Andamooka

We played Uno in the gentle cool breeze in the Spuds Roadhouse car park last night until after 9pm.  Soon after we came inside, the gentle cool breeze turned into a gale force wind, which howled all night, angrily buffeting our little van.  This morning we had breakfast with jumpers on while the rain fell outside.  Hard to believe after yesterday's 37 degrees!

The rain was short-lived, however, and at 10am we headed to Roxby Downs, about 90 km up the road.  The road was straight and the terrain was flat.

 There's a lot of desert out here!

Roxby Downs is a well equipped mining town, built to service the Olympic Dam mine which contains one of the largest known ore bodies in the world today and is the biggest underground mine in Australia.  It is owned by BHP Billiton and produces mostly copper but also extracts uranium, silver and gold.

Despite being very isolated, the town is quite modern, with a shopping centre, cultural precinct, swimming pool and cinema.  It also has a hospital, which is where we were headed this morning, to have Jack's still very swollen and angry looking finger assessed.

 

We were called in from the waiting room and to my surprise and disdain, the doctor looked just like the totally incompetent bumbling fool of a doctor who tried (unsuccessfully) to treat me for a slashed foot in Humpty Doo (NT).  I thought oh no, here we go again.  Fortunately, he had a reasonable bedside manner and appeared to have half an idea of what he was doing.  So, he laid Jack's finger out on the table and stabbed it straight through the middle of the nail with a two inch needle.  Yeeeeeoooowwww!  Unsurprisingly, Jack yelped out like Tom the Cat after being smashed over the head with a meat cleaver by Jerry.  Luckily, the pain was only temporary and after the initial shock was dealt with Jack could watch intimately as 'Doctor Death' squeezed (or 'expressed' in medical terms) great volumes of blood and puss out through the hole in his nail.  Great fun all round.  Because it had been a few days since Jack had tried to lever the car door open with his finger and a lot of the blood had subsequently congealed under the nail, the doctor had to bore-out the hole with an even bigger needle.  This was a whole lot of fun to watch too but Jack was very brave.  No tears.  Close, but no tears.



 Before.





During.

 

 After.

 

Once we had the medical issue dealt with and the boys enjoyed the lollies given to them by the doctor we hit the road to a little known opal mining town out in the middle of absolutely bloody nowhere called Andamooka.

I had visited Andamooka many years ago for lunch at one of the local pubs with my tank Squadron when I was in the Army.  We, or should I say the Soldiers, were so drunk by the time they left the pub they started brawling in the back of the truck.  I gave them all a stern warning but ten minutes later they started fighting again.  So, I lined them all up on the side of the track (it was an old dusty track through the desert between Woomera and Andamooka in those days) and the Troop Sergeant and I emptied all the cartons of take-away beer from the back of the truck into the desert sand right in front of them.

Soon after we got back to the barracks at Woomera, one of the soldiers came up to me and said, "Sir, short of being at war, that was the bravest thing I have ever seen anyone do.  I respect that."  I hadn't realised at the time how close I had been to being murdered out in the desert by my own troops, but it worked I guess. There was no more fighting.  Thankfully, there were no such dramas today when we visited the town.   

Andamooka is a quirky little shanty town built among a myriad of large spoil piles from thousands of mining shafts.  The houses are literally built on and around these piles of dirt to the extent that a lot of the houses are almost completely hidden on all sides except for an entrance/exit  track.  

 See what I mean?

 

Most of the houses are in significant disrepair which gives the town a very much abandoned feel somewhat like Chernobyl but without the contamination, presumably.  One could argue that a  rather large bomb had gone off with more than credible justification.   Curiously, Andamooka is not all that far from Maralinga.......I wonder if they are not telling us something?

 

 

The place is littered everywhere with junk and rusted out mining equipment. 

This is their Holden Dealership.

 We checked out the living standards of the locals.
This hut was one of the original miner's huts from 1930.

 



Fletcher had to go, so when in Andamooka...

 

 The town appears to have had a significant drinking problem

 but they knew what to do with an empty King Brown!



 Even gate posts were made from beer bottles. Impressive.

 

 

From what we understand, the town has made and continues to make good money out of mining opals.  But little of this money has gone back into the town which in a way is sad because it belies the treasure that this place is, pardon the pun.   The locals love it though.  We loved it too.  A great town to see as there are not many like it anywhere!

 

  We stopped in one of the local shops,

 

And look who we ran into!

 

We checked out the opals on offer and the boys were completely mesmerised.  Some of the opals were absolutely beautiful to look at and with so many colours to choose from!  Jack picked a favourite that he was keen to buy until he saw the $500 price tag.  Then, once the penny dropped, all he wanted to do was fossick for opals (called noodling in the opal trade).  Better to sell them than buy them!  So we did.



 



There is an area where the public can 'noodle' to find bits of opals and we got quite a selection of rocks that have traces of opal in them.  Getting the opal out and polishing them will be the second trick. Getting them home without the caravan axles breaking under the weight will be the first.

We trundled back down the desert highway through Roxby Downs and Woomera to our home between two trees in Pimba for a well earned rest and a few drinks.  The boys finished off a good day with a movie and then it was time to hit the sack.  Hopefully we wont be blown away by the gale force winds tonight!