The Strangest Place I Ever Did Visit: Coober Pedy, South Australia by Nick Bryans

Dust roads, dry heat, and wildlife in every direction; these are various things we think of when asked to describe the wilds of the Australian outback. However, things we may not instantly think of are golf courses and sculpture gardens. Well if not, you’ve clearly never been to the jewel of Australia, Coober Pedy.

This was the town Youth Hostel. Welcoming, I think you'll agree.

The South Australian town of Coober Pedy is best known as the ‘opal capital of the world’, due to the vast quantities of Opals mined there. It’s also ‘famous’ for the searing heat in summer (in excess of 50 degrees Celsius) forcing people to live underground, and build fully functional, underground houses (queue the ‘that’s not impressive, hipsters in London have been living underground for years’ jokes). It also has underground churches, shops and even a nightclub. The nightclub was a bit boring, if i’m honest, but I was expecting a sort of med-evil, pagan rave down there. So it was alwasy going to struggle to live up to expectation.

As anyone who has travelled knows, ‘sights’ do not give you a fair reflection of the area. There was the customary Opal mine tour, but we wanted to know what other attractions were here. The two others places of note in Coober Pedy were the golf course, and sculpture park. These we had to see.

The golf course was an outstanding spectacle; a nine-hole course in the middle of the desert, with no grass. You pick up a small piece of turf from the pro shop and simply place it under your ball every time you need to take a shot. Needless to say, preferred lies is a formality. What makes this course unique is not the holes themselves, but a small sign erected in front of the first green stating ‘KEEP OFF THE GRASS’. If you cannot derive humour from a dirt-track golf course, where can you derive it from?

After leaving Australia’s answer to St.Andrews, we embarked on the sculpture park. Now if I say the word sculpture, you probably think of Michelangelo’s ‘Statue of David’ or Rodin’s ‘The Thinker’. What you do not probably think of is several computer keyboards wrapped around an old telephone pylon, or a disused bike-chain with a throng of decapitated baby dolls wired to it. These are the ‘Pièce de résistance’ of the Coober Pedy Sculpture Park. Tracy Emin would have a field day if she found this place.

Other highlights for visitors include a decrepit bed-sit and an array of stolen road-signs. However, who am I to judge? They say the only value of art is intrinsic interpretations, and in fairness, if you placed some of these pieces in a Hampstead studio, claiming it was Damien Hurst’s latest exhibition, it goes without saying that you would have a few people claiming that they love the juxtaposition between old world industrialization and new world consumerism.

We left to watch the sunset 20 kilometres outside the town. Here is the real beauty of the outback.  Gorgeous views in every direction, total silence, changing colours of the rocks as the sun sets; an unparalleled experience. However, this got boring quick, so we found the only bar in town, where the owner told us a horrendously libelous  (if quite beliveable) story about about Mel Gibson.

Coober Pedy represents everything we associate with the outback; quirky towns, searing heat and postcard scenery. Sure, the golf course was a bit ‘sans grass’ for my liking, but you are never going see sunsets like these during a summer’s afternoon on Clapham Common. However, you are probably not going to see a sledgehammer immersed in a broken television as ‘art’ there either, and to be honest, I am unsure which I found more impressive.

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