The BBC’s promotional blurb for The Tourist promises an Outback world of “quirky, enigmatic characters” and there were plenty of those along my route – not least in the old mining town of Coober Pedy. Spoil heaps are everywhere, the daytime temperatures extreme – up to 50C. For this reason, 70 per cent of the population live underground, in hollowed-out houses. 

The town’s population of about 2,000 comprises nearly 50 nationalities who rocked up decades ago, hoping to find priceless opals in the sandstone. Most didn’t but stayed anyway, forging a unique and eccentric desert community. Among them was Dimitrius “Jimmy” Nikoloudis, who arrived “direct from Greece” in the 1960s and worked for decades as a miner. “There is no science to opal mining,” he told me, “just luck or, more likely, the lack of it. Just throw a rock and, where it lands, dig a hole.” 

Luck had rarely been a lady to Nikoloudis, but he seemed a contented soul who had found a place to belong. Having been a volunteer ambulance driver, an English-Cantonese and sign language interpreter, and the president of the Coober Pedy Shooting Club, he now worked as a tour guide. 

When you’re living in an environment that looks like a vision of a hellish future – and indeed the surrounding desert has provided backdrops to films such as Mad Max 3 and Pitch Black – it’s natural to want to humanise it. The hills of Coober Pedy are overlaid with a surreal veneer of suburban amenities that Nikoloudis drove me around in his van.