Precious metals.

Today we are at Cobar, we called in on the way through to the centre but it was pouring with rain and we saw nothing. We gave ourselves two nights so that we would have a full day to check out the place and the weather was kind to us this time around.
Cobar is a town that has grown and evaporated a couple of times thanks to the volatile nature of the demand for copper and gold. At the moment it is a fairly prosperous little town and is riding on the mining boom once again.

Our explorations took us first to a large gold mine that initially looks like an open cut mine but it is a huge hole in the ground with a road that allows an easy gradient for the heavy machinery that drives into the hole at the bottom (Yellow arrow points to the entrance) The seam that contains the gold can be seen where the white arrows indicate where old mines have been exposed, I am assuming that they were hand dug and had buckets that were hauled up through a shaft to take the ore to the surface.

At a park opposite the Information Office is a memorial to the miners who lost their lives in mining accidents in Cobar and this imposing life-size miner working at an ore face shows how work was done in the past. Computerized machinery does the hard work these days.

There must have been plenty of gold in “them thar hills” because an information board had a photograph of one of the gold stampers. I have been to other gold mining towns where they have had ten stampers or fewer so fifty is a huge quantity! The ore was smashed into dust by the stampers and the water would wash the dust over a bed that was filled with mercury. Gold is heavier than crushed rock and sinks into the mercury while the water washes the rock off and into a pit. At the end of the crushing the mercury is scraped off the plates and put into a crucible and evaporated (?) over heat to release the gold. (If I have this wrong, please let me know!)

A visit to a working copper mine was fascinating, we were taken in a small bus around the outside of the working area and could only take our photos from behind the windows of the bus. I couldn't help being amazed at the store of huge tyres in a shed dedicated to this task. We were told that these tyres are hard to come by so when they are available a big order is made so that they are on hand for when they are needed.

Apart from lots of facts and figures giving quantities and and percentages (which went in one ear and out the other) we were shown the complex arrangement of tanks and pipes that are part of the method of separating/refining the copper from the ore. It was all very impressive.

Even more impressive is the number of pubs in Cobar! These miners are obviously a thirsty lot! The smart Great Western Hotel is named after one of the Gold Mines. I couldn't resist taking a photograph of it – it has the longest iron lacework veranda I have seen.

AJ

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

Underground wonders

Today Colin and I learned what opal mining was all about. We first went on a tour of an opal mine after first watching a very good movie that told the story of how opal was created and how this area of opal field was found before being taken on a walk through the mine that is part of the show-room, owners home as well as the caves in which our accommodation is set.

Each of the homes dug into the hillsides started out as opal mines and once the opal was removed and there was a smart burrow left behind it was converted into living quarters.

Colin and I donned hard hats and went into 'Old Timer's Mine” which is an original mine cut with pick and shovel back in the 1920s and has been made interesting for tourists with plaques and dummy miners showing the various activities that were done and the hardships that were endured.

Behind a sheet of perspex was opal that was still in the rock wall, I used the flash and expected a big flash-back from the perspex but am pleasantly surprised at how well the picture came out. Can you see the opal?

When we emerged after 40 minutes of taking ourselves around the mine we walked into the shop where we had started our tour. My eye was drawn to a couple of carvings into the rock wall.

Yes, even the shop has rock as three of its walls, the fourth wall is the front of the shop and it is made of man made materials. I am not really all that enamoured of opal and although I gazed into the show cases and made all the right sounds of admiration, I had no interest in buying any! So I took my photo of the camel in the wall!

Another interesting place we visited was the “Catacomb Church” (there are actually several churches that are underground). We were fortunate in that a tour group had entered the church ahead of us and we were invited to stay while the local guide told everyone stories about how opal was found when the churches were created and that this Catholic church was unlucky in that no opal was found here – other churches struck it rich!

After the group had gone I was able to take my photo of the altar without using a flash.

A trip out to the Underground Pottery proved a waste of time – it was closed!
As I was writing this blog a familiar person walked towards me (I was sitting outside the dugout that is our home for three nights), it was Steven and with him, his co-pilot Sabine. It was lovely to chat with them both and we were invited across to have dinner with them and to meet the "group". What a treat! Everyone was so thrilled to be able to talk about what they had seen and done that we felt very comfortable in their presence.
Just maybe we shall meet up with them all again tomorrow - they, and we, are going out to the Breakaways.
That would be fun!
AJ