Fella Down a Hole

By ROBERT HUGHES

Returning to his native Australia last month, our art critic, Robert Hughes, began shooting a TV series titled Beyond the Fatal Shore for PBS, the BBC and Australia's ABC network. Along the way, Bob planned a series of letters/diaries to a close friend in New York City, chronicling his travels and observations. This account is the only one he completed before being seriously injured in a car crash, reported in our June 14 issue. Happily, Bob was to be released from intensive care this week and is making good progress on his recovery.

Coober Pedy, the Opal capital of Australia, is about 525 miles north-northwest of Adelaide. You fly there on a little 19-seater plane that stops first at a uranium-mining town called Olympic Dam, a cluster of machinery and huts in absolute flatness--red desert all around. As soon as you get out of the plane (which has to refuel), you are assailed by millions of flies. The fly biomass of central Australia must be 10 times the biomass of humans or kangaroos. You at once start doing the irritable wave of the hand known as the outback salute. The flies crawl into your nostrils, eyes and ears, and when you get back in the plane, they fly in clouds into the cabin, so that the pilot takes out a can of powerful insecticide--"Jeez, this is going to smell really putrid," he cheerfully announces--and sprays them down. Then you take off. Forty minutes later, you land in Coober Pedy, with dead flies in your lap.

Coober Pedy is Aboriginal for "white fella down a hole." Opals were discovered here, lying on the surface, by a 14-year-old boy back in 1915. He was looking for water but instead kept tripping over the "floaters," as surface opals are called. Few floaters are seen now; the opals are all underground, embedded in deep layers of soft sandstone. This whole area, millions of years ago, was ocean floor. So it is relatively easy to mine, and since opal mining is entirely an individual business, like California gold mining back in 1849, it has never been industrialized.

Indeed, it can't be. The big mining companies--which the opal miners hate, along with the government and the cops and the tourists--have never devised a profitable means of detecting or extracting opals. It's handwork. You just stake a claim and start digging. Sounds simple, but the trouble is that none of the conventional geological spotting techniques apply. Opals don't react chemically with the stone matrix around them, and they don't leave the "traces" that gold or diamonds do. So it is a matter of digging and digging and digging. One spot is as good as another; the chances are always essentially the same. You can drill or pick into one spot on the rock wall and find nothing or go in 6 in. away and hit a "pocket," or lode, of opals that could be worth $100,000.

Or--and the miners with whom I spent a night drinking in the clubhouse of the Coober Pedy Golf Club are full of stories like this--you can place an explosive charge, set it off and find that you've blown a quarter-million bucks' worth of opal to worthless dust, the texture of coarse sugar, because you didn't know it was there. Then you just go and have a drink. Or two.

Opal is a silicate fossil. It comes in "shells"--seashells originally, for this whole desert was once a vast inland sea--or more rarely in "pipes," or tubes, the fossilized backbones of archaic freshwater squid. The paradox of the stuff is that although it is so brilliantly colored, it has no color of its own. It's a solid diffraction grating, and the color you see is the light dispersed and reflecting through it. John Smart, the miner in whose mine we filmed, waxes reflective about this. "The opal's just a bloody illusion. It's as though you're spending your life down here digging for something that doesn't actually exist."

John is a short, wiry man of 47, with a red beard and red hair and fierce china-blue eyes. His father took him out of school when he was 14 to apprentice him to a butcher. He is self-educated, and he reads all the time when he's not drinking or down the shaft. His literary range is wider than that of most educated Americans I've met, and he talks beautifully. His father was a Stalinist union organizer, and though John is no longer a communist--few miners are; they're too solitary and anarchic by temperament--he movingly speaks of the kinship he and his mates feel with the labor traditions of Australian mining, which go back to the Eureka rebellion of the Victorian gold miners in 1854. "We have solidarity because we know all our chances are equal."

Do you ever feel jealous, I ask, when another miner makes the big strike? "Ah, no, Bob, it'd be pointless. You'd spend your whole life being jealous. I feel glad, actually. It keeps you believing that it could happen to you tomorrow. And if you go for six months without a strike, you've got to believe that. Otherwise you'd go crazy."

