 Andamooka is a strange and wonderful opal mining town in the desert. Of all the opal mining towns in Australia there can few that are wilder or more disorganized than Andamooka. There it is in the middle of the desert only a few kilometres from Lake Torrens and 30 km along a very ordinary dirt road from Roxby Downs, 113 km from the Stuart Highway, 286 km from Port Augusta and 592 km from Adelaide. Only 76 m above sea level, it is a town driven by one economic imperative - the desire to dig a fortune out of the unforgiving desert soils. Everything else is unimportant. The entrance to Andamooka is hilarious. After battling over 30 km of dirt road the visitor, to their horror, finds that the main street is actually worse than the road they have just travelled along. All around are cones of white soil where miners, like gophers, have been burrowing for gems. At the entrance to the town there is a rather sad little Town Park which has a boundary fence of brightly painted half tyres, a neat little sign and a wasteland where the only vegetation is some rather forlorn acacia bushes and cacti. Given that the annual rainfall is only 203 mm this is hardly surprising. Opals were first found at Andamooka in 1930 and since then there have been periodic great finds including the famous 'Andamooka' opal which was presented to Queen Elizabeth in 1954. Since then mining has continued in a rather chaotic fashion. |
