Outside Rudy’s mine a pair of dusty camels with teeth as brown as those of Gypsy Les were rubbing necks. One or other of them was being trained for the great Ayers Rock to the Gold Coast Camel Race, due to get underway, like so much else in Australia, in 1988. This would be the longest camel race ever held in the country or, for all George knew, the world. It was a pity Rudy himself wasn’t here for us to meet; he too was quite some character.

This characterfulness of Coober Pedy was, in George’s view, one of the reasons why so many people who were merely passing through for an afternoon ended up staying for a lifetime. As we drove around he pointed out any number of temporary tin shacks or clapped-out caravans on dust heaps or half-drilled dugouts, which were the accommodation of people just like us, innocent tourists who had not been able to bring themselves to leave. A couple he had taken out on this very bus now actually worked for him; he showed us the red hill in the side of which they were excavating their new home, miles out of town where a hot wind howled and there was nothing to look at but endless pyramids of sand. They might as soon have set up house between the Iranian and the Iraqi armies.

I didn’t doubt George’s story. This was frontier country right enough and it was easy to see its appeal for anyone wanting to break conclusively with their past. But it seemed to me that there was some distinction to be drawn between a decision to stay and an inability to leave. George saw only affirmation, a positive vote for Coober Pedy; it didn’t enter his calculations that the very despoliation of the place, the ravaged landscape itself, could sap the resolve of anyone already flirting with uncertainty and leave him marooned as in perdition.

George rounded off all his tours with a visit to his own underground house. He was very house-proud. We sat in chintz armchairs while he served us tea or coffee, showed us his wife’s opals, and talked to us about heating costs, rent costs, land costs, rates costs, and so on. I was struck by how conventionally cosy he had made his sandstone vaults. You could gouge the surface of the walls with your fingers; you let in air by pulling a wire which lifted a little tin lid on a vent sticking out above the hillside; and yet for all the world you were sitting in a semi in Delft or Dorking. Indomitable, the bland homemaking spirit of man.