Coober Pedy is a small town but full of M-E-N. They'll argue all night, but God help you if you cross them. The cops aren't much use out here, and the men take justice into their own hands. Last month, a passing wannabe miner got into another man's mine and rifled a lode of opals that the owner had opened up but left unextracted. (He had taken off to the pub for a beer, committing the fatal error of letting on that he'd struck, and this was overheard by the thief.) His friends identified the thief from his boot prints, said nothing, came for him the next night, broke both his arms and threw him alive down one of the thousands of abandoned mineshafts that speckle the landscape. He was never found, and probably never will be. Word of such things gets around and keeps people honest.

In the old days all the tunnels and shafts had to be dug with pick, shovel and explosives--backbreaking work. Now there are circular drills mounted on caterpillar treads, which lurch forward chewing at the soft rock, making a hellish racket that changes to a shrill glass-crunching scream when the teeth hit a pocket of "potch" (the gray waste near opal that runs in veins through the matrix). These drills are 4 ft. in diameter, and they create vaults in the tunnel roofs--beautiful, arched Romanesque spaces cut in the creamy pink-veined stone. It is troglodyte architecture: dense, theatrical and intensely moving, infinitely better than anything built above ground. It has the same kind of weird beauty as the basement of Antoni Gaudi's Palau Guell. Here and there the lights pick up sparkles of quartz and waste opal crumbs embedded in the stone. You could imagine it as a set for a Wagner opera; you half expect to see Alberich and his dwarfs.

So after we shot some walk-and-talk through the tunnels, during which I was interviewing John about luck and hardship and the resemblance between opal mining and professional gambling (which is very strong), the director Chris Spencer asked John to go at a face with the air hammer. He obligingly did, talking meanwhile about how he hadn't found an opal in weeks. Then he asked me if I'd like to have a go. I took the air hammer and started ripping some sandstone off the wall. And then, suddenly, there was a shrill noise, somewhere between a crunch and a squeak. John dropped to his knees and started scrabbling with his hands at the cut I'd opened. Under the movie lights, to my astonishment, there was a brilliant green flash. I'd gone straight into a small seam of opal and fragmented it. He levered out the remains with a small pick, and everyone crowded around admiring the results.

The largest intact bit was about three-quarters of an inch long, a good gemstone (a fossilized and then opalized shell from the Pre-Cambrian period), worth perhaps $1,500 uncut and much more when cleaned up. It was an amazing moment, and I am sure that nobody who sees it on film will believe that it was anything but a set-up. But it wasn't a set-up. In that moment I believe I came to understand something of the lunatic, persistent optimism that keeps these miners going through good times and bad. It was an epiphany.

We also went out into the desert to film some sequences. The desert contains the longest fence ever built, more than twice the length of the Great Wall of China--3,307 miles of wire-and-post fencing, running dead straight to the horizon in both directions. It is known as the Dog Fence because it is meant to keep dingoes inside northern Australia and out of South Australia, so they won't massacre the sheep. If the wind blows your hat over the fence, it's gone forever. The Dog Fence has only one gate every 12 miles.

The big thrill, apart from the Dog Fence, was doing the sunrise over Mount Despair. This is where the desert sequences for The Road Warrior were filmed. Imagine standing in the predawn darkness on the rim of a cliff, 300 ft. above the desert floor. There are purply black mesas before and behind you. Exactly above the center of the largest one, you see Venus, the Morning Star, burning in a deep violet sky. Nothing moves. No wind, no sound, only bitter cold. As the light begins to glow on the eastern horizon, you see an immense desert plain, flat as water--it is, in fact, the bed of an ancient inland sea. And it stretches without interruption, without a building or any other sign of human habitation, 2,000 miles to the northeast until it reaches the Arafura Sea, between Australia and Papua New Guinea.

The silence is absolute. As the light gathers, it is sublime and scary. When the low, fretted bars of cloud on the eastern horizon go from gray to molten gold, seconds before the sun's rim peers over the desert, it's the closest thing I have ever experienced to being in outer space. Then, as the light floods the plain, its birds begin to move: the black crows, the white cockatoos uttering their first tentative dawn screams, the rainbow lorikeets. A hawk sails over, and a mob of kangaroos hop by. A new day, the merest crumb of eternity, has begun. To see this is to love Australia; it is to become more Australian, even in the act of sensing your own insignificance in the vast, indifferent timescale of the desert.