On the way back he took us to see the modern hospital, presided over by a much-loved Japanese doctor and a matron who cultivated an indoor garden – you had no chance growing an outdoor garden in Coober Pedy – and who had a novel way of treating loony miners: she put them in amongst the plants. A touch of green contiguity worked wonders.

In fact, much of what passed for character and eccentricity in Coober Pedy would have gone by the name of lunacy anywhere else. The last thing George showed us was Speedo’s longdrop. Speedo was a shaven-headed Italian. A longdrop was the name for the deep hole in the ground which sufficed for many people in Coober Pedy – there being no sewage facilities in town – as a lavatory. Speedo’s longdrop was distinct in that the shed around it was built in the shape of a space rocket, out of ‘moon rocks’ brought from Oodnadatta, and was surmounted by a television mast. Whether Speedo actually watched television in his longdrop George was not able to tell us, but we did discover that generally speaking longdrops were not places to linger over. They build up foul and dangerous gases. Only recently a miner had stayed longer than he should have over his, had forgotten where he was, had lit a cigarette, and had tossed the butt in the obvious place. ‘Very nasty,’ George said.

Thinking he might have an interesting story to tell, I wondered where I might find him. I suppose I should have anticipated the answer. ‘All over Coober Pedy,’ George said.

Later that afternoon we wandered up to a cemetery squeezed between the Greek Orthodox Church and the Coober Pedy Basketball Club. The ground was littered with beer cans and bits of plastic. The graves themselves were mostly marked out with breeze blocks and memorialized by simple wooden crosses bearing the names of the dead – Albert Miles, Horace Reed, Chas Sharp, Carl Wendt – but no other messages, and no dates. One rather more stately tomb took my eye by virtue of the inscription on its headstone: In loving memory of our mother, Ethel McCulloch, born 1882 Adelaide, passed away August 25th 1967, remembered by Jack, Edna and family. August 25, 1967, was my twenty-fifth birthday. I spent it on board the Achille Lauro, leaving Australia at the end of my first visit. I was sick with grief for the friends that I was leaving behind, for Sydney, and for my lost youth. So it was a bad day all round for me and for Ethel McCulloch.

Some dissatisfaction on her part seemed to have hung on after death, and to have given her rare powers. Because scratched roughly into the horizontal gravestone itself, as if with a barbed fingernail, was an alternative, even a recriminatory valediction:

THIS. IS. WHER. EDNA. LAIDE. ME.

UNDER. SIX. FEET. OF. SOD.

WAITING. FOR. THE. ASCENDING. DAY.

SO. I. CAN. MEET. MY. GOD.