Mad Max and Me

I couldn’t understand why the booking clerk was laughing.
“No, I want to stay for 2 or 3 nights.” I told him, “So I can take a look around.”
“Trust me,” he replied, handing me my bus ticket. “One night will be plenty long enough for Cooper Pedy.”

I wasn’t totally convinced but admittedly, I didn’t know too much about the place. I knew it had opal mines, and that Mel Gibson had pranced around the area as Mad Max in “Beyond the Thunderdome” , and that the locals lived underground to escape the scorching heat. But other than that, I wasn’t too sure what to expect.

And stumbling off the bus, tired and creaky after the overnight run from Adelaide, I have to say I wasn’t overly impressed. As was usually the way, the touts were there to meet us, in the hopes that we would agree to stay at their particular hostel. However, these ones were uncharacteristically pushy and aggressive, which didn’t give a great first impression of the place. The second impression wasn’t much better. And as for the third…

But I’m getting ahead of myself. There were only 4 of us disembarking - Barbara (a German), Jenny (a Swede) and Dee (a Brit), so following the least obnoxious of the touts, we booked ourselves in to one of Cooper Pedy’s more upscale boarding houses. In keeping with the underground tradition, it was basically just a long corridor dug out of the hillside, with 8’x4’ “rooms” at intervals along each side. A curtain served duty as a door and a narrow cast iron bed completed the furnishings.

I felt a lot better after a short nap and 3 hours later, set out on an explore. The girls had signed up for a ½ day tour of the opal mines, but I was going freelance. The Stuart Highway, which runs from Adelaide on the south coast, to Darwin on the north, had only been paved some 4 years before my visit and people tell me that Cooper Pedy had gone up in the world during that time. I can only imagine how desperate it must have been prior to that because it appeared to be little more than a wasteland as far as the eye can see.

Which admittedly, wasn’t very far, being as we were, in the throes of a dust storm, filling the air, as well as my eyes, nose and throat with gritty sand. Time to follow the locals, I think, and head underground. First port of call was a mine, right off the main street and outfitted with a hard hat, I was soon following a line of middle-aged folk into the bowels of the earth. The hard hat proved to be my best friend because I couldn’t take more than a few steps without smacking my head on the roof. The whole thing was interesting enough, but didn’t take too long, so after a quick hike up one of the few hills to check out what passes for a view, I headed to one of the show homes.

Three ladies dug this one by hand, over the course of 5 years, taking the time to smooth the walls to a marble like finish. They were still working on it but the place already had 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms and all modern conveniences including that essential of Aussie suburban life, a swimming pool. It didn’t have any windows, but it had a swimming pool.

By the time I made it back above ground, the dust storm had abated so I took a quick hike up another hill to check out the town’s only visible attraction, “The Big Winch”. The what? Well, it’s a big bucket, the type of which is used in mining. And it’s perched on top of a hill. And uh, you walk up the hill and look at the bucket.

So that was pretty much it; I’d done the place. Interesting enough, such as it was but I could certainly see why the guy who sold me my bus ticket laughed when I said I wanted to spend a few days here. But, as I was here until the next morning I decided to pass the rest of the time sitting in the shade by the hostel, drinking beer and chatting to the girls, now home from their tour. I would have been quite happy spending the rest of my time doing just that, Barbara was fun and Jenny was nice to look at but no, Dee wanted to go to the bar.

I use the term ‘bar’ loosely because it was basically just a big barn that happened to sell beer. Cooper Pedy’s tourist industry was still in its infancy back then and the overwhelming majority of the residents were miners. Men for whom life held little pleasure other than drinking and fighting and uh…that’s about it. They certainly enjoyed little contact with the female of the species so when I walked in with three of them, every nut-job in the place (and there were a lot of nut-jobs in the place) looked me over, decided I was no competition, and set about trying to take them off me.

If I’ve learned nothing else during my time on this planet, it’s that there is no more dangerous situation for a young man to find himself than in a bar with three good looking females. OK, Dee was nothing to write home about but Barbara was kinda cute and Jenny was drop-dead gorgeous. There wasn’t a guy in there who wasn’t filled with thoughts of romance and if taking me out back and snapping me like a twig would smooth the path of true love, well then I didn’t think any of them would be overly concerned.

The thing is, by cracking jokes, buying an occasional round and keeping my back to the wall, I was managing to do a passable job of keeping things on the level. Nobody was swinging punches and if I could hold it together for another ½ hour or so, we could leave with honor intact and nobody (OK, me) would get hurt. But then one guy got a bit overly familiar with Dee and she decided that the best way to handle that was to scream abuse at the lot of them. And they screamed back. Not at her of course, but at me. Oh, the things they were going to do; it would make your hair curl.

But, I declined their kind offers to see how far a pool cue would fit up my arse and decided an early night was in order. Hustling my harem out the door with my bowels dissolving I almost dragged the three of them down the street as the natives bombarded us with beer cans while serenading us with oaths and epithets.

6am the next morning found us standing bleary eyed and shivering on Main Street as we waited for the bus to rescue us, and for once, I was happy to be up that early. I haven’t been back to Cooper Pedy, and I’m OK with that. I haven’t been back to Adelaide either, but if I ever get there, I hope I meet that booking clerk again so I can shake him by the hand.

If it weren’t for him, I’d have been stuck there for two more bloody days.