I totally love Kupa Piti. The pink and white mounds, the huge skies sparkling with shooting stars, the warm people, the cosy dugouts, the sense that you are living in a place of dreams. The Aboriginal dreaming for this place is related to the guts of a malu (kangaroo) but I don't know anything else of the story. When we went on the awesome bush camp with Sammy Brown and Renee Wintanna and the kids and dogs I saw the fresh insides of a roo for the first time and how opalescent they were. I'll write more about the bush camp soon. It was a very inspiring experience for me, and I felt myself to be extremely privileged to be invited on the journey to the pristine golden lands way off the beaten track where Mr Brown's parents had once walked.

The dream of opal brought many people to Kupa Piti, as it had the largest deposits in the world. The town grew to 30,000 in the 1970s and had a scary reputation, being a place of mining men from all over the world on their individual missions to strike it rich. People disappeared, rumoured to be thrown down the mineshafts. Much of the opal has been mined, and the population has steadily decreased to around 3,000. It is still one of the most ethnically diverse towns in Australia, and retains a palpable anarchistic feel, completely different to most rural and remote communities. The fact that people can live in underground homes they have dug themselves as they have been mining is incredible in Australia, which usually strangles people with arcane ropes of bureaucracy and building restrictions.