‘Noodling,’ not to be confused with canoodling, is a must on a visit to Coober Pedy. It involves fossicking on the mullock heaps for opal the original miners missed. Mind you, canoodling under those vast Outback desert night skies has its appeal too – but I had no taker!
We’d done all the other tourist activities – visited underground houses and underground churches, toured old and working mines,checked out museums and travelled out to the Moon Plains and the Breakaways. But it was our last day and we still hadn’t noodled. That we had left it so late was as a result, once again, of companion reluctance.
Our last day was the hottest of our stay – 37 degrees Celsius in the shade – and it was very windy. So I had to work very hard but finally got agreement to proceed. ‘Houston, we are good to go.’
We’d been advised to go to the safety of the public noodling areas where there were no abandoned mine shafts to snare unwary tourists. I was very happy with this advice. We’d already been on a tour of the active opal fields with its treacherous ‘over one million mine shafts and test holes up to 30 metres deep.’ I’d stayed in the safety of the bus for that tour – and had scrutinized my fellow passengers very carefully – as I’d once had an unhappy client who had threatened to ‘do me in’ when I least expected it and dump my body in a Coober Pedy mine where nobody would ever find it. It pays not to tempt fate, don’t you agree?
But what do you noodle with? One local told us that all you needed was a stick and that you could use your hands to sieve the rock and sand. Good luck finding a stick, or even a blade of grass, in Coober Pedy. (Can you believe it, locals have to take a square of artificial turf with them to tee off on at the golf course?) Sieving by hand didn’t really hold any appeal either. Surely in this day and age there’d be noodle kits you could hire?
So I googled ‘Coober Pedy noodle kits.’ The top result gave me the details for the local Opal City Chinese restaurant! The other results yielded only the information (but it was useful) that what you needed was a short-handled shovel, a sieve and, ideally, a black (ultraviolet to show up the opal) torch.
There was no hardware store in Coober Pedy but there was a very large multipurpose IGA– and we weren’t going to be defeated.What we came out with was a large wooden spoon, a plastic kitchen colander and a small bucket of Cadbury’s Easter eggs. The bucket was to be for our finds. I mean, no harm in being aspirational is there? A local had told us ‘a bloke from Sydney found $5,000 worth of opal there just last month. So go for it, look for rainbows.’
We went kitted out with hats, COVID masks (great for the bloody flies) and having slathered insect repellent on our arms and legs. We stuck it out for about an hour. It was hot. The wind blew the sand from our sieving into our faces and onto our bodies coating our bare arms and legs. But it was fun, even though we found not even a flake of opal.
We ended the day with a beer and a meal at the local Chinese restaurant – sweet and sour pork, not noodles!
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