Living underground

A couple of people have asked me to tell them more about sleeping underground in a dugout in Coober Pedy so I thought I would tell you a little more about life in the caves.

The idea of digging out a hole and converting it into a home began after the first world war when soldiers who had spent time digging trenches in France and Germany and the Middle East. joined the rush to get rich in the opal fields. They had quite primitive dugouts with ledges for lamps and recesses hacked into the walls of their cave for extra space to put their kerosene tin dressing tables and wardrobes in.

These two photos were not really taken to be stitched together but I let Photoshop merge them anyway. The colour is a bit different left to right but ignore that and you will see the dugout that was made in a mine(this is in the Old Timers Mine and the original dugout is still as it was - but the old timer has been replaced!

This is an example of a lounge room in a modern dugout. Colin took this but the room is so large that the flash did not reach the area he was aiming to. I have brightened it as much as I dare but it is still rather dark. I hope you can make out the furniture and the patterning created by the machine that they now use to cut the very hard rock that the mines and homes are dug into.

Coober Pedy is incredibly hot during the summer and freezing cold at night in the winter but in the rock dugouts the temperature remains a constant 24 degrees regardless of what the outside weather is doing. But the dugouts are in solid rock, so without ventilation the air would soon become stale. So every room has a hole to the surface through the “ceiling” and a chimney of sorts sits above this opening so that it is higher than the earth surface to prevent dust and small rocks falling down the chute into the room below. The hole is quite large – not large enough to crawl up but about ten inches or more in diameter.

There are homes that are above ground but they have to be heated in the winter and have air-conditioners running night and day in the long summers. Roughly half the population still live in underground homes, some are a combination of above ground and underground. It very much depends on the prosperity of the home owner. Tourists are well catered for with underground rooms but there are above ground ones for those who think they would be claustrophobic underground.

This is the long bunkhouse in which Colin and I spent three very pleasant nights. Our little recess is at the left of the picture - you nearly cannot see it, the rest stretches back such a long way so the cutting machine would have first made the passage way tunnel and then worked from it to cut each of the cubicles into the rock at the sides. The rock is so hard that there is no need for props and support beams. (This is why we didn't put up our tent, our tent pegs would not have gone into this rock!)
When the lights are out it is dark – very dark! Fortunately for us, we were in a cubicle in a long bunkhouse that was right at the front and near the door that had a window in it. So we had a light outside that glowed through the window and in the morning the daylight was able to brighten the entrance enough for us to know it was morning. We did not feel at all claustrophobic and slept well in our underground hide away.

The surfaces of the rock in our bunkhouse had been sprayed with a clear lacquer that stopped too much dust from floating around – but when we went through that Old Timers Mine we were almost choking with the dust we had breathed in during our 40 minutes of walking through the mine and the dugout living area.

After only a week of being in Central Australia in the very dry air, the skin around my finger tips is split and torn and my hair and nails are brittle. This is very much a place to bring your hand-cream and moisturiser!

AJ