This is a place where the Law arrived, unwanted and unbidden, 10 years ago. And it definitely arrived with a bang! When the new police station was built and ready to be occupied, it was destroyed in an explosion, later attributed to mining explosives!

According to an old timer that we met, there was a Law, but it was Coober Pedy Law and it was meted out, as and when necessary. Those that lived here knew where the boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable were. Cross over that line, and you might find that your grave is an abandoned mineshaft that litter the plain around Coober Pedy.

He told us that he once saw a miner and a gemstone dealer from his window, do business, with their respective pistols on the bonnet of the dealer's vehicle. Apparently, this was a sign of mutual respect!

But the miners are a shy and very suspicious lot, so it is best to take heed of the signs that proclaim DANGER and a picture of a person falling down a shaft. However, you could also take it that the miner might have shot you, because they are very protective of their turf, and shoved your body down one of those abandoned shafts! Seriously!

Driving towards Coober Pedy is like driving on another world. The landscape is barren, very dry and windswept with colours that seem, under a leaden grey sky, to be washed out, desiccated and burnt to a crisp. Here is a place that film makers have come to depict other planets in films like Mad Max: Beyond the Thunderdome, Pitch Black and, of course, Pricsilla: Queen of the Desert. There is actually a place called the Moon Plains where much of the filming takes place. Appropriately named.

Coober Pedy is so remote that, before the Stuart Highway was complete, it could take up to a week for supplies to make it up from Adelaide, the closest big city (only 1500km away!). Here, you can join the postman on his rounds. But bear in mind that his rounds take a week to complete in a special vehicle that can pretty much go everywhere! Believe it or not, this region has people on those massive livestock stations that still need their post delivered. It used to be a badge of pride that the Royal Mail was always delivered, come rain, snow or shine. Those traditions may not live in the UK these days, but that spirit still thrives in the arid desert empty plains around Coober Pedy!

Coober Pedy is a thoroughly "modern" place.....believe it or not! Where the rest of the world is intent on ensuring that there is a Me and a You, Coober Pedy is anything but (except maybe for the Law!). At last count, there are 45 seperate nationalities represented in the town! It is a veritiable United Nations there. They even have a Serbian Orthodox Church!

In terms of time, the town has only been around since 1915, so a baby in town terms then, when a teenager on his father's gold finding expedition found the first bits of rock that contained what is now known as Opal.

Since its discovery, the town has "grown" in leaps and bounds...well actually it has pretty much hidden itself underground. What you see above the surface is actually a tiny proportion of what lies underground here. When the veterans came back from WWI, they brought with them the idea of using dugouts common in the trenches on the Western Front. Before that, the first pioneers had been suffering blinding heat in summer with temperatures sometimes coming close to 50 degrees C! And shivering through freezing winter desert nights where the temperature would drop well below freezing!

The dugouts are now used for all sorts of things....garages, shops, homes, restaurants, hotels and churches to name a few! There are even one or two enterprising backpacker hostel owners that offer you a chance to put up your tent in communal areas! No matter what the temperature is outside, the dugouts remain a constant 23 - 26 degrees C! Very pleasant to come into when you have been sweating spontaneously outside!

But when the temperatures, and weather conditions are benign enough, you might find the locals playing a little golf! At this course, the greenkeeper is really the oilman. Greens are marked by the flag naturally, but also round oilslick sand. The rest of the course is parched, whitish desert floor and the ball is teed off from a patch of Astroturf! I think that the concepts of bunkers, rough and the fridge are fairly mute concepts at this course!

Not to be outdone by Larry the Lobster, or Map the Miner, or by a bloody big Rocking Horse, the Big Winch has been erected again in place of honour. Here you might gaze into the glare of a land baked hard and parched and admire the relics of mining days past that are scattered around the town, as well as contemplate the older Big Winch that lies in pieces at the foot of the new one.

Here is a plaque that explains that the remains of the Old Big Winch are all that was left after a massive and extremely powerful cyclone thundered through the Outback and destroyed everything in its path in the 70s! Crickey....a cyclone in practically the dead centre of Oz....big enough to destroy the Big Winch, the size of a small building?! That must have been frightening to live through, above or below ground!

