A sandgroper looks like a kind of wormy grub with legs. It belongs to its own family, cylindrachetids, which is believed to be descended from grasshoppers.
Picture the front half of a mole, including the two front paws, made out of the carapace of a scorpion. Where the back legs of this mole would be, the body instead pinches inwards a bit, and two sets of stubby jointed insect legs are attached. Behind these legs, the body flares out again into a long segmented carapace tail like a mealworm larva. The tail is about two thirds of the whole body. There are no wings at any stage of development.
A sandgroper lives its entire life
underground, swimming through the earth with its powerful front legs. It likes sandy or sandy loam areas, and tends to stay at a depth which is damp and cool. During dry summer, a sandgroper can be found at a depth of up to 1.9 metres deep, and in the cooler months or after rain it can be found up high near the surface. A sandgroper travelling just beneath the surface will leave behind a long raised trail on the surface, similar to the "worm sign" in the movie
Dune.
A sandgroper is also a nickname for a Western Australian person that has been used for over a hundred years, although I was a teenager before I heard of it for the first time. The National Library of Australia has a newspaper article dating back to 1896 which uses this nickname. 6 of the known 14 sandgroper species are from Western Australia, with 2 of them specifically inhabiting the Perth region.
Western Australian Museum article
Wiki provided the link to the article in the National Library of Australia
ABC local news article