Coober Pedy On Screen: Movies, TV & Media

Coober Pedy’s raw, otherworldly terrain - the gibber plains, the Breakaways, the mullock heaps and the dugouts - has pulled film and TV crews out into the desert for decades. It has stood in for post-apocalyptic wastelands and alien planets, and its sheer strangeness keeps drawing documentary and travel programs. Here’s a running catalogue.

Films

• Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985) - the desert around town and Moon Plain.
• The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) - the famous outback drag odyssey.
• Pitch Black (2000) - Coober Pedy’s moonscape as a deadly alien world.
• Red Planet (2000) - the surface of Mars, courtesy of South Australia.
• Until the End of the World (1991, Wim Wenders) - outback sequences.
• Ground Zero (1987) and Opal Dream (2006) - among other productions associated with the town.

(See Moon Plain and the Breakaways - the two locations crews use most.)

Television & documentaries

Coober Pedy turns up constantly in travel, food and documentary television - Australian programs and foreign TV crews alike are drawn to the underground homes, the opal mining and the desert eccentricity.

• The Food Lovers’ Guide to Australia - “The taverna in the desert” (SBS, 2004). Reporter Maeve O’Mara visits Tom & Mary (Anastasios and Maria Kiossos) for the opening of their Greek restaurant in Coober Pedy - tzatziki and galaktoboureko in the desert, with a road train hauling the ingredients across the outback. Watch it on the National Film and Sound Archive’s Australian Screen.

This section is a work in progress - we’re still adding documentaries and foreign TV episodes.

Know of more? If you can name a documentary or TV episode filmed here - ideally with a link to an Australian screen/film archive - please send it through so we can add it with a citation.

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Drop screen-grabs or posters into this post’s folder and reference them in the text, and link to clips on the archives where they’re hosted.