Coober Pedy Public Noodling Area

Welcome to Coober Pedy, where we have a massive, safe opal fossicking area open to the public 24/7! Open all hours, so you can hunt in the daytime with just your peepers or at night, with the aid of UV blacklights!

How to get there?

It's quite close to the main street of Coober Pedy and nearby the Coober Pedy Drive-In cinema (last one in South Australia!).

Here's where the main carpark area is, on Jeweller's Shop Rd. The noodling area extends the 2 blocks between Old Water Tank Rd, Jewellers Shop Rd and Harlequin Drive, excluding the fenced off Faye's Underground Home tourist attraction.

Who owns it?

Running Opal Hunting At Night gear hire and tours there, I recently had someone ask me if I owned it - I wish! No, this is council-owned land.

What's the history?

Please take my history of the area with a grain of salt until I've properly verified it! What I share here is what I've heard from old timers. I keep meaning to confirm with the Coober Pedy Historical Society on which facts are more reliable. As I understand it, the Jewellers Shop Rd opal field started around the same time opal was first discovered in Coober Pedy, in 1915. From that time, up until the early 80's, it was a popular field, with the name coming from the ability to go and easily find a nice bit of opal.

In the early 1980's, the Coober Pedy town district expanded to include the Jewellers Shop Rd opal field area, causing a cessation in any mining there. Around this time, the town itself was really booming, with a population multiples of today and with a lot more opal $ splashed about and nightclubs going til the morning (try getting a meal after 9PM these days for contrast!). With higher tourist numbers, too, there were incidents of tourists going out onto the deeper opal fields outside of town and falling down the 90 ft / 30 metre shafts there! To prevent those dangers to tourists, it was decided to make the old Jeweller's Shop Rd field a safe, public noodling area. The opal level at Jewellers Shop was between 8 and 25 ft deep, so consisted mostly of dozer cuts and diggings done by excavators and backhoes, after the earlier hand diggings. These shallow open cuts were filled in and dirt pushed around by dozers to leave us with all the piles of great noodling dirt we have today, mostly unchanged from that time 50 years ago.

Can you still find valuable opal there?

Definitely! Well, don't take my word for it, as while I've found plenty of nice bits of opal there, my gear hire and tour guests have better records than me at finding valuable chunks! In the year+ I've been down there, some of my guests have found $2,000 bits of seam opal, some nice shells and even a really nice clean snail/gastropod fossil, field-priced at ~$600. I haven't had many of the pieces I've found valued, but one nice green opal pipe/belamnite I found looked promising, until I cleaned it up too much, revealing a layer of sand on one side, reducing its value to about $400 - was still pretty chuffed to find a pipe with colour!

Which areas of the noodling area are good to hunt for opal in?

It's so random as to where some of the best pieces are found, so I suggest you go with your gut and try anywhere! Near the carpark is convenient, my opal pipe was found at the big mound directly across from the carpark on the opposite side of the road. I've found some areas to be more consistent in producing maybe 1 piece of colour for every 10 pieces of opal picked up, but we've also had some nights in that same spot not finding anything, so I can't guarantee any area will or won't throw you up some nice opal!

Scan the surface or dig down deep in the piles?

Again, I wish I could say one method will give you better results than the other, but have seen people find nice pieces very close to the surface or digging down deep, so why not try both if you have time! After a heavy rain, there's more chance to find something nice sitting on the surface or with an edge revealed you'll see with a blacklight at night. This is due to rain washing off layers of dust and dirt, revealing some gems that had been sitting just below. There is a risk with pieces on or close to the surface that they may have some sun hazing/cracks due to heat exposure, but one of the $2,000 chunks of seam opal one of my guests found was maybe an inch under the surface and still very healthy opal.

Enjoy and good luck!

It's a must-do thing while in Coober Pedy, to go out and "noodle" for some opals at the public noodling area, whether during the day or night!