The Breakaways, Coober Pedy, South Australia - The setting for Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome

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As we drove toward Coober Pedy in South Australia on our recent holiday, the surrounding countryside became flatter and more and more barren. Closer to the town, dozens of large and small 'ant-hills' appeared showing where miners have put down exploratory shafts. A man called Tullie Cornthwaite Wollaston (now there's a name for you) is credited with having found the first Australian opals. At age 25 in 1888, Wollaston and a friend set off from Adelaide on camels and trekked 700 miles before finding the first opals in the south-west of Queensland. A year later he took the opal he'd found to London. Wollaston was also the first to introduce Black Opal to the world. He set up markets for Australian opal throughout the world, making 13 trips to Britain and Europe, 5 to the USA and 1 to Japan and Hong Kong. Wollaston was born in 1863 and died in 1931. Water has always been the greatest obstacle for miners at Coober Pedy as the opal fields are situated in the middle of a very barren and water-starved. There have been various methods employed to try to combat the problem of lack of water. In 1919, two bores were sunk. One was salty the other provided reasonable water. In 1921 a 500,000 gallon concrete tank was built and took 5 years to fill. In years of low rainfall, water still had to be carried in. In 1967, a solar desalination plant was established but dust soon covered the panels and when a willy-willy broke most of the panels, this method was abandoned. In 1971 a reverse osmosis plant was constructed and by 1985, town residents finally had water on tap. A new 2.2 million litre tank and new bore in 1988 was established. As we couldn't take our hire vehicle off sealed roads, we joined a small tour group to visit the 'Breakaways' just east of the town. This region was used during the filming of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and also Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Before man landed on the moon, astronauts were sent to this region to train as it was believed to be most like the terrain to be found on the moon. We saw an area where a lot of silica occurs naturally and Vince took a photo of the sunset through a large piece of silica. We found this area quite fascinating and were shown a petrified tree in the ground.