AROUND a 1000km north west of Sydney, you could be forgiven for thinking there’s not much out in the wide open brown fields.

A quirky town with a pub, a primary school, a general store and Flying Doctors clinic are the only main infrastructure, with hardly a house in sight.

But around 200 people live here, you just can’t see them because they live underground.

Welcome to White Cliffs, the town full of holes that have become full-scale housing for the locals.

And the homes are dirt cheap (pardon the pun).

Called ‘dugouts’ the homes are the remnants of mine shafts from the opal mining boom of the 1800s.

This ‘Never Never’ region was once populated by a boom of thousands on the hunt for the lucrative gemstone.

Now, most residents stay for the quiet life and to make their ‘digs’ cushy.

And it’s a very affordable lifestyle.

As the capital city housing prices soar beyond reasonable affordability, White Cliffs offers an alternative for around $65,000.

The houses are charming and unique, and when the locals renovate, they just grab a jackhammer.

The first call to White Cliffs resident Enid Black cuts out.

“You don’t get very good phone reception underground,” she said matter-of-factly.

But it isn’t the bad reception, or the curious housing arrangement that takes getting used to in White Cliffs.

“What people struggle with the most out here is silence,” she said.

Except ground vibrations. The locals can feel that.

It is the remaining drive shafts at the entrance to the minds around the hills that have been converted into housing.

Dug out of solid rock, they offer a hardy framework for creating some magnificent cave-like dwellings.

Many of the rooms in them are small — around 180cm high and 120cm wide.

Enid has walked outside to a mild 25 degrees and better phone signal to continue chatting.

In the winter the temperature on a cold morning can drop to below zero, in the summer it can soar to 50c.

There’s not a lot of rain, and not a lot of vegetation.

So for most of the time the dugouts don’t leak.

“In the early days the miners were keen on using dynamite to blow the rock up.

“But the rocks still didn’t move,” says Enid, “What it did do was create some fissures in the rock allowing room for plant matter to make its way down.”

Enid said she was surprised how sometimes a plant root would randomly pop up.

It was also one of the few occasions when water could seep in, she said.

“But it hardly ever rains enough for it to be a problem,” she said.

“If it rains two inches we’re all excited. If it rains 10 inches.

“You might just mop a little bit of water up.”

There’s no doubt she loves her town. And she loves her hole in the ground.

In fact, she and her friend Mal Burns are renovating another one.

“Some people buy a beach shack, some buy a dugout and go opal mining” she said.

After her father died “many, many years ago” Enid said her mother had “just had enough of it all”.

Being into gemstones, she and a friend decided to visit White Cliffs. The result?

A few weeks later, Enid says, her mother packed her bags and went to live in a dugout.

It was when her mother died that Enid found herself out there.

“I came out here to clean up the dugout and pick up the cat and realised no-one was at the pool. “I’m a qualified lifeguard so I decided to stay,” she said.

The pool is 15m long. It’s a lap pool. She laughs as she says that out loud.

Enid said the difference between White Cliffs and other small towns was the sense of belonging was available to everyone.

“You know how you hear in small towns you have to be born there to be accepted? That doesn’t happen here because almost everyone has chosen to be here,” she said.

She also rates the quality of life in the sparse region quite highly.

She’s adamant that even the produce in White Cliffs is fresher than the food in supermarkets in big cities.

“When the fresh vegetables arrive from Adelaide markets, it’s all residents can smell.

There’s been plenty of renovations since Enid first went to the area.

While the dugouts are fairly cheap to build (in contrast to your regular house) they cost in time and equipment.

Enid said the area had been surveyed and residents took out a 99 year lease on their chosen plot. After that, they could dig to their heart’s content within plot boundaries.

They don’t even need a building permit.

“You’re not really building anything,” Enid says quite tongue-in-cheek.

But that didn’t mean residents couldn’t build on top.

Enid noted one resident who built a rock fixture on top of a dugout.

“The great thing about that was no-one else was blocking their view,” she said.

Enid said it was a bit of a mission to renovate, as the average person could only remove around 4m/sq of rock per day.

When they did, the rock had to be shifted out of the dugout with machinery akin to industrial vacuum cleaners.

It’s a slow process.

Others, she said, tried to do the digging with a bobcat from the side of the block if they could.

“But then they deal with carbon monoxide.

“Short of wearing an oxygen mask ...” Enid says.

“And even when you remove the rock, you’ve then got the rock on your block, so you’ve still got to do something with that,” she said.

There was also the risk of digging up surprises.

Some have found themselves digging into old mine shafts they didn’t know were there.

Others have been more fruitful.

White Cliffs is one of the few places in the world where you can knock out a wall and discover an opal seam, which Enid herself admits she has done in the past.

“It wasn’t anything to get excited about,” she pointed out.

Unlike her friend who dug into a cracking good seam and pulled in some seriously precious gems and coin in the process.

“My partner found some damn good stuff,” she said.

There is electricity, but wiring isn’t fed into walls — the dugouts don’t have power points.

But plumbing is in most buildings.

Enid said, it was all about having the pipes at the right levels, because many of the dugouts were on the side of hill and could still drain water away.

“You can get it out with drains and pumps.

“There’s still septic systems and all that,” she said.

Others pumped water and sewage into abandoned shafts.

With proximity to five national parks and the unique lifestyle of the region, White Cliffs has become a mecca for grey nomads and the drive tourism market.

“The new tourism is in community,” Enid said.

“People go places to see how the community is and how they live.

“That is what White Cliffs has to market.”

So the town dug out a motel for visitors.

“There’s a stack of rooms. They are really interesting, they built that one mechanically,” she said.

So how do you make sure you’ve picked a good dugout to buy?

“Local knowledge,” said Enid.

“Ask around. People here know the good places.”

So if you’re looking for a place to call home in the shafts of White Cliffs, the land is wide and open, the amenities are few and far between, the average age is 69 and the nearest major hospital is at Broken Hill.

But Enid says she loves the room to breathe and she doesn’t see herself moving anytime soon.

“I’d say I’ll stay forever.

“I don’t think I could go back to living in a normal house,” she said.

“I like the climate, I like the wider open spaces.

“I like that you wake up for a coffee in the morning and there’s a kangaroo in the garden.”