White Cliffs : Underground Bed & Breakfast

By David Ellis

B&B operators Peter and Joanne Pedler truly can claim to being the ultimate in Mine Hosts.

Their address proves it: PJ’s Undergound B&B is located at Dugout 72, Turleys Hill, White Cliffs NSW – a collection of old one-time opal mine tunnels and diggings that they’ve turned into a remarkably comfortable half-dozen rooms for guests… and a complete subterranean “2-bedroom cottage” as well.

The Pedler’s are like most of the 150 residents of tiny White Cliffs in far western NSW, in that they live underground to escape the searing 45C or more heat in summer (113+ Fahrenheit,) and the chilly minus-2 nights in winter, enjoying instead a steady 22-degrees or so day and night year-round.

And it gives new meaning to telling folks that you live Down Under.

The now largely-abandoned White Cliffs opal fields were put on the map somewhat by chance: during an 1889 drought three shooters were sent to the Momba Pastoral Station to reduce kangaroo numbers, and while opals were known to be in the area, they came across an unusually big number of what looked like quality stones.

Mainly out of curiosity, they sent them to Adelaide for valuation by a wonderfully-named gem dealer, Tullie Cornthwaite Wollaston who was so impressed that he took a stage-coach to White Cliffs to see for himself.

He later wrote that he “found the shooters camped under two tents and a bough shed. They asked me to make an offer for the stones (opals) they had gathered. I suggested 140-pounds – and was prepared to spring another 10-pounds – but my bid was promptly snapped up.”

Mr Wollaston travelled weeks by steamship with the opals to London with some others that he’d bought, aware that the world’s then-main opal mines in Hungary were petering out.

“The (London) dealers told me not to waste time on opals as there was no demand for them,” he wrote in his diary. “And there was some stupid superstition going around at the time that opals would bring evil to those who wore them.”

Unfazed he forged ahead, selling his stones and returning to Australia and White Cliffs for more, which he was able to sell in England and later America.

Word of the White Cliffs opals spread, and within a few years some 4000 miners and their families were camped in the searing heat or working and living in their tunnels in the sandstone ground that gave the area its name.

Sales reached millions of pounds, in 1902 alone opals worth over 140,000-pounds being gouged from the ground; but by 1914 with diminishing returns from the mines and the outbreak of WWI, the town regressed to a handful of hardy battlers.

Fast forward to the early 1980s when ex-miner Peter Pedler and his wife Joanne decided to join the small but growing tourism industry in White Cliffs, reasoning that as they’d “baby sat” some mates’ motels around the State, why not open their own B&B?

And do so in the old mines themselves? Today their PJ’s Underground is a thriving little business with six guest rooms (three of them family size,) and that self-contained 2-bedroom underground “cottage” that comes with all mod-cons (right down to the dishwater) that you’d find in a normal above-ground cottage.

The neat and tidy little B&B rambles through the old mine workings some 10-metres under Turleys Hill, with all the sandstone walls painted white, rooms equipped with ensuites, refrigerators – and to ensure you don’t get claustrophobic, 3-metre high ceilings.

Rooms start from $160 a night double or twin, including breakfast provisions of cereals, fruit-juice, home-baked bread, jam from the Pedler’s fruit trees – and, depending on the mood of the family’s bantams, fresh eggs; the “cottage” costs $400 for 2-nights (minimum stay,) again with brekkie supplies.

You can take a guided mine tour, trek the town’s historic “heritage trail,” see the bizarre above-ground Post Office built in 1900 of corrugated iron – one of the hottest materials to build with – and the Bill O’Reilly Oval named after the great cricketer who spent some early years in White Cliffs when his father was a teacher there.

Ring Peter or Joanne on (08) 8091 6626 about the best way to get there from where you live, and to experience a few nights living underground.