Tasting Australia Airlines touches down in Coober Pedy with a plane full of foodies eager to lap up a bucket list culinary collaboration between two of the country’s top chefs: Attica’s Ben Shewry and Africola’s Duncan Welgemoed. Fifteen years after my first visit to the historic opal mining town, the endless expanse of red earth that morphs into a moonscape of white mounds still fills me with wonder. It’s a striking motif for over a century of prospectors mining for precious opal.
“It was almost called Emerald City,” local Anangu guide Tanya van Horen later says of the official naming of the town in 1920. But the Progress Committee settled on the Aboriginal term ‘kupa piti’, she adds, which means ‘white man in the hole’.
Along the main street, the main business is naturally opals. Shopfronts with faded retro signs like ‘Star Opal and ‘Opal Cave’ appear unchanged since the opal rush that attracted immigrants from around the world several with Sandra Bullock. I’d go, but Ben and Duncan are cooking.
