Coober Pedy, Sydney, The Blue Mountains and Nimbin

Somewhere over the rainbow... The mythical Land of Oz.

“I’ve been everywhere, man / I’ve been everywhere.” So sings Johnny Cash in his 1960s hit single I’ve Been Everywhere, before going on to give a list of place names that have, erm, nothing to do with the theme of this article.

But you get the general idea: since my last post, I’ve been all over the proverbial shop in the mythical land of Oz. Here’s a little summary of some of the places I’ve been and the lessons I’ve learned:

Coober Pedy

Coober Pedy is a small, dry town in the middle of the South Australian desert. Summer temperatures reach 50 degrees C, water has to be shipped in from down-state, and the dusty, fly-blown soil supports neither life nor tent pegs (as we found to our cost). In fact, about the only thing Coober Pedy has going for it is the abundance of opal deposits in its rocky earth.

Since these deposits were discovered in the early 20^th Century, the town and its environs have been fairly extensively mined, first with the shovel and the pick, then later with dynamite. Driving into town, we crossed the opal fields; a barren, lunar landscape, pockmarked with triangular molehills of dirt, marking the spots where present-day prospectors are working their claims. Notices warned against wandering around in the opal fields, as there are some very deep shafts waiting to swallow the unwary tourist.

In Coober Pedy itself, much of the population lives underground, in a trend which was started by soldiers returning from World War One. We took a tour at the Umoona Opal Mine and Museum and saw some of these underground dwellings. They’re built far enough down in the rock to maintain almost a constant cool temperature throughout the year which, with the extremes of the desert climate, is a definite plus point. Most of the houses are, in fact, abandoned, ‘worked-out’ mine shafts. This didn’t always stop their inhabitants doing a bit of dynamite-assisted D.I.Y. though. Our guide, an ex-miner, told us how it used to be a fairly regular occurrence for neighbours to blow holes in each others’ living room walls while doing a little home-mining, until a city council ordinance imposed massive fines to put a stop to such ‘accidents’.

The next day, we visited an underground Catholic Church, which I described in the visitors’ book as ‘a little ripper’. I hope that God has a sense of humour…

On the way south to Adelaide – almost 1000 kilometres from CP – it rained relentlessly, something that doesn’t happen very often around these parts. We picked up a local station on the car radio and listened to a phone-in discussion about – what else? – the rain. “Now over to Jeff in Mount Gambier,” the presenter would say. “Jeff, have you had any rain there?”. “Naw mate, not a drop.” And so on.

Holy Mackeral Batman - it's smalltown Australia!

Sydney

We arrived in Sydney just in time for ANZAC Day (25^th April), when Australians honour the sacrifices of their war dead by getting blind drunk and throwing up in an alleyway. To be fair, the ANZAC Day church services do start very early in the day – in many places there’s one at dawn – and the heavy drinking comes later. Also, many of the people we saw staggering about the streets of Sydney at 9pm were military personnel, for whom this must have been a rare day off.

Many of the things that Sydney has to offer the visitor – an Opera House tour, a Harbour Bridge climb, a trip to Taronga Zoo – were beyond our means, so instead we spent time wandering around on foot which, it has to be said, is probably the best way of seeing the city. Sydney’s suburbs follow the twists and turns of her harbour, with coastal tracks and ferry services often connecting them far more directly than roads do.

We spent a windy afternoon walking from Bondi Beach to Coogee Beach, and the next day headed to Manly where yet more white sand and tanned flesh awaited our pale Pommy eyes. Manly was named by Arthur Phillip, Captain of the British First Fleet, who is said to have been impressed by the natives’ ‘manly’ physiques. Other places named by Phillip include Phwoar! Bay and Hello Sailor, How’s Your Father Cove. Or maybe I just made that last bit up – I’ll let you decide.

We walked over the Harbour Bridge of course, and also a few times around the Opera House, which international backpackers in our hostel were in the amusing habit of calling ‘the Oprah House’. (If that’s not an example of American cultural imperialism, I’m not sure what is.) Like a movie star, the Opera House is smaller in real life but otherwise exactly as you’d imagine it, with improbable, graceful curves that just cry out to be photographed.

The Blue Mountains

We moved on to the Blue Mountains, a couple of hours’ drive inland from Sydney. Australian place names – at least those that don’t come from Aboriginal words – have a habit of being obviously, even brutally descriptive. See a big hill somewhere, and the chances are that it’ll be called ‘Big Hill’.

The Blue Mountains are no exception to this rule: they are indeed very blue. Their blueness comes from the way that the light hits the mist which rises from the eucalyptus trees which cover almost every inch of them. We did a few walks in the mountains, including one around the ridge of part of the range. Along with spectacular views out over the basin, we saw laughing kookaburras, parrots and colourful songbirds, but sadly none of the speckled drongos that I’d been reading up on in Sydney.

At night, it gets cold in the Blue Mountains, and I mean properly cold – European cold! On our first night, even fleeces and woolly hats weren’t enough to keep out the chill and we were forced to repair to the local tavern to keep from freezing in our campervan. Four pints of Guinness later, I was well-insulated for the night ahead, but still left facing the problem of how exactly I’d be getting to the campsite toilet block at 3 AM without developing frostbite.

The aptly-named Big Prawn in Ballina, New South Wales.

Nimbin

Nimbin is both a quiet town of 500 souls in the gentle, rolling countryside of the New South Wales dairy belt and, to quote Mark from TV’s Peep Show, ‘a hippie free-for-all’. Its fortunes as a farming town had faded, and many of its buildings had fallen into disrepair when, in 1973, a whole heap of hippies showed up for the Age of Aquarius Festival.

Many of them liked Nimbin so much that they decided to stay and establish a progressive, alternative community that would explore new and better ways of living. Oh, and smoke dope of course. Mustn’t forget about the dope.

We arrived a few days after the town’s annual Mardi Grass cannabis festival had ended, but the party still seemed to be in full-swing. One of the first sights to greet us was that of a bare-chested, dreadlocked fellow sitting by a stream and playing his flute to… no-one in particular. In a town park, a Japanese drummer beat out a crazy rhythm on his bongos while his friends danced nearby, while across the street a man in a tie-dye shirt seemed to have lost his dog Hash (at least that’s what he kept calling out).

You get the sense that it’s always a bit like this in Nimbin. Someone later told us that, ironically, the police were actually a bit stricter than usual at Mardi Grass this year, and that consequently there was a real shortage of the old wacky-baccy at the festival. Try telling that to the guy with the flute.

If you are ever in Nimbin, I can recommend the museum there which is called, conveniently, the Nimbin Museum. The museum is as eccentric as the town itself, featuring a seemingly random collection of objects assembled in a style reminiscent of a well-appointed junkyard. The decorated shells of VW Combi vans sit side-by-side with archive newspaper reports about Aboriginal land rights and video footage of the museum being raided by police in a drugs bust. No real narrative is given; instead you’re just left to work things out for yourself which, in Nimbin, seems to be the way things are done.