a bottle of beer in at least one hand. Inge Duke took just two weeks to collect enough empty beer bottles to build an extension to her house--made of 10,000 stacked bottles.

Andamooka’s most famous drinking hole was Bill’s Pub, a shack at White Dam outside the township, owned by the mildly eccentric Bill McDougall, who died in November at age 73.

Plastered with traffic signs and signposts from around the world, Bill’s bar is the town’s only tourist attraction.

Bill never had a license to sell alcohol, but he used to serve visitors beer or homemade port, then demand that they donate money to the Flying Doctor Service that flies medical help to remote areas.