To the discomfort of everybody else who wanted to sleep, some sheila did take it into her head to occupy the chat seat next to Dutchy. She was an inane girl with blonde hair that stood up in perpetual surprise and one of those flat Australian drawls which owe their existence to a frantic desire to please. ‘Oh yes!’ and ‘Oh no!’ she would say, in the same sentence, to cover all eventualities. She was the sort of Oz girl that has been bred specifically to soothe Oz men. She talked to Dutchy about the difficulties of driving, the monotony of the roads, the special problems of handling a big vehicle, and the irritations of troublesome passengers. There was no minor hardship in Dutchy’s life that she was not prepared to enter sympathetically into.

‘I once nearly hit a camel on the Nullarbor,’ Dutchy said.

‘Oh no!’

‘Yeah. It suddenly darted straight out. Very early in the morning it was.’

‘Oh no! A camel darting out in front of you on the Nullarbor in the morning. Oh no!’

‘The passengers were all deaf mutes. I was taking them back from the deaf-mute Olympics.’

‘Oh yes, the deaf-mute Olympics. That must have been difficult for you.’

‘Difficult for them. They didn’t hear my warning.’

‘Oh no!’

‘Oh yes – they all ended up in a pile at the front of the bus.’

‘Oh no! – Oh yes! I can imagine.’

I closed my eyes and returned to my own struggles at the Comatose Games. I wasn’t doing well but I was murdering the Welsh boy.

A little after dawn we pulled into Carnarvon, a pleasant-looking tropical town of banana plantations, bougainvilleas and caravan parks, built on the Gascoyne River at more or less the very spot George Grey came ashore in 1839, having lost half his stores, broken up the majority of his boats and imperilled the lives of all his men on a sort of early surfing trip – before the days of surfboards – into the mouth of Shark Bay. Nothing daunted, with the seaweed still dripping from his hair and the groans of his men not yet abated, Lieutenant Grey looked around him, beheld a ‘rich district’, a ‘low fertile country’, and submitted to that spirit of prophecy which never abandoned him through all adversity:

I, however, felt conscious that within a few years of the moment at which I stood there, a British population, rich in civilization, and the means of transforming an unoccupied country to one teeming with inhabitants and produce, would have followed my steps, and be eagerly and anxiously examining my charts.