The closure of a drive-in rarely makes the news but Coober Pedy’s is no ordinary drive-in. Since it was built by volunteers in 1965 it has served as a meeting point for the remote opal mining community, itself immortalised on film in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. For decades miners turned up in their utes, still filled with mining equipment and gelignite. As beer was sold at the drive-in, the operators had to ban patrons from bringing along explosives.
But curtains have now closed on South Australia’s last drive-in after furious winds reaching almost 120km/h ripped through the town on 15 November, leaving the screen in tatters. More than half the panels and the underlying structure were ripped away by the wind.
“We are heartbroken as a community,” states the drive-in’s website.
The original drive-in was built by the Progress and Miners Association with the help of volunteer labour in 1965. It was a time when men like my father were drawn to Coober Pedy with the promise of making their fortune mining opals. There was no electricity, water was rationed and the nearest pub was more than 200km away in Kingoonya.
“There really was very little in the way of entertainment,” says Sue Britt, a volunteer at the drive-in and member of the Coober Pedy Historical Society. Apart from radio, the only entertainment for miners was watching slides projected in the town’s community centre, powered by a generator from the local store.
“The drive-in became a gathering point for everybody,” Britt says. “Families would bring picnics and come early so the kids could play before the film started.”
The original projection room was a two-storey corrugated iron shed with the projectors up top and a canteen below. Old cone speakers were mounted on the projection booth for sound. To this day, before the movie starts, a sign announces: “Patrons, explosives are not to be brought into the theatre – The Manager.”
“The original drive-in had a capacity for 110 cars and it ran seven days a week,” says Tina Boyd, a former volunteer projectionist. “Sometimes there were R-rated movies for the blokes.”
The drive-in became such a drawcard for Coober Pedy that if there was any town news, it would be announced there. “When the Flying Doctor plane came in at night, they’d come to the drive-in to ask for someone to go out to the airport and turn on the runway lights, because that’s where everyone was,” Britt says.
In 1986 500 vehicles packed into the drive-in to watch Crocodile Dundee on the big screen. Crocodile Harry, a local eccentric and ex-croc hunter, had claimed to be the inspiration for the title character (this has been debunked). But Harry had other claims to fame: his dugout was used as a filming location for Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and it’s rumoured Tina Turner left behind a pair of her underwear as decoration for his underground lair.
Television and VHS arrived in Coober Pedy in the 1980s and with it came the end of the drive-in’s monopoly on entertainment. By 1995 the drive-in was nearly derelict and the screen became a favourite nesting place for pigeons. But a year later the drive-in was restored and reopened. Since the 2000s it has been run by a group of volunteers, among them Britt and Boyd.
Like learning to sink an opal mine, Boyd was taught how to operate the Gaumont-Kalee Model 21 projector, also known as “Sexy Beast”, which used carbon rods to project motion pictures on to the screen. “It is all hands-on, apprenticeship-type stuff,” she says. As 35mm film was phased out, the drive-in fundraised to buy a data projector and build an air-conditioned room to house it in.
Boyd recalls screening The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert for the film’s producer and crew in celebration of its 20th anniversary. The scene where Guy Pearce’s character is assaulted by miners was filmed at the drive-in. The original 35mm film was dug out of the National Film and Sound Archives, and Boyd brought the postwar projector out from retirement. “It was an honour to be asked to rescreen the film,” she says.
Britt recalls Boyd’s nerves of steel. “If anything happened and the film was interrupted by some kind of glitch with the projector, people would get on their car horns,” says Britt. “And Tina would have to figure out what was wrong right in the middle of a cacophony of horns as people complained.”
Up until last week’s storm the drive-in continued to show films every fortnight. Echoing the resiliency of the town, the volunteers have promised on Facebook that it will be back: “This is not the end of the drive-in, we will rebuild and be back up and running before you know it.”
Britt says: “It’s a symbol of something that makes Coober Pedy special.”