Opal mining is actually a relatively simple operation. The opal was once the "beaks" of ancient fish (similar to those found in cuttlefish today), that accumulated on the bed of an ancient sea. Over eons, the seafloor was covered and beaks were fossilised into seams what is now called opal. 90% of the seam is actually worthless. The real value comes from opal that has a brilliant iridescence and seems to sparkle from within.

Like any precious stones, there are various gradings that determine the value of the opal. Black opal is incredibly rare, and hence has the highest value and green/blue opal is relatively common and is more affordable. So vast is the field of opal, that Coober Pedy is the largest of its kind anywhere in the world!

But to get to the stuff, miners dig a shaft downwards on their 100m x 100m claims to where they reckon the seam is. Once the shaft is dug and bottomed out, the miner follows the seam. In days gone by, it was all done by hand. Digging, hauling and extending. But nowdays, mechanical aids have made it far easier to get at the opal. Scattered all over Coober Pedy now, in amongst the slagheaps (heaps of waste material discarded for having no value), are trucks that look very bizarre.

On the loadbed, is essentially a giant vacuum machine. A miner will drop a long hose into his shafts to suck up what his tunnel borer churns up. So powerful is the sucking of action of these machines, that miners have found the 100m from the truck is the furthest that it operates! It sucks up the debris into a grinder that sits on a lever extended behind, and above the truck. When the debris becomes too heavy, the waste material drops out. If the miner has found a good seam to follow, he just picks up the broken up ore and decides what to keep. He can take the rough ore and polish it himself or he can sell it off to a dealer who does what needs to be done to sell off as jewellery.

We had a very educational stop at the Old Timers Museum where all of this was explained to us, by an old-timer with a wicked sense of humour. He took great pleasure in showing us how powerful the hoover was by getting us to pick-up football size pieces of ore and watching it being sucked up by the incredible suction. He regaled us with stories of how people have had to hang on to watches, rings, hangbags and flimsy bits of clothing!

If you love machines with loud sounds, many moving parts, dust and capable of chewing through solid rock, then the tunnel borer is for you. This baby churns rock into powder with missing a beat! This is the sort of toy that every man should have (who has ALMOST everything)! But be warned: it, and that man, will wreak complete and utter havoc wherever they go! Instead of burn, baby, BURN it will be churn, baby, CHURN amid chackles of demonic laughter!

So strange is this mining activity to the local Aboriginals they actually gave it a name. By then, I think that the locals knew that the white man was extremely strange! In the local dialect, "Kuba" means uninitiated man and was commonly used to describe the white man. "Pidi" means in a hole or burrow. Putting the two together, you get, in the local dialect, "white man in a hole"! So, when the tiny town council adopted the name, it was accepted as Coober Pedy (pronounced in a strong nasal twang as Coobba Peedy).

Strange the Aboriginals might think the white man is, but he is not slow to capitalise on that, at all! In one shop we stopped for an ice-coffee (the dimensions of which could feed a small family!), that doubled up as an artists' gallery, the Maltese (not the chocolate!) manager told us that he sells, on behalf of the Aboriginal owners, up to ten or so didgeridoos everyday! So what, you say. But bear in mind that each one sells for about AUS$700! Everyday! Apparently, these same didgeridoos sell for upwards of GBP£900 each in Europe! So if you see me peddling these musical instruments, you now know why.......Waltzing matilda, walting matilda, you'll come a'waltzing....

Since it was coming up to Christmas, and the town was staging their annual Carols by Candlelight concert that night, we decided to stick around and join the locals in bellowing their hearts out to all too familiar carols. Come the appointed hour at the local footie (Aussie Rules is called footie here) stadium, those locals that arrived pulled up chairs and proceeded to listen to the local school kids, church choirs, one or two solo and duets decimate and mutilate carols into vaguely familiar melodies and harmonies!

Added to this exciting mixture was a howling wind that drowned out pretty much everything with a lightening storm far off in the distance; the kids, not singing or being entertained by a locally created character called Dusty (think Denis the Menace, but without the menace), were all happily playing with those sticks and bands of luminescent colours on the part of the ground that was unoccupied. To complete an already bizarre picture, there was a line of Aboriginal elderly sitting on deckchairs, decked out in santa hats and other Christmas paraphernalia. We imagined that they looked out on the scene before them in complete and utter amazement and bemusement at what the white man does to celebrate major rituals in their culture! And so did we, before we headed off into the desert, singing carols as we went!

There is no place like it on earth anywhere! And one well worth visiting!