Twenty-six Feet Under

Carl’s dying wish was that the whole town had a drink on him. He took out a last minute loan and shouted everybody beer at his funeral. Apparently the priest actually poured beer from this keg for all the guests.
 

People who live in Coober Pedy make city kids look like pampered assholes. Life in the outback is often harsher than a straight-up hash pipe, and death is something that you tend to become pretty familiar with—especially when you throw in an occupation like mining where your iBook is traded for a set of explosives and a sledgehammer.

There’s a dangerous course of obstacles you need to navigate if you’re going to survive alive in CP and the first is in your way before you are even born. There’s one chronically understaffed hospital in the town and it has no midwives, which means that you had better pray you make it to a hospital in Adelaide in time to be delivered. If you’re skeptical then the multiple graves of one-day-old babies in the local CP cemetery should be enough to convince you.

Once you are old enough to walk though, don’t even think about venturing out to explore your new and fascinating landscape because in the ground, within a 30km radius around you are 1.5 million holes, each about 30 metres deep. The holes are usually fairly small at the top and nearly impossible to see, and it’s estimated that in the last 30 years at least 50 people have become casualties of the OH&S nightmare that are the mining fields.

An ex-miner, and now opal store owner we met, Andy Shiels, has worked for the Mine Rescue Squad for 30 years and has seen some pretty gruesome shit in his time. He told us that “If you do fall down a mine shaft, you are pretty much gone. Most locals and miners know to hold out their arms (wings) to slow themselves down, but the average person will just crumple in on themselves when they hit the bottom.” According to Andy, on a scale of one to ten mining is a definite ten out of ten in terms of dangerous professions. When we asked him whether people lose fingers from the explosives, he kind of laughed and said that was nothing. Beyond the basics, he told us the other ‘highlights’ of his job include: frequent cave-in rescues, flood rescue, missing aircraft searches and road accident rescue. Essentially, what Andy sees on a daily basis is like the harshest thing you’ll ever experience put under a giant microscope.

Once you throw into this mix the booze, a dangerous dust particle known as silica that gives you lung cancer, and the fact that CP has at least seven of the world’s ten most dangerous snakes blending in with its dirt, it’s kind of surprising there’s any kind of population left to fill in a Census form.

VICE STAFF

Mining shafts like this are normally obscured by a mountain of dirt.



This is the local dentist’s surgery which opens once a month.