Alien. Apocalyptic. Lunar. Barren.

Coober Pedy (Umoona) has long sent its visitors scrambling for adjectives to describe its unique, sun-scorched vistas, mullock (excavated dirt and gravel) heaps and subterranean accommodations. The ‘breakaway’ country surrounding the town supports not a blade of grass, and the extreme temperatures sent its residents underground decades ago.

It has always attracted travellers hungry for the ‘real’ outback, adventurers curious to witness a landscape that stretches out like a forgotten ocean, and treasure hunters drawn by the treasures that lie beneath its seemingly desolate surface.

For a young Yanni Athanasiadis, fresh from military service in the early 1970s and with no intention of leaving his hometown of Thessaloniki in Greece, the lure of that famed treasure and the fortune it promised would eventually lead him to Coober Pedy.

An uncle had gone out to Australia decades before and, on a rare visit back to Greece, regaled his young nephew with tales of shimmering opals in every colour of the rainbow. Yanni vividly remembers their night out together at a rowdy bouzouki bar, his uncle throwing money around and Yanni collecting it, astonished. “Don’t worry, there’s plenty more where that came from,” Yanni remembers him saying. “Just have a good time!”

But, for young Yanni, it didn’t make any sense.

“I didn’t know what opal mining was. I didn’t even know what an opal looked like. The next morning, with clearer heads, he explained it to me, and I thought to myself, I’ll go for one year and come back a rich man.”

And what was it like, moving to Australia as such a young man? “I didn’t move to Australia,” corrects Yanni with a grin. “I moved to Coober Pedy.”

He understood then, as he still does now, that in many ways Coober Pedy is a world of its own. Located 850 kilometres north of Adelaide (Tarntanya) and with a population then of barely 1,200, it is a town that demands resilience.

His first impressions of the place? Another smile: “If I wasn’t so stubborn and so full of pride, I would have turned around and gone home straight away! There wasn’t even running water. We would be given a 44-gallon drum of water each week and a bucket, and that was it. And for the first two or three years, I lived in a tin shed.”

But if he thought the living conditions were tough, working in the mines set a whole new bar for endurance.

“I look back now and can’t believe how dangerous it was. We worked all the time with explosives. We’d have two people down in the hole, one up above, and we’d fill up a 24-gallon drum, winch it to the top, empty it, then send it back down.

“I would always take two T-shirts; when one got soaked in sweat, I’d hang it up to dry and put the other one on until it got soaked in sweat. It was hard, dangerous work.”

He shakes his head, remembering, and then: “But when you’re young, you think anything is possible. You have a strong coffee, take a little nap, and go back to the mine.”

THE COLOURS OF FORTUNE Those few years stretched into decades, and while Yanni returned to Greece many times, Coober Pedy always called him back. The early days were lucrative, and he’d made around $14,000 by the time he was 23 – a lot of money in those days, enough even to buy a house in Adelaide. “But I was a young man! I spent it as quickly as I earned it.”

His luck in the mines wouldn’t come again so abundantly, and he’s seen as many hopes dashed as dreams realised over the years. Opal deposits are as unpredictable as they are mysterious, and the element of chance involved makes finding them a fool’s errand for some and a life-changing source of riches for others.

But Yanni saw early on that opal mining wasn’t the only way to find success in Coober Pedy. Tourists eager to buy opals at the source and to see the town’s extraordinary ‘dugouts’ were arriving in greater numbers.