Just before the broadcast ended, the member for Jagga Jagga squeezed in a proposal for 1988 to be proclaimed the first ever Earth Repair Year. It was extraordinary timing. For we were now approaching Coober Pedy – Australia’s ‘Opal Wonderland’ – whose earth was quite beyond repair, not to be healed or mended in 1988 or any other year. The spectacle of Coober Pedy at sunset could not be compared with anything either of us had ever seen before. It was like entering a war zone. The red desert sand, the pyramids of dirt, the dugouts, the telegraph poles everywhere, the corrugated water tanks, the tin sheds, the drills, the vacuum blowers, the thin, temporary-looking strip of bitumen that was the main street, the red rubble on either side, the whole tumult of shanty-town impermanence, as if everything that wasn’t merely earth could be lifted up and transported somewhere else in an afternoon – all contributed to an atmosphere of almost unimaginable ferment. We couldn’t believe our eyes. We drove round and round, astonished by the dust and the hectic pace of the trucks – many of them marked EXPLOSIVES – loving the rudimentary functionalism of it all; the mining town and the minefields indivisible, not just production evident everywhere we looked but also dealing, chalkboard signs hanging outside the hotels announcing the presence of opal buyers, experts from Hong Kong and Singapore who sat in illuminated windows with their scales beside them, waiting for business like the girls in Kalgoorlie. Then we drove out again while there was still light so that we could repeat the drama of our entry.

We took up residence in a caravan park in the very centre of Coober Pedy, a swirling dustbowl at the foot of a mine belonging to Elias Christianos. The mine was a vast sandcastle, pitted with corrugated-iron water tanks, sheds, shacks, broken-down utilities, and round tin barrels of the kind used for mixing up raffle tickets. Chimneys and air vents and coolers protruded at queer angles like the eyes of periscopes. Part of the hill was buttressed with a stone wall, presumably to stop the whole pile sliding into the caravan park, so that it looked like a ruined Aztec fortress or the remains of a Babylonian temple. An enormous windlass stood to the right of Christianos’s mine, with a little battered bucket hanging from it, 120 feet in the air. Next to that was a rodeo-style sign which said COOBER PEDY VIDEO and was visible all over town. And next to that the Australian flag fluttered, a dusty red all over. Above the opposite wall of the caravan park it was just possible to see the lights of the Italo/Australian Miners Club on Garibaldi Street.