White Cliffs New South Wales
A town that is built underground.
White Cliffs in New South Wales is a town very different to most. You won’t see many buildings when you arrive. Everything from houses to hotels has been built underground to escape the Outback heat. People have been drawn here since the 1880s in search of opals, and you are able to pick up some of the glittering gems in the many shops and galleries around town.
There are four significant opal mining settlements in Australia. Coober Pedy (popular with backpackers and tourists because of its closeness to the Stuart Highway), Andamooka (still like the Wild West), Lightning Ridge (quite sophisticated and suburban) and White Cliffs, which seems to have just the right balance between wildness and civilisation.
White Cliffs – a certain level of craziness?
Of course to outsiders all opal mining towns, where miners dig endless holes looking for seams of opal-bearing rocks, possess a certain level of craziness. ‘The largest unfenced loony bin in Australia,’ is how one person in Broken Hill described the town.
To the objective observer White Cliffs is really a single purpose town. Miners started coming here (the local Aborigines found it far too hot for permanent settlement and occasionally visited the place as they travelled to and from the Darling River) in the 1880s and, apart from its minor function as a service centre for the surrounding properties, it remains a town driven by opals.
Housing driven by the heat
The summer temperatures, typically over 40°C, forced the miners underground. The 100 million-year-old sandstone conglomerate in which the opal seams were buried carried two advantages. It was remarkably stable (no one has ever died from a mine collapse in White Cliffs) and it was relatively easy to dig. By around 1900 miners were burrowing into the hills in an attempt to find opals and escape from the heat. The real way to see White Cliffs is from the air. It appears like a strange moonscape with an estimated 50,000 disused diggings.
Amazing outback attractions
Surprisingly, the town has many attractions apart from opals and opal mining. There is the fascinating experiment known as the “solar dish concentrator power plant” (a precursor to solar panels); the wonderful Bill O’Reilly Oval with not a blade of grass; the unusual underground accommodation; the amazing night skies sparkling with billions of stars and far removed from any urban pollution; and the various shops where opals are sold by the people who mined them. Beyond that, it is an unruly town with dusty, unsealed roads; houses and dugouts hastily constructed by miners; and a very basic pub and general store.
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White Cliffs NSW, Australia
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