The Australian actor had put up a picture of items he wants to sell and the most prominent was what seemed to be an old Cobb and Co coach identified with the town and which would have been of huge historical importance in the way Glen Innes was set up and grew.

The picture prompted proposals to crowd-fund a bid for the vehicle when the actor puts it up for auction on April 7. Attempts have been made to reach him to see if he’ll do a deal.

Now The Examiner has traced the man who made the coach – as a stage prop for a weepy 1987 drama called The Right Hand Man in which a stage-coach driver goes to work for a dying, one-armed aristocrat in 1860s Australia. Without spoiling the plot, there is a love-triangle and much wailing. It wasn’t well reviewed.

The maker of the coach was one Mike Henderickson, according to Stephen Ralph, the owner of the Australian Teamsters Hall of Fame who is himself a coach-builder who knew Mr Henderickson.

Mr Henderickson was a master craftsman – he also built wheels for a horse-drawn coach for the Queen of Australia, and, according to Mr Ralph, designed an innovation: a dynamo in the wheel which powered a heater in the cabin so the Queen could keep warm. Her gratitude is not recorded.

And he constructed the coach now owned by Russell Crowe. It is a copy, about four-fifths the actual size, of a Leviathan coach capable of carrying 77 to 82 passengers, depending on how many were children.

Russell Crowe wasn’t in the movie but he did own a coaching station at Nymboida which became a museum and that, it seems, had the Glen Innes coach.

We’re still trying to reach Mr Crowe. But does Glen Innes want his coach?