There was little to love in the landscape, though, for the first few hundred kilometres south of Broome. My map told me that there was ocean and beach to the west, and any number of capes testifying to early French interest in the region – Cape Latouche Treville, Cape Jaubert, False Cape Bossut, Poissonnier Point – but the Great Northern Highway was too far from the coast for any of this to be visible. The only thing to look at was the interminable scrub, littered with those disheartening beer bottles, the little brown stubbies, which lie by the roadside in the remotest places forming a sort of chain of mindless indulgence around the entire continent. I tried to ignore the bottles and passed the time pretending that the monotonous country hereabouts was in fact various and beautiful. Surely, I told myself, there is a vast and mysterious unchartedness about this; surely it is harsh and bewildering, majestic in its tediousness, surprising in its unsurprisingness. A flat wonderful unendingness. But I was soon asleep and only woke, hours later, when the bus suddenly turned left off the highway into a dirt-track wide enough, strictly speaking, for no more than a motorbike. Part of the excitement and charm of outback travel is that you can make your own road just about any time you feel like it. It’s common to see a new track running alongside an old existing one, for no other reason, clearly, than that a driver needed to enliven the tedium. A Toyota-load of Aborigines is particularly likely to give up on the highway and to head off into the bush on a whim. I thought some such impulse had taken hold of our driver until it became clear that he knew where he was going and that we were about to enter the town of Goldsworthy.