82 Australian Geographic
It turns out to be one of the few buildings out here that is
built above the ground.
“Almost everyone lives in dugouts where it’s a constant
temperature of about 22 degrees – it’s much easier than having
to run an air conditioner in each room all day,” Rob says.
A highlight of Rob’s show-and-tell is a snoop around
the cavernous White House, a luxurious underground rabbit
warren that would make Kevin McCloud, presenter of Grand
Designs, a television architectural design program, salivate.
Think New York apartment chic mixed with all the quirk of
Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art...and all in an aban-
doned opal mine. Amazing.
Just down the hill, and past a few hundred abandoned mine
shafts (there are more than 50,000) that, from the air, give the
town a lunar landscape appearance, is a much more modest
dwelling, home to 71-year-old Dick Wagner and Southern
Cross Opals.
Dick is a bit of a legend in these parts, and for good reason.
“Within an hour of buying a lease from another miner in 2000,
Dick struck it rich, finding a seam of opal.
“It ran and it ran,” says Dick with a smile, professing he
dug up “buckets full of opal”. So how did the previous miner
owner react? “The first day I showed him he was happy for
me, the second day he was still happy, but after the third day
he wouldn’t talk to me,” says Dick, laughing. “He knew he
had gotten so close.”
But, like most of this outback outpost’s underground in-
habitants, Dick’s luck soon turned, and since his opportunistic
find he’s dug up next to nothing. Or, at least that’s what he’s
telling everyone.
While Dick loves to romanticise about the days “when min-
ers walked in from Wilcannia with a wheelbarrow, pick and
shovel and a bit of tucker on board”, he admits that although
it’s off the beaten track, White Cliffs isn’t quite the frontier
country it once was.
“When the 75km road out from Wilcannia [Opal Miners
Way] was unsealed, it was shocking – mile after mile of cor-
rugations and bulldust,” Dick recalls. “But since it was sealed
in 2009, visitors have started to increase.”
Another White Cliffs’ landmark to benefit from the sealed
road is the town’s purpose-built Underground Motel where
you can bunk down in your very own dugout for the night.
“Just be careful if you hear digging in the middle of the
night,” Rob deadpans, referring to one miner’s failed attempts
to make his lounge room bigger.
“He accidentally miscalculated his boundary and ended up,
with pick in hand, in his neighbour’s bedroom.”
Apparently it is true.To escape the heat, most residents of White Cliffs,
including Dick Wagner, opal miner come jewellery
peddler, live in underground houses called dugouts,
where the temperature is a constant 22oC.
Outback pilot Randall Crozier and three motorcycle
musterers, Joe Baty, James Hatch and Jack McGrath,
take a break from rounding up goats between Wilcannia
and White Cliffs.
Now accessible via a sealed road from
Broken Hill, White Cliffs is experiencing a
surge in travellers enjoying a voyeuristic
peek at the quirky town.