Qualla: White Cliffs, New South Wales

White Cliffs, New South Wales: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mattinbgn, CC BY-SA 4.0. To find most of the people of White Cliffs, you have to go down. In this scorched corner of outback New South Wales, where summer days routinely climb past 36 degrees and the landscape is a moonscape of pale spoil heaps, the residents long ago made a logical bargain with the heat: they dug their homes into the hills. Around 140 underground dwellings - 'dugouts' - honeycomb the ridges here, holding a steady, blessed 20 to 22 degrees while the surface bakes. You can sleep underground too, in one of the town's subterranean motels. It is one of the strangest, most ingenious small communities in Australia, and the opal that started it all still glints in the rock beneath the floor.

Image: Mattinbgn | CC BY-SA 4.0

White Cliffs, New South Wales: The Stone the Kangaroo Hunters Found

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mattinbgn, CC BY-SA 4.0. White Cliffs owes its existence to a hunting trip gone slightly sideways. The first Australian opal was found in this area in 1872, when a party of kangaroo hunters was working the low stony country. One of them, tracking a wounded kangaroo over the rises, stooped to pick up a pr...

Image: Mattinbgn | CC BY-SA 4.0

White Cliffs, New South Wales: A Town That Went Underground

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peterdownunder, CC BY-SA 3.0. The town proper took shape in the late nineteenth century once opal mining began in earnest, and it has been mined ever since. By the early 1900s the field was booming; the population swelled with seasonal diggers, and the surrounding plain filled with the white mullock heaps tha...

Image: Peterdownunder | CC BY-SA 3.0

White Cliffs, New South Wales: The Tiger of White Cliffs

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mattinbgn, CC BY-SA 4.0. For a town of a few hundred souls, White Cliffs has produced an outsized legend. In December 1905, in this remote opal settlement, Bill O'Reilly was born - the son of the district's first schoolteacher. He would grow into one of the most feared bowlers cricket has ever known, a f...

Image: Mattinbgn | CC BY-SA 4.0

White Cliffs, New South Wales: Mirrors in the Desert

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Richard Gifford, CC BY 2.0. White Cliffs has a quieter claim to fame, and it points the opposite direction from the dugouts - straight up at the relentless sun. In 1981 the town became the site of Australia's first solar power station, a ring of fourteen parabolic mirrored dishes built to turn that abundant...

Image: Richard Gifford | CC BY 2.0

White Cliffs, New South Wales: Where the Desert Does Strange Things

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cgoodwin, CC BY-SA 3.0. What holds White Cliffs together, beyond opal and ingenuity, is a kind of stubborn outback continuity. The primary school opened in 1895 and has run without a break ever since - no small feat 255 kilometres from Broken Hill and 93 from Wilcannia, with barely 250 millimetres of ra...

Image: Cgoodwin | CC BY-SA 3.0