Living in Coober Pedy: The Australian Town That Lives Underground

There are more mine shafts under this Australian town than there are people living above it, by more than a hundred to one. Coober Pedy is famous as the place where half the population lives underground to survive the heat. What almost no one talks about is what nearly got buried in the desert around it, and why the government called that land empty when it wasn't. This is the real story of Coober Pedy: a hundred years of unmapped tunnels, a mining law that lets ordinary people strike it rich and disappear into secrecy, a native title fight that took sixteen years to win, and a nuclear waste dump that a group of Aboriginal grandmothers stopped cold after the same land had already been poisoned once by British atomic tests. No official records fully account for how many shafts are actually down there. No one has ever mapped them all. In this episode: 0:00 - The Hole They Called Empty 0:19 - A Town Built to Disappear 1:17 - Why Coober Pedy Went Underground 2:52 - The Claim System and the Danger Below 4:28 - The Land Nobody Asked About 6:04 - The Black Mist and the Second Empty Land 7:59 - Irati Wanti, the Poison, Leave It 9:15 - What Empty Actually Means Sources referenced in this documentary: District Council of Coober Pedy · Encyclopaedia Britannica · SafeWork SA · National Native Title Tribunal · South Australian Opal Mining Act 1995 · McClelland Royal Commission into British Nuclear Tests · Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta campaign archives Unseen Earth goes where the map runs out, to the places called empty, remote, or forbidden, and finds out who decided that, and why. New episodes every Tuesday and Friday. #CooberPedy #UnseenEarth #ForbiddenHistory #Australia #OpalMining #HiddenHistory