While noodling I felt the pull

It's hard to identify the physical location in my body, harder yet to pin down the sensation itself. But there it was driving me to chip away at the building-sized pile of rubble with a broken prospector's adze.

Karen must have felt it too. She's hunched over a gravel outcropping, green hat pulled down against the white-hot mid-day sun, batting away the hundreds of bottle flies swarming around and digging away with a hand-sized stone.

Coober Pedy does this to you.

It's about the most God-forsaken wasteland imaginable. A treeless town of 3000, the largest in central Australia between the coast 500 km south and Alice Springs 1200 km north. Built with bare hands out of rubble and without a water well on the driest, rockiest plain in the Outback. Hundreds of thousands of piles of mine tailings encircle the town and the subsurface is a Swiss cheese of shafts and tunnels where every year they lose the odd tourist or late-night drunk.

The town site is filled with abandoned cars and apocalyptic film props and the people here are all a bit nuts. Mind you, except for a few hundred Aborigines, nobody seems actually to be from Coober Pedy. Half the population lives underground in houses and mines and we even pitched our tent in an underground campsite. Few would want to visit, let alone live here but everyone is digging

I look down through the chalky dust blowing in my face, my hands are caked with moisture sucking grime and then I see it. A little spit and I see a multi-coloured glint in the sunlight. I dig around and come up with two bits of a fossilized seashell the opal veneer visible where the adze cracked it. I can feel the pull now.

I hear a shout from Karen that she has found some opal chips. Sure it's all worthless 'potch' as the locals call it, not the rare 6% of opal that is precious. Still I see her go back to the digging in a swarm of flies and can see that she's got the opal fever too.