It turned out that Bill Stretton wasn’t the only Coober Pedy character we’d missed out on meeting by a month here or a year there. Iron Man Jim Shaw, otherwise known as the Human Buckjumper, was one we ought to have known. He had come to Coober Pedy in 1921 the hard way, pushing a wheelbarrow from Tarcoola, a distance of well over 200 kilometres. Every time he came to a hill Iron Jim had to empty his barrow, carry it over, and then go running back for his belongings. It took him a long time to complete his journey. Aeroplane George was altogether speedier. To this day no one knows what Aboriginal magic he called upon to get him from one place to another, but stories abound of motorists seeing him in Coober Pedy as they drove out of it and then finding him strolling through Kulgera, 400 kilometres up the track. My theory is twins, but the one person I put this to in Coober Pedy said that Aborigines don’t come in twins.

And then there was Bert Paxton who used to go opal divining stark naked when the moon was full. Some coyness surrounds the question of what Bert went divining with. But he was also known to lie on the dust hills, still naked, and to shout, ‘I’m recharging,’ to passers-by. It was George Van Brugge who told us about Bert Paxton. He’d been recommended to us as the man who conducted the most informative tours around Coober Pedy and we found him in his opal showrooms wearing a Wild West hat and selling earrings to some visitors in an accent that had as much to do with Amsterdam as Australia. The next day we went out with him on his bus.

He took us up into the Stuart Ranges close to where Willie Hutchison found the first opal in 1915, so that we could ‘noodle’ – that’s to say get down on our hands and knees and fossick in the dirt for the wherewithal to make inelegant prismatic ear-rings. Then we went to Rudy’s mine to try our hand at fault divining – pointing a parallel pair of metal rods at the cave wall and waiting for them to open. ‘It’s all done by bodily electricity,’ George explained, which was how we came to get on to Bert Paxton. My rods did not only not part, they actually twitched closer together. ‘You don’t have what it takes,’ George told me.