Coober Pedy: The Australian town underground

"Have we landed on the moon?" Sarah Orloff asked her husband of just five days. Chris had accepted a job as the only dentist in a remote outback town, 520 miles north-west of Adelaide, and the couple had left a comfortable terraced house in Reading for a new life in one of the world's most inhospitable places.

Coober Pedy is a barren, heat-scorched, opal-mining town in the middle of the Australian desert, so remote that to Sarah it looked and felt like another planet. Even more alien was the couple's first marital home: an underground dwelling that had been dug by hand out of the parched red earth.

It was little more than a cave, with rock walls, stone floors and an almost total lack of natural light. "That first night we slept for hours and hours, well into the next day, because it was pitch-black and so silent. It was a very strange feeling," recalls Sarah.

Life beneath the earth's surface is the norm for about two-thirds of Coober Pedy's 4,000-strong population. Their dug-out homes range from ramshackle bunkers with few basic amenities to lavish caverns complete with four-poster beds, a swimming pool and even a miniature garden.

They live underground to shelter from temperatures that can soar to almost 50°C in summer and plummet below freezing on winter nights, and from the infernal dust storms that rage for several months of the year. The natural insulation of the earth ensures that the temperature inside the underground homes remains at a tolerable 19-24°C all year round.

Most people work underground, too—the men in the opal mines, in search of the precious stone that they hope will make them rich, and the women in the town's numerous underground shops, hotels, restaurants and cafés. On Sundays, many Coober Pedy residents worship in the sandstone vaults of one of the four underground churches.

The town resembles a vast building site, with scrap metal, machinery and the detritus of mining scattered over the arid landscape. The main street is dotted with a few dust-caked shops and offices, but most activity seems to be centred on the local pub. Among the regulars are Coober Pedy's most notorious characters, with nicknames such as The Russian Spy and Crocodile Harry. Its car park is filled with trucks emblazoned with the word "EXPLOSIVES".

From the outside, the underground houses match the rough-and-ready image of this outback town, their entrances nestling in mounds of red dirt, overhung with weather-beaten canopies of corrugated iron. Inside the dugouts, a different picture of Coober Pedy emerges.

"People have got the wrong idea about this place. They think it's the Wild West out here," says Val Clee, who moved from Adelaide a few years ago. In her neat dress and bright red lipstick, Val hardly looks like a cave-dweller, nor is her house a typical cave. The kitchen is gleaming with cheerful red worktops, fitted pine units and every possible electrical appliance. In the bathroom is a large spa-bath and outside the front door a patch of lawn, hardly bigger than a tablecloth.

In Coober Pedy, where water is scarce and even the hardiest plants shrivel and die, this garden is almost holy ground, nurtured by a complicated recycling of bath and washing-machine water. "We have to pay about five times more than Adelaide householders for our water, so we are very careful", says Val's husband Deane, the town's only chartered accountant.

Val and Deane buried their house in the side of one of the tallest hills in the area and, although the only natural light comes from the windows at the front, Val says she never feels claustrophobic. "If I feel hemmed in, all I have to do is go outside, and the view of the horizon is uninterrupted for 360°". And as she says, "It's easy to be house-proud living underground, and life is much simpler."

Coober Pedy was never intended to be a place where the nest-building instinct would take root. Since opal was discovered there at the beginning of the 20th century, speculators from all over the world have flocked to make their fortunes, calling the area after the Aboriginal words kupa piti, meaning "white man's hole in the ground".

For decades it was little more than a desolate frontier post, with no electricity or water. It was a harsh life, but many wanted it to stay that way. The miners feared that the arrival of settlers would bring rules, regulations and interference from tax officials. But Coober Pedy grew into a modern town, where the local store sells not only beer and explosives but also perfumed soap and copies of Australian Women's Weekly.

According to long-time resident Jenny Gough, a cheerful woman in her early fifties who works as a nurse at the local hospital, it's the women who have been the driving force behind the town's development. Once they realised their miner husbands would never leave, because the mining had got into their blood, "they gritted their teeth and tried to make it a better place to live in".

In the early 1960s, Jenny and her husband Ron were one of the first couples to raise a family in Coober Pedy. "Even the simplest domestic chores took a huge amount of labour", she recalls. "The dust was never-ending, and water was rationed, so keeping nappies and baby clothes clean was hard work. Because of the red earth, the water turned all the washing bright pink, so it was lucky both my children were girls!"

Jenny and Ron had the ultimate stroke of good luck. "After the children were born, we needed another room. So, we used explosives to blow through the wall—and discovered an abandoned mine containing opal." Today the walls of Jenny's now sumptuous home still bear pockmarks made by the excavations, but she doesn't care. She believes it is the possibility of being poor one day and rich the next that makes life in Coober Pedy so addictive.

Fifteen months after they arrived in Coober Pedy, Chris and Sarah Orloff bought their own dugout in the centre of town, which they are now renovating. "We paid £14,000 for it, which sounds a lot for a hole in the ground, but they're in great demand," explains Sarah.

"We had to rip everything out. Electric wires were hanging down over the walls, there was water dripping from the ceiling, and huge cockroaches kept crawling out from underneath the lavatory," Sarah says with a shudder. When they investigated the cockroach problem, they discovered an 80-foot-deep shaft which the previous occupants had simply boarded over. Sarah is undaunted. "I know it will be a wonderful place eventually."

In addition to finding relief from the heat, Sarah and Chris relish the privacy and peace of living underground. "There are hardly any disturbances because the walls are soundproof, and you can play music as loud as you want. It also feels very safe." Although they originally intended to live in Coober Pedy for only two years, they now want to extend their stay. "Reading seems so dull in comparison," says Sarah.

Jenny Gough's daughter Robyn once tried to leave Coober Pedy, only to find she couldn't stay away. "I lived in the city for five years and then came back and married a miner," she says. "I missed living in a dugout. Houses above ground creak and groan in the night, and they are always either too hot or too cold. It just didn't feel like home."