Coober Pedy and The Deplorables

Cafe Locked Out On The Road

Kret and I heading to Coober Pedy

We were a few weeks into a tour around Australia called The Deplorable’s Tour.

We were travelling town to town trying to discover if Australia was fully compliant with the mandates, or if there was any resistance.

What we found, and recorded, was levels of resistance everywhere.

In Port Augusta though, hardly anyone would talk to us. It was disappointing, but then I suggested we head to the iconic and isolated opal town, Coober Pedy.

We were told by the Port Augusta locals that we shouldn’t do it because up there, they hated people like us — the unjabbed — Things could get ugly.
So, we went.

Wendy and her campervan — the one we’d end up traveling around the country in — decided not to come and headed down to Whyalla to wait for our return, whereas Kret and I filled up our little truck, we called Charlotte, at the last servo before the road to Darwin.
It was here that a man who looked a lot like an unfriendly Chopper Reed walked over to the truck and said, “Café Locked Out, I love you guys.”
He was there with his wife. They had been to Epic, and since they weren’t allowed back into their home state, Western Australia, they bought this huge Winnebago to live in.
But the most remarkable quality about the pair was that they were unjabbed funeral directors.
Before heading off, I recorded an interview with them in their Winnebago.
They were great people, but sadly, as Kret and I headed out of town and had over 600 kilometers of desert ahead of us, I discovered, as I checked the recording, that it hadn’t worked.
To me, Port Augusta was a disappointment, and this only added to that.
They’d told me the western Australian coroner had called them up, pleading with them to reopen their parlour, as they had more bodies — not from COVID, for WA had no Covid — than they could handle.
The road to Coober Pedy is a road journey you should undertake.
Most of it mirrors a Martian plain — small red rocks as far as you can see. No buildings, no trees, no internet. Just me and my great companion, the Polish freedom fighter, Kret.

Christine, who lives underground

Kret could drive for hours and could open bottles of beer — the ones without the screw top — with anything. He also rolled our cigarettes with deftly concertinaed tiny pieces of cardboard, scavenged from the cover of the rollie papers, as filters. Then, apart from being profoundly brave, he loved hugging and rolled the best joints, especially when he was full of vodka.
We were brothers in arms, and in that brief window of time, we loved each other.
Early on, we pulled up behind one of the monolithic road trains that looped by every twenty minutes or so from both directions.
I approached the driver wanting to ask him what it was like to work out here — just you, the truck, and the vast nothingness.
But the driver was scared of us and our little truck, with its “End the Mandates” posters.

Greg, the Cave Man

So scared, he didn’t want to talk. But I did, so I followed him back to his cabin, politely asking questions. My final one — the only one he answered — was when I asked him if he ever saw any life out here.
“Nah, not much,” he said. “A couple of snakes.” Then he closed the door and roared off.
Ironically, a few more clicks down the road, we passed a large snake curled up in the road.
I got Kret to stop and went to check it out.
It was bleeding from its snout, but it was not squashed.
The truck must have driven straight over it, and the turbulence underneath had probably spun it around, leaving it dazed. Trouble was, the next truck, which was on its way, could finish the job.
I had to get it off the road.
Why?
Because we were the snakes of our world now, thanks to the mandates, and to ignore your own humanity would mean you had been conquered.
What I needed was a long stick to flick it off the highway.
But there were no trees. The only thing we had that was long enough was Wendy’s red sovereign flag. This is all shown in the video below.

This video is the show we did from the Underground Chapel, it contains the snake video and the interview with the funeral directors.

Next, Kret, the great driver, decided that in order to escape the heat, he’d drive all night.
And so, that’s what we did.
Almost out of fuel, we reached the highway’s only roadhouse, a place called Spuds.
It was around two in the morning, and after filling up Charlotte, I wandered into the store to pay, when the huge man behind the counter, in a polo neck top that had “Spuds” written on the pocket, asked, loudly, “Where’s your mask?”
I had several options to go with then. I could have apologized and found a face nappy, I could have lied and said I had an exemption, or I could have done this, which is what I did.
I just kept walking towards the counter at an unhurried pace and said calmly, even a little flippantly, “I don’t wear them, mate.”
“But you have to wear one,” he roared. “It’s the law.”
“Oh well,” I said and handed him the money for the fuel. “Arrest me.”
That was it. He never replied. He was trembling, which was weird because I’m a little guy, and little guys don’t generally make bigger men tremble.
But not one to linger, I headed down to the fridges, only to have the employee of Spuds stick his head over his counter and scream, “Now where are you going?”
“I’m buying some milk.”
“Oh no, no, no,” he said, waving his finger. “You are not buying anything from this store.”
Then Kret wandered in, which saw Spud’s employee of the year, recoiling and yell, “And where is your mask?”
Further down the moonlit highway, both of us starving and with few provisions, thanks to Spuds, we invented a new breakfast: toasted muesli and a swig of Corona beer.
Astonishingly, it was delicious.
When we reached Coober Pedy, our first stop was the service station. There was tension immediately. You could feel that this was an isolated town. Anyone new coming in was worthy of an evaluating look, but here we were, unmasked, and even our tiny little truck was shouting “Freedom” from its posters. A dangerous word that clearly was under suspicion here.
One man, who looked like a young biker with a long beard, menacingly approached us, and we both thought, “Ok, maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.”
But it turned out he was a fan.

