Mintabie erased from the map: opal town razed after government-ordered closure

Mintabie, a former opal mining town in South Australia’s outback, has been razed and erased from the map five years after authorities ordered its abandonment amid persistent law-and-order concerns tied to drug and alcohol activity in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands.

The town sits on baked red dirt about 1,120 kilometres northwest of Adelaide and 485 kilometres south of Alice Springs, on the boundary of the APY Lands, a 103,000-square-kilometre Indigenous-owned region where alcohol is banned. In the late 1970s and 1980s Mintabie was Australia’s largest opal producer and drew a mix of miners, traders and itinerant characters. In 1988 there were 775 miners working the Mintabie Precious Stones Field and opal worth $39 million was pulled from the ground. By 2000, there were fewer than 150 miners left, and from 2012 onward, costs outweighed results as the field declined.

The Mintabie township’s fate was sealed after a government-commissioned review found increasing lawlessness, drug trafficking and violence in the area and recommended its closure, with governance returned to the Anangu traditional owners. The Weatherill-era Mintabie Review Panel delivered its findings to the South Australian parliament in January 2018 and estimated that cleaning up the town would cost $2–3 million. At the time, about 30 permanent residents remained, with roughly the same number living there occasionally.

In June 2018 the state government gave residents one year to leave, with a six-month extension granted in some cases. The last 15 or so inhabitants drove out in January 2020, leaving behind homes and businesses funded by mining earnings. Officials said remediation would conserve environmental and cultural considerations, but what followed was the total dismantling of the town.

From the outset, Mintabie’s infrastructure—shops, a pub, a hotel, a school and a telecentre—became the focus of demolition plans. By then, a Telecentre offering a Post Office, internet access and government services had already dwindled; the local school, which could hold up to 100 students, enrolled eight. In the years that followed, several structures were removed, and one of Mintabie’s iconic social hubs, the Goanna Bar and Grill, burned in 2021, a year after the town was closed. By late 2024, the project expanded to a full decommissioning, with the state budget and the contractor selection signaling a transition from abandonment to active remediation.

The Malinauskas Labor government allocated $7.7 million for Mintabie’s remediation in the 2023–24 budget. In November 2024, the Department for Infrastructure and Transport awarded the decommissioning contract to Indigenous-owned and -operated civil contractor Intract Australia. The township was closed to public access while all dwellings, abandoned vehicles and mining equipment were removed; the work was completed in July. The APY executive board was suspended in August, and an administrator was appointed, who declined to comment on Mintabie.

Award-winning photographer Brendan Beirne, who had visited Mintabie as recently as December 2023 to document its ghost town status, returned after demolition began and found the site almost unrecognizable. He observed that the signage at the turn-off near Marla had vanished, and upon entering the old townsite, there was little left beyond a low stone-walled garden and a single large boulder. The once-bustling mining hub, with its stone structures and corrugated iron sheds, had largely disappeared, replaced by silence and desert light.

Historically, Mintabie’s opal fields drew hundreds of workers and a volatile mix of characters, including fugitives and entrepreneurs, with stories of lavish opal buys and parties intertwined with rumors of bodies buried in mine shafts. By some reckoning, opal production peaked in the late 1980s; the field generated tens of millions in value over decades even as the town’s fortunes waxed and waned with the ore.

Today, the land is left in a state of transition. State officials have signaled plans to revegetate parts of the site, though no decision has been announced about the future use of the opal field itself. The Mintabie episode has underscored the tension between resource extraction and Indigenous land stewardship on APY Lands, highlighting the long arc from a thriving frontier town to a sanitized, remediated landscape. For the Anangu and other stakeholders, restoration is as much about cultural and environmental stewardship as it is about economic legacy, with governance structures and site management continuing to evolve in the wake of Mintabie’s closure.