Fella Down a Hole

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In the old days all the tunnels and shafts had to be dug with pick, shovel and explosives--backbreaking work. Now there are circular drills mounted on caterpillar treads, which lurch forward chewing at the soft rock, making a hellish racket that changes to a shrill glass-crunching scream when the teeth hit a pocket of "potch" (the gray waste near opal that runs in veins through the matrix). These drills are 4 ft. in diameter, and they create vaults in the tunnel roofs--beautiful, arched Romanesque spaces cut in the creamy pink-veined stone. It is troglodyte architecture: dense, theatrical and intensely moving, infinitely better than anything built above ground. It has the same kind of weird beauty as the basement of Antoni Gaudi's Palau Guell. Here and there the lights pick up sparkles of quartz and waste opal crumbs embedded in the stone. You could imagine it as a set for a Wagner opera; you half expect to see Alberich and his dwarfs.

So after we shot some walk-and-talk through the tunnels, during which I was interviewing John about luck and hardship and the resemblance between opal mining and professional gambling (which is very strong), the director Chris Spencer asked John to go at a face with the air hammer. He obligingly did, talking meanwhile about how he hadn't found an opal in weeks. Then he asked me if I'd like to have a go. I took the air hammer and started ripping some sandstone off the wall. And then, suddenly, there was a shrill noise, somewhere between a crunch and a squeak. John dropped to his knees and started scrabbling with his hands at the cut I'd opened. Under the movie lights, to my astonishment, there was a brilliant green flash. I'd gone straight into a small seam of opal and fragmented it. He levered out the remains with a small pick, and everyone crowded around admiring the results.

The largest intact bit was about three-quarters of an inch long, a good gemstone (a fossilized and then opalized shell from the Pre-Cambrian period), worth perhaps $1,500 uncut and much more when cleaned up. It was an amazing moment, and I am sure that nobody who sees it on film will believe that it was anything but a set-up. But it wasn't a set-up. In that moment I believe I came to understand something of the lunatic, persistent optimism that keeps these miners going through good times and bad. It was an epiphany.

We also went out into the desert to film some sequences. The desert contains the longest fence ever built, more than twice the length of the Great Wall of China--3,307 miles of wire-and-post fencing, running dead straight to the horizon in both directions. It is known as the Dog Fence because it is meant to keep dingoes inside northern Australia and out of South Australia, so they won't massacre the sheep. If the wind blows your hat over the fence, it's gone forever. The Dog Fence has only one gate every 12 miles.

The big thrill, apart from the Dog Fence, was doing the sunrise over Mount Despair. This is where the desert sequences for The Road Warrior were filmed. Imagine standing in the predawn darkness on the rim of a cliff, 300 ft. above the desert floor. There are purply black mesas before and behind you. Exactly above the center of the largest one, you see Venus, the Morning Star, burning in a deep violet sky. Nothing moves. No wind, no sound, only bitter cold. As the light begins to glow on the eastern horizon, you see an immense desert plain, flat as water--it is, in fact, the bed of an ancient inland sea. And it stretches without interruption, without a building or any other sign of human habitation, 2,000 miles to the northeast until it reaches the Arafura Sea, between Australia and Papua New Guinea.

The silence is absolute. As the light gathers, it is sublime and scary. When the low, fretted bars of cloud on the eastern horizon go from gray to molten gold, seconds before the sun's rim peers over the desert, it's the closest thing I have ever experienced to being in outer space. Then, as the light floods the plain, its birds begin to move: the black crows, the white cockatoos uttering their first tentative dawn screams, the rainbow lorikeets. A hawk sails over, and a mob of kangaroos hop by. A new day, the merest crumb of eternity, has begun. To see this is to love Australia; it is to become more Australian, even in the act of sensing your own insignificance in the vast, indifferent timescale of the desert.