Jason Newson The Blacklighter

He was a blacklight miner, meaning he’d walk the desert at night, scanning the landscape with his ultraviolet light that illuminated opals. When he wanted a break, he’d sit on the now-freezing earth, below more stars than could possibly exist, and watch us or the other freedom podcasters on his ubiquitous umbilical cord, his phone.
It was then that we got the call.
Ten kilometers out of town, our funeral directors had run out of fuel. In order to get back into Western Australia, they were heading up to Alice Springs to sneak back into Western Australia using the Great Central Road. And since the first interview didn’t work, they agreed to another one out here.

Back in town, we parked up near the servo and waited to see what the locals would make of us.
Soon, they were all around us, and they were angry. The town had a gang of nurses who had been brought in from down south to try and convince the local Indigenous people that the vaccine was safe and effective — a claim an Indigenous elder had disputed by dropping dead in the middle of the main street, immediately after leaving the vaccination centre.
But while the Indigenous people showed no interest in us, others locals kept arriving.
One old lady and her middle-aged son, who had a pronounced speech impediment, even invited us to camp in their underground home, which was in the centre of town.
This couple had even carved out an underground chapel, and it was in here that I was allowed to do a live Café Locked Out show.
Their son had only known the cave; he’d grown up here, and due to his speech issue, had never left. He was a “dinky di” Aussie cave man.
Alone, the next morning, I watched the sun wake the car wrecks strewn around their hole-in-the-ground home and noticed their old dog wandering down the street, also alone. It had no lead, no collar, and no human following it with a roll of plastic bags. Out for its daily countenance, I saw it meet up with another free dog. After the ubiquitous bum sniff, they wished each other well and walked off in separate ways, no doubt to meet other dogs.
This town had not been built by people who had waited here in the desert for bureaucrats to inform them that their permit had been approved. Out here after opals, they had initially used handpicks to carve out these holes in the world, homes, as the sun tried to “evil” them by hammering the landscape like it was a blacksmith’s anvil.
It was a town for the self-reliant, for the adventurer, for the person who did not feel like being found by the greater population, who were miles away and all hugging the coast.
Now many of them were masked up — oh, except for the ones who kept driving in to talk to us. And despite the various colours they were using to express their thoughts about the mandates and the politicians driving them, they did not compare them to opals.
We left the next day, and once again, in Spuds, the same shop assistant started yelling at Kret, asking him, again, why he wasn’t wearing a mask.
“He’s not wearing one,” Kret pointed at a nearby man.
“He doesn’t have to,” roared the man. “He’s sitting down.”
“Then get me a chair,” suggested Kret, with that Polish accent that, if you listened closely, had the words “fuck you” permanently imbued into its tone.

But later, as we traversed the desert, I studied the desolation and polished the gift the miner had given me.

Last interview on the way back

Around the country, I would speak about him and remind people that while opals came in all different sizes, shapes, and colours, each was Australian and unique and rare and beautiful. And if God suddenly returned and started using a blacklight to find human-hope in these dark times, you, the defiant ones, would be his opals.
But that wasn’t the story that had buried itself the deepest.
That was owned by a furious young woman who had just been sacked from an administrative job on a remote mine site.
She’d even arrived in one of the mine’s dust-covered four-wheel drives.
A nurse had come to their mine to vaccinate them all, and while waiting, this young woman had asked the nurse if she knew of anyone who had had a severe reaction.
“Yes,” said the nurse. “My son. He’s now going to have to carry an EpiPen for the rest of his life.”
Exasperated, the young woman had then asked, “Well, if you know that, why do you want to inject us?”
“Because the government has told us to take it,” said the nurse, “and if we can’t trust the government, who can we trust?”

Michael Gray Griffith

Cafe Locked Out On the Road