We discovered later that we’d been talking to Gypsy Les, Coober Pedy’s foremost, in fact Coober Pedy’s only, junk dealer. ‘He’d rip you off as soon as look at you,’ one of the young barmen told us, ‘but you’ve got to feel for the poor bastard – his girlfriend’s crook, seriously crook, and he’s been chewin’ the rag for months.’ Which was one of the reasons we didn’t put a late-night call through to Simon Wiesenthal. The other was that just about everybody else in the bar looked as though they’d worked for one S.S. or another at some time in their lives. And, if a hole in the ground in Coober Pedy was the only place they could run to, well there was a kind of justice in that.

The barman who talked to us about Gypsy Les also filled us in on a few details about the town: what it’s population was – somewhere between three and six thousand; who ran it – ‘We don’t have police and we don’t have a council – we’ve got a Progress Committee’; and how his opal claim was going – ‘I’m still serving behind the bloody bar, aren’t I?’ It cost $25 for a PSPP – a Precious Stone Prospecting Permit – and once you had that there was nothing to stop you going out and buying four wooden pegs, nailing a plastic identification disc to each one, and then finding a square of dust no bigger than 50 metres by 50 metres to drive them in. If you weren’t happy with your square you could try another one, and even another one after that, for the same $25. Though every time you registered a claim it would cost you a further $22. The only restrictions were these: you couldn’t peg anyone else’s claim; you couldn’t peg in the middle of the main street; and you couldn’t peg under the Stuart Highway. Coober Pedy was a town which found any restraints upon its personal freedoms irksome, but it had begrudgingly accepted this last prohibition when the main arterial highway between Adelaide and Darwin – the only passable road connecting the south of Australia to the north – collapsed one afternoon into someone’s mine.

‘’Course I haven’t been here long enough to be able to answer all your questions,’ the barman said, once he got bored with me. ‘You ought really to have been talking to Bill Stretton. Yeah, I reckon Bill Stretton’d be your man. Beaut bloke. Beard down to here. Used to patrol the dog fence. Met everybody in his time. A real character.’

‘Where can I find him?’

‘You can’t. He died four months ago.’