We didn’t leave the bus at Port Hedland, not even to stretch our legs. We were given a quick whisk around the town, told about the vast quantities of iron ore and salt that were exported from here, shown the Port Authority’s Control Tower, affectionately referred to as the Pill (guess why? – because it controls all the berths in the harbour), and then back on to the highway south, first stop Whim Creek. Not far out of Port Hedland a spectacular electrical storm ripped into the night. The moon looked too big, fevered – a ghastly swollen phosphorescent yellow. As I cleaned the window of the bus to get a better look I realized that I had been moon-watching every night since arriving in Darwin. Moon-watching and moon-fretting also. You did, you really did worry about the moon up here, so much less forbidding was it than the ice-cold divinity of European skies. It seemed, on most nights, wholly unstable, not a controlling force but itself affected and moved by the vast electrical disturbances. Over Port Hedland the moon looked decidedly ill.

Unable to sleep, I talked to a girl called Cathy from Okehampton in Devon. Cathy was travelling around Australia with her Welsh boyfriend whom she’d met at Cardiff University where they were both reading English. To see as much of the country as possible and to make the best use of their bus passes, they were scheduling their journey so that they could do nearly all of their sleeping on buses. This had exhausted the Welsh boy. Wrapped up in a tie-dyed sheet he roamed the bus in a frenzy, searching for more room to stretch out in. In the thirty-six hours we were on the bus together I never once saw him not in this sleepless furore. A sort of touristical Lady Macbeth, he raged from seat to seat in the hope that he’d overlooked one, that someone had moved or got off, and that he would at last find a space large enough to give him rest. This was by no means the first Welshman I had met who could not make up his mind where he wanted to sleep.