Coober Pedy

Q: What noise does a cow make? A: Thwump – if you hit it at 110km an hour. Which several people have done along this road. First you see the car – ouch, then the cow – oof. It does answer one question that has been nagging at me though; there are signs to homesteads all along the road, this HS 34 km one way, that HS 65 km the other. In all these vast distances and arid landscapes, what are they there for? Beef cattle, I guess, what’s left of them.
What the dickens (do you like my rural-speak?) is going on with the weather? Get Noah on the phone, as if we should be worried. We’re not sure if we actually should be, about tackling that track, with news just in of wild storms and flash flooding today, not on that track, but just up the road. Outback style, that is about 400 km, towards Alice Springs.

It starts to spit as we get up but it doesn’t really hit its stride until we’re a couple of hundred km along towards Coober Pedy when it comes down in sheets just as we pull in at a rest area for a break. There is another caravan owner standing damp and shivering and we all look at the rain and laugh at the absurdity of it. He has been running in front of it all the way from Coober Pedy but it has caught him. I’ll bet n o-one in living memory has seen it greener, though, there’s actual sort of tough grassy stuff.

The little lakes along here, part of the Lake Eyre, Lake Torrens complex are all glistening. With the long sweeps of silver water to the low flat mesa-top hills in the distance it is quite stunning.

R is fiddling with the radio, looking for a local station when suddenly on comes Emma Ayres and the ABC Classic FM program. Amazing! Out here! If this can happen they can probably get Home and Away in Turkestan. Or maybe Boganistan. Haha.

The news comes on, talking about a no-fly zone in Libya. “We need one of those here,” says R.

We try to find another route. The Savannah Way is still blocked at the Fitzroy Crossing and there is a whole printed page of other currently closed and cut roads and tracks. Probably it would be best to head back south and go across the Nullarbor, but we hate to turn around.

We get to know the girls in the Info Centre pretty well during the day, but no-one has actually driven the Anne Beadell highway. I wouldn’t either if I lived here, I would get in the fastest car i could find and hightail it to Adelaide. Or anywhere. Coober Pedy is a weird, ugly dump. It’s all hillocks of earth with people living inside them to keep cool and scratching at the earth hoping to find their fortune in opals.

Like all of these unusual places it attracts some, um, colourful characters, along with lots of sad looking Aborigines, speaking their own language and slouching around. Apart from its uniqueness there is absolutely nothing to recommend it. I would rather hang by my thumbs than spend a holiday here fossicking for opals, which seems to be the main thing the town tries to tempt tourists with.

By the time we get here today, gather all of the information we can, which is still really not enough to make an informed decision, we decide it is too late to hit the road and check in to a local caravan park. We will do some washing and housekeeping and check the weather and conditions in the morning.