I was disappointed that none of the guides to the area I was carrying contained copies of Grey’s charts for enthusiasts like myself eagerly and anxiously to examine. Instead, all one learnt was that Aubrey Brown and John Monger had first settled the town in 1876, having driven 4,000 sheep from York – presumably the York on the River Avon, not far from Perth – and that the great aviator, Sir Charles Kingsford-Smith, had once run a garage and removal business here.

Perhaps because of the town’s Welsh name, or because of their system of travelling at night in order to see everything they could in the daylight. Cathy and her sleepless boyfriend left the bus at Carnarvon. Dutchy dropped them at a coffee shop that wouldn’t be open for another three hours, then drove us slowly twice around the town for no reason that I could understand unless it was to look for passengers who’d got lost. On the way out we passed Cathy and Andrew still sitting with their rucksacks by the side of the road. Andrew had wound his sheet even tighter around himself and in his impotent rage resembled some mythological figure who’d fallen out for eternity with the Goddess of Sleep.

By mid-morning we started to hit our first Perthites heading north for the long Easter weekend. Suddenly there were fewer 4-wheel drives on the road and more station waggons pulling trailer loads of boats and dinghies and surfboards. We stopped for morning tea just outside Wannoo at a roadhouse called the Billabong, where the men putting petrol in their motor cars were creamier to look at than those we’d become accustomed to, softer-bellied, pinker, smoother and more salaried. I found myself missing the leathery skin of the men from the north, but Ros had the whiff of home in her nostrils now and the closer we got to Perth the more she fell a victim to what Oliver Sacks calls ‘incontinent nostalgia’. At Geraldton – ‘The Friendliest Town in the West’ – or rather at the sight of the multi-coloured clay tiles on the roofs of the houses of Geraldton, the tears began to stream from Ros’s eyes. I was soon handing her tissues at the rate of three every two kilometres. ‘Faster! Faster!’ she implored. It wasn’t only tears she was holding back – the sweat of sheer panic was now pouring out of her. Long before we’d arrived at the outskirts of Perth she had gone through her entire supply of perfumed face towels collected from motels all over North Australia. She dabbed her forehead. She mopped her throat. She thrust fresheners under her arms and wrung them out so that she might use them again.

‘Nervous?’ I noted.