Rowe and I head out to the Moon Plain, a stark landscape outside town that looks so much like Mars, some people out there think the 2004 Mars landing of NASA's robotic explorer Spirit was filmed right here in Coober Pedy. "The BBC rang me up last year," says Rowe. "They said they had two pictures in front of them, one of the Moon Plain and one from NASA's Mars landing. They couldn't tell the difference between the two. I said, 'I can't tell the difference either!' and they said, 'Do you think the Yanks are pulling our chain?' " These are the sorts of stories that flow freely through Coober Pedy.

The only thing that breaks up the dry, cracked, reddish dirt in all directions is the Dog Fence, billed as "the longest fence in the world." (Coober Pedy is full of such claims.) The Dog Fence (not to be confused with the rabbit-proof fence, the subject of the brilliant Australian film of the same name) cuts a line through the center of Australia, beginning in the Bunya Mountain National Park in Queensland and ending nearly 6,000 miles later on a beach in Western Australia. It is one of the longest structures on earth and its sole purpose is to keep wild dogs (known as dingoes) on one side of the country and sheep on the other. It seems the dingoes, which are otherwise harmless, get a hankering for a little wool every once in a while.

The trouble is, wild camels don't give the fence much respect, and they routinely walk right through it - carrying large lengths of wood and wire with them when they do. So there are folks along the way who are in charge of the fence's upkeep (the man in Coober Pedy looks after more than 175 miles of the fence). There was no word at press time on whether a camel-proof fence was under consideration.